Stay in Charge of Your AI Agents: A Governance Baseline for Microsoft 365
Free eBook
Stay in Charge of Your AI Agents: A Governance Baseline for Microsoft 365
Your employees are already building agents that send email, open files, and reach your business data. Most have no owner, no policy, and no review. This free eBook gives you the governance baseline to fix that.
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16 pages. About 20 minutes to read.
When you onboard a new employee, you define what they can access, what they can create, and how their activity is monitored. Your AI agents do many of the same jobs. They draft and send emails. They open, move, and delete files. They reach the open internet and analyze business data. Most of them were created with none of the same controls.
That gap is where compliance and security risk lives.
AI agent governance is the practice of giving every AI agent a defined purpose, a named owner, scoped permissions, and a scheduled review, supported by inventory, telemetry, and policy controls. This eBook shows you how to put that in place using the Microsoft capabilities you may already license.
In May 2026, Microsoft reported 15x year over year growth in active agents across Microsoft 365 tenants. Governance has not kept pace.
Inside the AI agent governance framework
Why agents are not a malware problem
Agents are given access on purpose, because the business wants the work done. The risk starts when that access is broader than needed, the purpose drifts, the owner leaves, or the agent is manipulated into harmful action inside its permitted access. No tool can decide why an agent exists or who is accountable for it.
Where does your organization sit today?
The eBook includes a maturity self assessment across visibility, security, and management.
Frequently asked questions
AI agent governance is the practice of giving every AI agent a defined purpose, a named owner, scoped permissions, and a scheduled review. It combines organizational policy with security, identity, and compliance controls, so agents are managed the same way you already manage the access rights of human workers.
Microsoft 365 E5 provides important foundational capabilities across Microsoft Purview, Defender, Entra, Intune, and SharePoint. It should not be assumed to deliver complete discovery, monitoring, and protection for every type of agent. Microsoft Agent 365 adds agent specific inventory, observability, governance, and security, and is included in Microsoft 365 E7.
Start with Microsoft Purview DSPM for AI for visibility into supported AI usage and data exposure. Microsoft Agent 365 provides a centralized registry for supported agents. Defender, Entra, and Intune add complementary visibility. Then ask employees directly, through a company wide email or an intranet poll, what they have built.
Agent activity can fall under the Digital Operational Resilience Act, the NIS2 Directive, the EU AI Act, and GDPR, particularly in Europe. Depending on the incident, the applicable regulation, and the jurisdiction, organizations may need to report incidents, support audits, and demonstrate the controls they had in place.
At least quarterly. Repeat the inventory to catch newly deployed agents, and reassess each existing agent's access to catch permissions drift, where an agent built for one purpose accumulates rights over time.
Get the governance baseline
Know it, Secure it, Govern it, plus a maturity self assessment and a 30 day plan. Free, 16 pages, instant access.
Get the governance baseline
Know it, Secure it, Govern it, plus a maturity self assessment and a 30 day plan. Free, 16 pages, instant access.