Microsoft Teams Get a Massive Power-Up in Terms of AI Agents

Microsoft is rolling out a powerful suite of AI agents inside Microsoft Teams designed to boost collaboration, automate tedious work, and help teams perform more efficiently. These agents are now in public preview for Microsoft 365 Copilot users.

Nicole Herskowitz, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365 and Copilot, explained that the agents will work across Teams, SharePoint, and Viva Engage. They’re built to be context aware via Microsoft Graph, with enterprise-grade security, identity, compliance, and admin controls in place.

What’s New & What These Agents Actually Do

One of the standout enhancements is how these agents tap Microsoft Graph and indexed enterprise content to deliver accurate, context-sensitive help. Think of custom or sometimes autonomous agents that complete tasks, answer questions, escalate items, and trigger workflows, all grounded in company data and meeting contexts.

These agents are deeply embedded in the collaboration stack. So instead of switching apps, users can interact naturally in channels, meetings, or SharePoint sites.

For example, in a “Project Pluto” channel, an agent can summarize past conversations, distill decisions, generate drafts of internal documents, schedule checkpoints, and coordinate with the Project Manager Agent to assign tasks, all without manual intervention.

The Facilitator Agent aids meetings by drafting agendas, taking notes live, converting decisions into action items, and keeping follow-ups on track.

Meanwhile, the Knowledge Agent in SharePoint helps organize files, update tags, track updates, and pull together relevant content from Teams, Viva Engage, and other integrated sources to answer employee questions with citations.

There are also template-based flows and tools to streamline common business processes. Tasks like triaging support tickets, doing compliance checks, or drafting contract reviews are already being automated by early users inside Microsoft via these agents.

In addition, Microsoft is enabling employees to build their own retrieval agents inside SharePoint using what it calls “Agent Builder.” These are lightweight agents tailored to specific sites or data sources, ideal for onboarding, training, or quickly surfacing knowledge in team-specific contexts. The idea is to give non-developers a way to leverage AI to reduce friction without sacrificing governance or security.

Enterprise Controls & Requirements

To use many of these agents and get full functionality, a Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required. Microsoft emphasizes that the features are built with compliance, data privacy, identity controls, and lifecycle management baked in. Admins will be able to manage agent permissions and rollout via the Power Platform admin center.

Some standard AI features in Teams (like suggested replies, voice isolation, and media quality tools) are available more broadly, but the newer agent-centric features are tied to specific licensing tiers.

These tools run under the same guardrails as other Microsoft 365 security standards.