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Day 1 Keynote Includes Many Announcements in a Very Long and Tiring Event
After 150 minutes of non-stop high-tech razzamatazz at the Chase Center in San Francisco (Figure 1), the keynote for the Microsoft Ignite 2025 conference finally ended, roughly an hour longer than it should have lasted. But it seemed that every high-profile Microsoft speaker except Satya Nadella wanted their moment on the stage to talk about Work IQ, agents, foundries, and getting stuff done with AI. Throw in frequent interactions with customers and softball questions to partners, and we ended up breathing a great sigh of relief when matters came to an end.
Two things were obvious from the large screens, scripted words (at one point, I could see four active auto-prompts), and the in-the-round seating (so much better than a cavernous room). First, Judson Althoff (CEO, Microsoft commercial business) is a more polished performer than Nadella. Second, Microsoft focused on explaining how AI solves real-world problems instead of talking about how AI would make work life more fulfilling. In other words, “we’re getting things done with AI” rather than “Copilot can generate some great stuff.” All of this is happening now in the so-called “Frontier firms,” aka companies who are willing to deploy AI now to become “human-led and AI-empowered.”
The change in emphasis was notable and perceivable through demonstrations like the six-minute order for 20,000 t-shirts initiated by Ryan Roslansky and fulfilled by the imaginary Zava company using Microsoft 365 Copilot (attendees could pick up a t-shirt after the keynote). In passing, Zava seems to have taken over from Contoso and Fabrikam in Microsoft demos. Overall, the keynote included just too many demos, most of which attracted desultory levels of applause.
Agent 365
Now available in the Microsoft 365 admin center, Agent 365 is the new admin experience (aka, a “control plane”) for AI agents. Opening the Agents section of the Microsoft 365 admin center reveals details of agent usage within the tenant. When I looked in my tenant, I was surprised to find so many agents listed (Figure 2). I’ve created a couple of agents, but nothing like the 148 reports. The answer lies in the Entra ID app registry, which includes agents published by Microsoft and third parties.
According to a session later on November 18, Purview will make its own contribution to the Agent 365 framework by implementing features like DLP checking for agent prompts (notified as MC1181998, updated 12 November 2025, and due for public preview later this month). The message is that Microsoft is dedicating a lot of effort to building out features that exist today to protect Microsoft 365 data to cover agents as well.
Security Copilot in Microsoft 365 E5
Microsoft also announced the bundling of Security Copilot in Microsoft 365 E5. The new capability is being rolled out now and should reach all E5 tenants over the next few months. Security Copilot measures its processing in Security Compute Units (SCUs), and tenants will receive “400 Security Compute Units (SCUs) per month for every 1,000 user licenses, up to 10,000 SCUs per month.” Further SCUs can be purchased at $6/each.
The SCUs don’t have to be used to analyze security incidents with Security Copilot. They could also be used with the Entra ID agents to process access reviews or conditional access policy optimization.
Microsoft Copilot Enhancements
Microsoft 365 attention was drawn to announcements like the additional functionality for Microsoft Copilot users (Microsoft 365 users without a full Microsoft 365 Copilot license) in an update that Microsoft plans to roll out in January 2026 to complete worldwide by late March 2026.
The change is documented in MC1187671 (18 November 2025), where Chat in Outlook will expand its ability to reason from a single email thread to a complete mailbox, and Copilot Chat gains the ability to create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files from web data and any files they load into a chat. In addition, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint gain an agent mode to expand the ability of the apps to reason over web data (and the current file) to create content. The agent feature is only available if the tenant allows people to connect and use the Anthrophic Claude model. Hopefully, as more Microsoft 365 components consume the Claude LLM, Microsoft will address the shortcomings in how audit events capture details of how people use Claude.
Security a Big Downside for the Ignite 2025 Experience
I haven’t attended an Ignite conference in person since 2019. I’m not sure that San Francisco works as well as other venues do for large conferences. Microsoft imposed heavy security everywhere, probably to avoid the same issues that occurred at Build earlier this year. One protester stood up during the keynote to highlight the use of Azure in Gaza and was quickly removed by venue personnel. Later, a bunch of protesters were active for some hours outside the Muscone West building (Figure 3).
The security was an unpleasant side of the conference and resulted in large queues. My bag and identity documents were checked four times during the day (keynote, original arrival at Muscone South, going into Muscone West, and going back to Muscone South). While it was great to meet so many people again, the overall experience made me think that I’ll give Ignite a miss for another few years.
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Tony, can I report this and give you full credit?
Anything I say is in the public realm…
This was my first time doing this event since it was still called TechEd, so it’s been a minute. the opening day was an absolute nightmare because of the keynote being so far away and needing to bus attendees back and forth. It wasn’t nearly as much of an issue on days 2 and 3. Agreed on the keynote. Two and a half hours was an hour too long. Felt like every partner who paid enough money to get their 5 minutes on the stage got their 5 minutes on the stage. Didn’t need most of that. the rest of the keynote was very good.
I asked about the security as someone was looking at my bag. The ID check against the badge was a Microsoft thing, but I was told that the scanners and bag checks was a Moscone center thing, and those were their security requirements, not Microsoft’s. I don’t think Microsoft was sad about it, but that’s worth pointing out.
Going through security at Moscone center was not nearly as much of an issue on Days 2 and 3 when there weren’t 15,000+ people all trying to do it at the same time.