Many organizations underestimate the depth of the shift that agent-based work will introduce. The narrative often remains focused on Copilot, SharePoint agents, flows, and the early wave of Copilot Studio creations. Leaders expect incremental change. The reality is structural. Agents will not simply sit next to existing tools. They will shape how information is used, how actions are executed, how work is delegated, and how risk surfaces evolve.
Microsoft has signaled this transition with the introduction of Agent 365 during last week's Ignite conference. The announcement is more than a feature update, it marks a turning point in how digital labor is defined, tracked, and governed. Agent 365 brings a new identity model, central inventory, policy surface, and cross product visibility. The idea is powerful, agents become recognized objects with their own identities, their own permissions, and their own place in the organizational system.
Yet the gap between Microsoft's vision and the lived reality of enterprises remains wide. The issues that already exist inside Microsoft 365 do not disappear because agents gain visibility. Unstructured environments persist. Redundant content remains. Outdated sites continue to influence search. Power Platform artefacts accumulate without owners. External sharing grows organically. Copilot draws from information that has not been reviewed for accuracy or sensitivity.
Gartner data confirms it, 70% of leaders claim to have a central AI strategy, but only 34% can apply that strategy across their applications. 86% worry about agent sprawl. Less than 10T trust their vendors to provide the necessary governance controls. These patterns recur across the insights in the SharePoint agent report and the Agent 365 analysis.
The pace of change only intensifies these gaps. The rapid GPT 5 integration into Copilot Chat shows that Microsoft has adopted faster release cycles. Defaults activate sooner, UX changes appear without warning, administrators learn about new functions only after employees start using them. The sense of reduced control is widespread.
SharePoint agents illustrate the consequence. They can be created by any site member. They rely on existing site content. They proliferate quickly. They create new dependencies that few organizations have mapped. Gartner notes that 79% of organizations fear unpredictable PAYG costs for agents. The concern is well founded, rapid creation collides with limited oversight.
Agent 365 steps into this environment with an ambitious promise. The challenge is not the promise, the challenge is everything around it. Agents do not operate in isolation. They depend on the entire environment, and that environment is rarely clean.
This is the insight gap. It is the gap between the surface level control plane and the operational reality of organizations that have grown organically for years. Agent 365 gives visibility. It does not solve the underlying problems that determine agent quality, agent trustworthiness, and agent risk.
Organizations need more than visibility. They need operational discipline across the entire Microsoft 365 estate. The shift to agent-based work requires a foundation that can support it.
A different view helps clarify what is happening. Agent 365 is not merely a new tool, it is a signal of a larger movement. Microsoft clearly sees agents as a new layer of digital labor. Agents will interpret, decide, and execute. They will participate in conversations, join processes, influence decisions, and act across systems. In fact, they already do now.
In this model, the environment becomes the operating surface for both humans and agents. The environment is no longer a passive collection of sites, files, flows, and chats. It becomes a shared workspace for agents that draw from content, context, and permissions. Any weakness in the environment becomes a weakness in the agent transaction.
Microsoft provides the structure for identity and policy through Entra, Purview, and Defender. This structure matters, it gives organizations a unified identity layer for agents, audit trails, data loss protections, risk scoring, and behavioral controls. It provides a way to align agent identities with organizational governance.
Yet this layer does not address the full operational context. Agents need stable content sources, they need clean site structures, they need correct permissions, they need reliable Power Platform components, they need life cycles that retire artefacts before they become problematic. They need data clarity that prevents misleading output.
Gartner highlights this relationship clearly in the SharePoint agent analysis. Agents only perform well when the underlying documents are accurate, current, and structured. Redundant content, conflicting versions, outdated material, and personal notes degrade agent responses. These issues exist across most organizations today.
The problem extends beyond SharePoint. Copilot responds based on access to OneDrive content, Teams conversations, files shared in chats, calendars, and historical documents. Agents rely on apps, flows, connectors, and Dataverse content. External agents rely on the quality of Graph aligned information. Everything affects everything.
This is the new reality. Agent governance is not a standalone discipline. It is interconnected with collaboration governance, content governance, Power Platform governance, permission governance, lifecycle governance, and cost governance.
Agent 365 focuses on the agent component. The broader governance needs remain.
Gartner research on AI TRiSM adds another dimension. Modern AI governance requires lifecycle visibility, validation, runtime oversight, continuous monitoring, and integrated controls across applications and data sources. No single console can cover all of this without a deeper operational layer that ensures data hygiene and process integrity.
Agent 365 is a needed step. But agent governance cannot outpace environment governance. The environment must be ready before the agents operating in it can be governed effectively.
The organizations that will succeed are those that understand that the ecosystem matters as much as the agents. The ability to scale agents depends on the stability of what surrounds them. Rencore Governance provides the foundation that enables Microsoft’s agent-first approach to succeed.
Rencore Governance provides the foundation that enables Microsoft’s agent-first approach to succeed.
This is where Rencore Governance aligns with Microsoft's direction. The platform does not replace Agent 365. It complements it. Rencore provides the operational fabric that connects the environment to the agent ecosystem.
Rencore gives organizations a single inventory across the entire Microsoft 365 estate. This includes sites, lists, libraries, files, teams, groups, external users, flows, apps, environments, licenses, sensitivity labels, and more. In an agent first world, this broad inventory is essential. Agents read from this environment. Agents act on this environment. Agents depend on this environment.
Rencore also offers a policy engine that evaluates relationships across the entire environment. It does not stop at agent behavior. It examines ownership patterns, risky external sharing, inconsistent permission models, inactive users, abandoned sites, unmanaged flows, outdated content, and storage bloat. The Rencore policy engine connects these insights directly to remediation through automation.
Lifecycle management is another area where Rencore extends Microsoft's approach. The platform automates the lifecycle of teams, sites, flows, and other artefacts. It supports archiving, retiring, and restructuring based on departmental rules, business processes, and compliance requirements. Lifecycle management ensures that the environment remains clean and that agents operate on current and relevant data.
Power Platform governance adds further depth. Rencore gives organizations visibility into Maker activity, app dependencies, flow reliability, premium connector usage, unassigned ownership, and environment structure. These are operational realities that Agent 365 does not attempt to manage.
Rencore also supports AI governance by analyzing usage patterns, agent interactions, and data dependencies. It classifies agents by risk and provides insights into how they rely on the environment. It builds the context layer that Agent 365 cannot generate on its own.
The Rencore approach is not adversarial. It is additive. Microsoft defines the strategic direction. Rencore operationalizes it. Microsoft provides the identity anchored control surface. Rencore reinforces it with continuous environment level governance. Together, they give organizations a complete path from strategy to execution.
Agent 365 is a major step forward for the market. It highlights the need for a dedicated control plane for agents. It sets the stage for a new category of digital labor. But the success of this model depends on the health of the environment that supports it. Rencore strengthens this foundation by ensuring that the environment remains structured, governed, and ready for agent-based work at scale.
The future belongs to organizations that treat environment governance and agent governance as two parts of the same system. Rencore helps create that link. Microsoft defines the strategic direction. Rencore provides the operational capability that aligns with it.
The combination forms a balanced approach for the next phase of work. An approach that respects the role of agents, the responsibility of operational teams, and the need for clarity in a rapidly expanding digital landscape.
If you like to learn more about how Rencore is helping organizations to govern agents and everything around it, stop by our booth today and tomorrow at the ESPC conference in Dublin.
Alternatively, reach out today and learn how Rencore Governance can help you and your organization stay in control of all of your Microsoft 365, Copilot, Agents, and Power Platform workloads.