From 18 to 21 November, Microsoft Ignite 2025 took place in San Francisco. Bechtle colleagues Tim ter Haar, Mike Krul and Gino van Essen were there in person at an event that this year revolved entirely around one theme: bringing AI and AI agents into every layer of the modern workplace. In this blog, Tim shares the standout announcements from Microsoft’s official Book of News, giving you a clear, concise overview of what’s new and what’s next.

Copilot for Business.

Microsoft has unveiled Copilot for Business—a dedicated offer for small and medium-sized organisations (up to 300 users) at just $21 (around €18) per user per month. This gives your business access to the same powerful AI capabilities as enterprise customers, including automatic e-mail summaries, document templates, analytics and meeting notes.

Here are the key points:
 

  • Copilot for Business is available from 1 December 2025.
  • Bundles allow you to combine Copilot for Business with a Microsoft 365 Business plan.
  • New promotions are on the way (in addition to existing Copilot and Purview offers) for the business variants. These will run until March 2026 and apply to both standalone subscriptions and bundles.
Microsoft 365 graphic

New Copilot chat features.

Good news! Copilot’s chat capabilities have taken a big step forward. You can now collaborate directly with AI in your chats. Copilot doesn’t just answer questions—it proactively picks up tasks and creates conversation summaries, speeding up decision-making and embedding AI more deeply into everyday communication.

Copilot Chat has matured and now offers features that fundamentally change how people and AI work together. In Teams, you can now:
 

  • Brainstorm ideas with Copilot
  • Summarise chat history
  • Extract tasks and decisions
  • Schedule meetings straight from the chat


The new Agent Mode in Word, Excel and PowerPoint enables complex, multi-step task—for example, analysing sales data and creating visual summaries. Voice commands are also now available, so you can give Copilot hands-free instructions.

Microsoft 365 Copilot graphic

Agent 365.

With the introduction of Agent 365, Microsoft is providing a central control plane for managing, securing and monitoring all AI agents across your organisation. Each agent is assigned a unique Entra Agent ID, so identities and permissions can be managed just like those of human users.

Your IT team gains full visibility into who created each agent and what data they’re using—making it easy to disable any that pose a risk. Integration with Defender and Purview adds automated alerts, incident response and robust data governance.

Work IQ.

Work IQ is Microsoft’s new context engine designed to make Copilot and AI agents smarter and more personalised. It understands your work patterns, relationships and preferences, and links them to all the data in your organisation—emails, files, meetings and chats.

This means Copilot can proactively suggest the right agent, connect insights and even predict the next best action. Work IQ is available via APIs for building custom agents and forms the foundation for all upcoming Copilot features.

Model Router in Microsoft Foundry.

The Model Router is now generally available, ensuring every AI task is automatically directed to the most suitable model—whether that’s OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, NVIDIA or others. This optimises both performance and cost, and enables you to build agents and workflows that always use the best model for the job.

Security Copilot for Microsoft 365 E5 customers.

Security Copilot is now included with Microsoft 365 E5 at no extra cost. Organisations receive 400 Security Compute Units per 1,000 users per month, enabling AI-driven protection across Defender, Entra, Intune and Purview.

Security Copilot delivers:

  • Autonomous, proactive protection
  • Automatic alert triage
  • Integrated incident response

This means your IT team can respond to threats faster and continuously strengthen your security posture.

Our takeaways from Ignite 2025.

Microsoft Ignite 2025 made one thing crystal clear: AI is no longer just another feature—it’s the new foundation of the modern workplace. Copilot, AI agents and Work IQ are evolving into a connected ecosystem that helps your organisation work smarter, faster and more securely—provided they’re deployed at the right time. That’s where Bechtle makes the difference. With our experience, we’ll help you identify which innovations are ready to implement now and which will deliver real value later.

Curious how far along your organisation is? Sign up for our Copilot webinar and discover how to make AI work for your workplace of tomorrow. Want to learn more about cloud, data or AI? You’ll find it all in this blog—or check out the full Book of News.