Microsoft product roadmap hints at ‘Agentic Users’ with their own M365 licenses

Later this month, Microsoft plans to enhance its M365 productivity suite with “Agentic Users,” autonomous AI agents with their own identities and access to enterprise IT systems that can collaborate with one another and with humans.

“These agents can attend meetings, edit documents, communicate via email and chat, and perform tasks autonomously,” Microsoft said in an addition to its product roadmap entitled “Microsoft Teams: Discovery and Creation of Agentic Users from Teams and M365 Agent Store.” The update will be rolled out to desktop systems worldwide beginning later in November, according to the roadmap entry.

Microsoft provided further details about its plans for Agentic Users in a message posted to the Microsoft Admin Center, according to various reports from around the web.

Microsoft MVP João Ferreira posted what he said was a copy of it a copy of LC1183300 to his personal blog.

“Agentic Users are a new class of AI-powered digital entities designed to function as autonomous, enterprise-grade virtual colleagues. Unlike traditional bots, Agentic Users are provisioned as full-fledged user objects with their own identity in the organization’s directory (via Entra ID or Azure AD), email addresses, Teams accounts, and presence in the org chart,” the purported Microsoft announcement began.

All users in enterprises with access to Microsoft teams and the Microsoft 365 Copilot store will be able to view agent templates, although only approved users will be able to create agents from those templates, it continued.

Microsoft did not respond to an email seeking confirmation of the authenticity of the message.

The post also contains images that hints at the use cases these new Agentic Users might be used for, including procurement, HR initiatives such as employee wellness, tracking team tasks, and developing workflows. There was no mention, though, of how Agentic Users compare to the many agents that M365 already offers, including its Facilitator and Project Manager agents, its Office Agent, and different flavors of Copilots for sales, service, and finance operations.

Confusion over licensing, increasing costs, and Microsoft’s revenue play

Before they can create any of the new agents, admins will need to approve a template for use and “assign the required A365 license,” the posting said. No further information was included about the nature or pricing of these licenses.

Analysts speculated how the new A365 licenses might relate to existing M365 licenses, which are typically sold on a per-user, per-month basis with an annual commitment.

“Previously released agents like Facilitator or Project Manager were bundled under M365 Copilot entitlements, with advanced actions billed via Copilot credits. A365 introduces explicit per-agent licensing and admin-controlled approval through the Agent Store and separates agent costs from human seats,” said Forrester vice president and principal analyst Charlie Dai.

Alexander Golev, partner at SAM Expert, a specialist in managing Microsoft licensing and cloud costs, suggested instead that A365 will replace M365 user licenses.

“Our expectation is that it will provide a combination of user-like access to Microsoft 365 services on a monthly/annual/3-annual fee basis plus the core functionality of M365 Copilot. Additional AI use will be charged in the same manner as with users — prepaid capacities and pay-as-you-go items. We don’t expect them to be all-inclusive,” he said.

Microsoft has been changing its licensing practices to increase its revenue significantly, Golev said. “In the recent years, they moved from server- or device-based licensing to CPU-based and then core-based.”

In its reporting of M365 revenue, Microsoft focuses on average revenue per user (ARPU), “which is now hitting its ceiling,” he said. “You can only scale so far. Earth’s population grows slower than Microsoft’s revenue targets. What we have been predicting is the move to ARPA — Average Revenue per Agent, which can scale exponentially,” Golev said.

Another licensing expert, Rich Gibbons, blogged about the new A365 licenses, saying that he expected Microsoft to use them as an opportunity to generate additional consumption-based revenue.

Risk of agent sprawl?

Analyst Pareekh Jain of Jain Consulting said he expects Microsoft to update its previously introduced agents as part of the rollout of Agentic Users, giving the existing agents their own email addresses and Microsoft Entra IDs too.

“Too many autonomous agents for overlapping or redundant tasks mirror the challenges most enterprises have faced with bot and app sprawl in prior M365 deployments. Without tight governance, enterprises could face duplication, higher spend, data security exposure, and oversight challenges,” Jain said.

But, said Dai, Entra IDs could play a pivotal role in avoiding that sprawl. “These IDs can be used to treat agents as directory-backed identities enabling lifecycle control, access reviews, and compliance policies….helping enterprises gain visibility and accountability,” he said.

Even before we learn all the details of these new Agentic Users, it’s clear that there are some aspects of them to which enterprises will have to pay particular attention.

Dai pointed out to the need for effective collaboration between IT asset management and FinOps teams, while Everest analyst Tanvi Rai said enterprises will need strong change management to train employees to supervise, validate and govern agent behavior effectively.

Despite all the uncertainty, what is evident is that Microsoft’s move will further intensify the race among rivals, such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, who are also accelerating their efforts to introduce autonomous AI-driven agents aimed at boosting productivity across enterprises.