Ready to embark on a journey to Frontier?
SoftwareOne’s Microsoft Advisory experts are here to guide you on your path.
Ready to embark on a journey to Frontier?
SoftwareOne’s Microsoft Advisory experts are here to guide you on your path.
“Frontier” is one of the more layered terms a Corporate-segment IT team will run into this year. A Microsoft rep might present it as a broad AI strategy, while a vendor might refer to it as a licensing tier. Meanwhile, on a Teams call last week, a colleague described it as Microsoft's identity-and-governance model.
None of them is wrong, exactly. A term this broad and durable can connote a direction, a license, and an architecture at the same time. For a Corporate-segment IT leader, one big question this year is whether Microsoft 365 E7 is worth budgeting for now or something to revisit next cycle. But making the best decision means first parsing the three meanings of “Frontier.”
1. Frontier as a PROGRAM. Microsoft uses this umbrella term to indicate the widespread use of agentic AI and the deployment of agents that take action inside a company’s systems on an employee’s behalf. One example would be an agent onboarding a new hire by creating the account in Entra, assigning licenses, and provisioning app access from a single request.
⇨ What this means: Agentic AI is arriving as a category of product opportunities.
2. Frontier as a TIER. E7 is Microsoft’s newest enterprise license, layered directly on top of Microsoft 365 E5. It adds three components: Copilot, Agent 365, and Entra Suite. Entra Suite builds on the identity protection E5 provides and adds governance and verified access on top of it. Agent 365 is entirely new, so nothing in E5 does what Agent 365 does, as E5 predates agents.
⇨ What this means: E5 secures your employees. E7 does more to secure your employees, as well as any agents deployed by employees.
3. Frontier as a VISION. Microsoft Entra Suite secures the identities agents run on, Azure provides the platform underneath, and Agent 365 governs what runs on it. An agent drafting a customer email carries its own identity the same way an employee does, runs on infrastructure built to handle spikes in demand, and reports back to a single dashboard to document what it touched and when, rather than operating in an unmonitored way in the background.
⇨ What this means: Every agent runs under the same identity, infrastructure, and oversight an employee would get, which keeps its activity inside the company’s view.
Secure, performant, and governed: that is the architecture the program is heading toward, and the license that packages it. It applies to companies of every size, and what changes from one company to another is the path taken to get there.
Microsoft’s own guidance for achieving its vision is written with a large enterprise’s resources in mind, and that means having a dedicated AI governance function, a data science team, and layers of approval built to catch mistakes before they compound. But a Corporate-segment IT department, which might just be a director and a handful of generalists, can reach the same destination by taking an even shorter, more direct route.
Fewer approval layers mean fewer places for a decision to stall. A team of five can make a governance call in a single meeting that a five-thousand-person company spends a full quarter cycling through committee review, and that speed becomes a real advantage once it's paired with a plan sized for a five-person team rather than borrowed wholesale from a much larger one.
Gartner’s research backs the pace of this shift. The firm projects that 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. Such independent validation, separate from anything Microsoft says about its own products, points to how quickly this decision arrives, regardless of whether an organization has enterprise-scale resources sitting in reserve.
The question worth answering before touching a single setting: What does a right-sized path to Frontier actually look like for an organization of our size? If Microsoft builds its frameworks with the largest possible customers in mind, the work of adapting those frameworks for a leaner organization is a separate, but solvable, concern.
An organization can begin by tightening its identity practices and governance habits, without committing to the license decision just yet. For Corporate-segment leaders specifically, vendor conversations tend to collapse all three meanings into a single pitch. Delineating the terms gives a lean team the ability to ask sharper questions and decide which of these three aspects must be discussed right now.
The remaining practical decisions follow from there:
- Which team runs the first pilot?
- What does governance look like in the first two weeks?
- How will usage-based costs be forecasted?
Another post, “Which Team Should Run Your First Frontier Pilot,” walks readers through the first of those decisions directly, since that is often where an organization’s planning might stall. You can also download The Right-Sized Frontier Roadmap eBook for a full walkthrough of what a proper adoption path looks like for a Corporate-segment organization.
And for anyone who wants the numbers before having the strategy conversation, our Microsoft 365 E7 and Azure readiness blog goes deeper into the analyst data behind this shift, along with what it means for the infrastructure underneath any agentic AI rollout.
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