Autonomous agents are coming to your Microsoft tenant
Microsoft announced on 21 October 2024 that customers can build autonomous agents in Copilot Studio from November. Five things to settle before someone switches one on.
On 21 October 2024 Microsoft announced that customers will be able to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio, in public preview from November, alongside ten prebuilt agents for Dynamics 365 covering sales, service, finance and supply chain.
The word that matters is autonomous. A copilot waits to be asked. An agent is given a goal and a trigger, and then acts on its own — reading a mailbox, updating a record, sending a reply — without a person present for each step.
Why this lands differently from previous Copilot news
Most Swiss SMEs already run Microsoft 365. This capability arrives inside a tenant you already have, built with a low-code tool aimed at business users rather than developers.
That is the appeal and the problem in the same sentence. The person who builds the agent is often the person who understands the process, which is good. They are rarely the person who understands what that agent’s account can reach, which is not.
Five things to settle before November
- Who may create one. Decide now whether agent creation is open to everyone or restricted. The default configuration is a decision even when nobody makes it.
- What identity it runs as. An agent acting under a broad service account inherits that account’s reach. Scope it to the data the task needs and nothing else.
- Where the boundary is. Draw an explicit line between actions an agent may complete alone — drafting, sorting, summarising — and actions that require a human to approve: anything that sends externally, moves money, or changes a record of account.
- How you would know. Before the first agent runs, know where its log is and who reads it. Reconstructing this after an incident is painful.
- How to stop it. Name the person who can switch an agent off and make sure they can do it without opening a ticket.
The reasonable stance
This is not a reason to block the feature. For the routine, high-volume, low-judgement work that clogs a Swiss SME — triaging mail, chasing missing documents, preparing standard replies — agents are a genuinely good fit.
It is a reason to have the five answers written down before the first one runs, rather than discovering them afterwards. Half an hour of policy now is cheaper than an investigation later.