What is Microsoft 365 Frontier, Work IQ, Cowork and Agent 365 with a Copilot Global Black Belt

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, Copilot and AI programme leads, and security/governance teams deciding whether to enable Frontier, the Anthropic models or Agent 365 — plus anyone fielding data-processing and sovereignty questions from legal teams.

Guest: Brett Johnson — Copilot Global Black Belt, Microsoft

Brett Johnson, a Copilot Global Black Belt at Microsoft UK who supports field teams across Microsoft 365 Copilot, agents and Copilot Studio, returns for a second conversation with Tom Arbuthnot. He decodes the Frontier Program, the Anthropic model integration and its sovereignty implications, Work IQ, Cowork and the newly generally available Agent 365.

Many thanks to Luware, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• The Frontier Program is an opt-in tenant setting that lands the newest Copilot innovations early, and can be scoped to selected users rather than the whole organisation. It differs from public preview: public preview features are committed to ship, whereas Frontier capabilities are sometimes reworked or folded into something else (scheduled tasks in Copilot went back and forth before landing). ▶ 4:08
• Frontier is not purely technical — depending on the customer it also opens access to a wider community and, in some cases, direct conversations with product engineering and product marketing teams. ▶ 6:10
• As of the last week of April, admins can enable the Anthropic models for a subset of users rather than the whole tenant — a change Johnson expects to become the pattern for future model rollouts. ▶ 12:17
• Anthropic processing sits outside the Microsoft service boundary today: it is a stateless external connection currently running in Anthropic's US services. Anthropic became an official Microsoft sub-processor on 6 or 7 January (one of many that make Microsoft 365 Copilot work), EU processing is planned within this calendar year, and the longer-term plan is to bring Anthropic services inside the Microsoft service boundary as OpenAI models already are. xAI already appears in the admin console but is not yet a sub-processor. ▶ 13:18
• Work IQ is the layer combining Microsoft Graph, memory/personalisation settings and a real-time inference layer — not just an MCP wrapper over Graph. In practice it means Cowork can spot that you are in a meeting right now and pull that live transcript into its reasoning. ▶ 17:24
• Work IQ is reachable via an MCP connector as well as the Copilot UI, enabling automations such as a daily digest that infers which three of 50 inbound emails actually need attention plus upcoming meeting prep. ▶ 19:57
• A public sector Cowork demo took ten dragged-in Word documents (mock FOI requests) and, in minutes, rated them for severity, built a summary Excel spreadsheet, drafted official responses, produced a review PowerPoint and packaged it into an email. Work happens in a secure cloud container with input and output directories in OneDrive, and sensitivity labels and the security wrapper carried through; prompts are stored in the user's Exchange mailbox for Purview governance. ▶ 20:27
• Agent 365 went GA on 1 May alongside E7. It builds on a foundational Entra Agent ID and wraps Purview and Defender controls around agents, giving observability, lifecycle management, publishing gates and sharing controls, plus a visual map of where agents were created. Third-party agents are brought in via the Agent 365 SDK so they surface in Entra ID — necessary given there are already well over half a million agents live in Microsoft 365. ▶ 30:40
• Personal vibe coding builds enterprise-ready skills: Johnson had Claude produce a 24-page technical spec for an astrophotography file-management tool on a flight, then handed it to VS Code to build it. His advice to enterprise practitioners facing internal gates is to learn on an out-of-work project and bring the understanding back. ▶ 25:03

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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