Microsoft Ignite 2025: The most exciting news, updates, and announcements
Microsoft Ignite is back, bringing the tech community together to share new developments and updates from across the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s always an exciting couple of days, and this year’s event – hosted in San Francisco – was no different!
It’s no surprise that AI and Copilot took center stage. However this year, the conversation goes far beyond Copilot just being a helpful assistant at work. Now, it has evolved into a platform for intelligent agents that can autonomously perform tasks, make decisions, and collaborate with users in more meaningful ways.
The message from the opening keynote, delivered by Microsoft’s Judson Althoff was clear: the future of work belongs to Frontier Firms, those organisations that are run by people but powered by smart AI agents.
We know there’s a lot of information out there. There’s hundreds of blogs, news items, videos and more talking about the Ignite updates. Our aim is to bring you that information and explain it in Plain English: what actually are these new things, and what will they do for me?
Let's take a look.
Announcing Microsoft Agent 365:
In a world where AI powered agents become the norm, how do we manage this and keep control of what exists within organisations? Agent 365 is the first step in doing that. Offering IT teams and administrators a brand new control panel for managing agents. It will help organisations govern agents responsibly, and at scale. Bringing a complete view of all agents within an organisation, into one clear dashboards. It offers some security capability too, bringing agents under management and offering the tools needed to limit their access only to resources they need.
You can learn more about this here:
End-user Improvements Coming to Copilot Studio:
Copilot Studio is a tool that lets you easily create, customise and manage your own AI agents. Now, it’s getting an upgrade for end-users. Including:
- A redesigned creation experience, in a conversational interface that guides users.
- File generation that allows agents built in Microsoft 365 Copilot, to now create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in seconds using natural language commands.
- A new workflows agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot: Create, build, and manage workflows using natural language in chat.
You can read more about the updates to Copilot Studio here:
Copilot Studio Update - Microsoft Copilot Blog | Microsoft.com
Introducing Work IQ:
The opening keynote saw Ryan Roslansky, CEO of LinkedIn, announce that 90% of Fortune 500 companies now use Copilot. He went on to say that this was due to Copilot’s seamless integrations across work and productivity apps, it’s ability to create and use agents, and a third thing: Work IQ.
Think of Work IQ as the smart brain behind Microsoft 365 Copilot. It is the intelligence that enables Copilot to know you, your work, and your organisation. It works in three simple ways: Understanding your work data: Work IQ looks at your emails, files, meetings, and chats to learn how you and your team work. This helps it understand what’s important to you and your company. Memory: It remembers your individual style, habits, and the way you prefer to do things—like how you write, who you work with most, and the tasks you do regularly.Inference: By combining what it knows about your work and your habits, Work IQ can spot useful patterns, give you smart suggestions, and even predict what you might need next. For example, it can recommend the right AI agent to help you based on what you’re trying to do.
Work IQ is built into the Microsoft apps you use every day, such as Word, Outlook, and Teams. It helps Copilot to continually get better at helping you.
Create Copilot Pages in Copilot Chat:
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat now lets you create Copilot Pages based on what you want to achieve. Designed to make it simple for anyone to turn ideas into interactive content.
With advanced reasoning models, Copilot can write code directly onto a page so users can build interactive reports, visualise concepts, and quickly test new ideas. All without needing any coding experience. You can keep improving your page with Copilot by chatting or editing directly, and then share it with others. Copilot is also able to convert these pages into PowerPoint presentations.
This feature is now widely available.
New Copilot and AI Features Coming to Windows
Microsoft has described Windows as “becoming the canvas for AI,” with a whole host of new features announced during Ignite. Agents will become a seamless part of the OS experience, with agent capabilities embedded into core Windows services. Microsoft 365 Copilot, AI agents and Copilot search will also be added to the taskbar, bringing access to Copilot and agents into the flow of work.
Video Generation Coming to Microsoft 365 Copilot:
Copilot is already a powerful tool for written and graphical content generation. Now, thanks to OpenAI’s Sora 2 video model, video creation has arrived into Copilot.
Users can create short AI-generated videos from text prompts, using integrated voiceover, music, and brand tools for consistent content.
This video generation is currently only available within Create for commercial users participating in the Frontier programme.
New Agents Including Learning Agent
Lots of new agents have been announced by Microsoft too, including Learning Agent.
This agent provides personalised microlearning, targeted tips, and curated courses to help employees develop role-specific and AI skills, with content sources aligned to team goals.
Microsoft Ignite 2025: Final thoughts
It’s clear that we are entering a new era. If the last couple of years was the era of AI, this is the area of agentic AI. Where our daily working lives will be powered by intelligent agents, and smarter workflows.
The innovations unveiled at Ignite this year promise not only to change how we work, but also how we learn, collaborate, and create impact across every sector.
And, as poignantly put by the LinkedIn CEO during the Ignite Opening Keynote, “The future of work and the future of AI is inseparable.”
This sentiment perfectly encapsulates Ignite 2025: a future where technology and people work in harmony to drive meaningful change. With AI at the heart of the modern workplace, the journey ahead is both exciting and full of potential.
