“Intelligence cannot scale without that trust,” says Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of Microsoft Security.
Microsoft’s latest moves to dominate the growing enterprise artificial intelligence include plans to make Microsoft 365 E7 suite generally available on May 1 for $99 per user per month, launch a research preview this month for a Copilot Cowork product built with Claude maker Anthropic and increase access to its Agent 365 control plane the same date E7 goes GA.
E7 marks the first new enterprise license plan by the Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant in about 10 years. Microsoft, which has a channel ecosystem of about 500,000 partners, is unifying E5, M365 Copilot, Agent 365 and other parts of the vendor’s product portfolio under E7. The $99 price point is for E7 with Teams, but users can save some money by buying E7 without Teams for $90.45 per user.
Copilot Cowork comes as recent product innovations by Anthropic rock publicly traded enterprise software stocks over investor panic that Anthropic, ChatGPT maker OpenAI and other AI upstarts pose an existential, disruptive threat to traditional software providers including Microsoft and rivals Salesforce, IBM and Oracle.
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Microsoft Copilot Cowork, E7
Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of Microsoft Security, told CRN in an interview that the new and upcoming offers are a major opportunity for managed security services providers (MSSPs).
“Intelligence cannot scale without that trust,” Jakkal said. “It’s not just IT professionals (using AI). It’s not just classic developer teams using it. It’s business functions using AI and creating agents. That’s awesome. But we also see that without the right tooling, that’s a real risk.”
E7 comes as Microsoft prepares to increase prices across a variety of application suites on July 1. Mike Wilson, chief technology officer and partner at Mason, Ohio-based Microsoft partner Interlink Cloud Advisors–a member of CRN’s MSP 500–told CRN in an interview that the price increase is justified by the amount of value Microsoft has been adding to different packages.
“We’ve got to think about that (the price) in the context of what we pay human beings, like what we pay to enable them for technology is small compared to what we actually pay humans,” Wilson said. “The value’s there.”
Talking to CRN before the reveal of E7, he said Microsoft needs to provide the tools needed for succeeding with AI at scale. The agent builder products such as Copilot Studio are important, but Agent 365 providing the governance layer for partners is also critical.
“Agents are going to be transformative,” Wilson said. “Having that governance layer is a huge advantage for Microsoft. I think they’ve done a better job of putting that security and governance layer than any other vendor in the space.”
Microsoft has been publishing metrics to show growth throughout its AI portfolio, including Copilot paid seats more than doubling year on year. Microsoft executives said in January on the company’s quarterly earnings call that M365 Copilot now has 15 million paid seats.
The vendor has also seen daily active Copilot usage up tenfold, and the number of M365 Copilot customers with more than 35,000 seats tripled year over year. Manufacturing, retail and financial services are among the industries leading Microsoft agent adoption, according to the vendor.
Microsoft’s security business protects 1.6 million customers and leverages more than 100 trillion daily signals, according to the vendor.
Microsoft’s Upcoming E7 Suite
On May 1, Microsoft will launch the M365 E7 Frontier Worker Suite, bringing together M365 E5, M365 Copilot, A365, Entra Suite and advanced capabilities in Defender, Intune and Purview.
E7 users can apply AI across email, documents, meetings, spreadsheets and business application surfaces. IT and security workers will also have observability and governance capabilities for AI at enterprise scale, according to Microsoft.
The $99 price tag is lower than buying all of those capabilities individually, according to Microsoft. M365 Copilot is $30 per user per month. The Entra Suite is $12 per user per month and $9 for E5 license users.
And M365 E5 is $57 per user per month until July 1, when Microsoft will increase the suite 5 percent to $60. E5 without Teams is $48.45 per user per month until July 1, when Microsoft will increase the suite 6 percent to $51.45.
M365 E3 is $36 per user per month until July 1, when it increases 8 percent to $39. And without Teams, E3 is $27.45 until July 1 when it increases 11 percent to $30.45, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft Copilot Cowork
Microsoft is putting its Copilot Cowork introduction under the banner of a third wave of Microsoft 365 Copilot innovation that moves the AI product beyond virtual assistant and into a tool that can complete actions and complete work through embedded agentic capabilities.
Copilot Cowork is a collaboration with Anthropic that can orchestrate full workflows, from building presentations to assembling financials and emailing a team of employees to prepare a user for a customer meeting, as an example. Microsoft is also working on out-of-the-box plug-ins across use cases and scenarios.
Cowork leverages Microsoft’s enterprise data protection (EDP) and WorkIQ intelligence layer for understanding user work patterns, relationships and organizational context, according to the vendor. Cowork is in pilot with select customers and will enter a research preview this month through Microsoft’s Frontier program.
Cowork can complete tasks in the background while workers do other things, according to Microsoft. It can interact with user email, documents, files and data in Microsoft 365 without connectors, integrations or data movement. Data never leaves enterprise boundaries and doesn’t have to run locally on user devices. The data instead stays in the cloud.
Along with Cowork, this “wave 3” of Microsoft agentic capabilities includes updates for M365 Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. For example, users can ask Copilot to create pivot tables, update calculations, forecast cash flow and more in Excel.
Copilot Chat is also adding the ability to create and augment artifacts, build agents in the canvas users leverage daily and other enhanced experiences, according to Microsoft.
Wave 3 also includes the addition of Anthropic’s Claude in mainline Copilot Chat for Frontier program members alongside the latest generation of OpenAI models, according to Microsoft. Copilot Chat also offers an auto router for choosing the best-suited model for a job. Claude was already introduced in Researcher and Copilot Studio.
The Agent 365 Control Plane
Microsoft plans to make its Agent 365 control plane for AI agents GA on May 1 with a price of $15 per user per month, according to the vendor.
Originally available to Frontier members, as disclosed during Microsoft Ignite 2025 in November, Agent 365 offers a single place for agent observations, governance, management and security across the organization.
Without a unified control plane, IT teams might not have visibility into the number of agents, how they behave, who has access to them and security risks.
In two months, tens of millions of agents have appeared in the Agent 365 Registry by preview customers, according to Microsoft. The vendor itself uses A365 for visibility into 500,000-plus agents across the company. So far, most agents have been leveraged in research, coding, sales intelligence, customer triaging and human resources self-service.
Over the past 28 days, agents have generated more than 65,000 responses a day for employees, according to Microsoft.
A365 capabilities that are GA on May 1 include an agent registry and security policy templates for the entire tenant and enforceable in Microsoft Admin Center for onboarding new agents. The registry covers agents built in Microsoft products, ecosystem partner agents and agents registered through application programming interfaces (APIs).
Users can also receive reports on agent performance, adoption, usage, an agent map and activity details, according to Microsoft. And they will have the ability to use Entra to evaluate agent identity risk.
Risk signal evaluation will still be in public preview May 1 for most Defender and Purview capabilities–although, a Defender protection enterprising public preview in April instead of May 1 is runtime threat protection, investigation and hunting for agents that leverage A365 tools gateway, according to Microsoft.
The Entra capabilities in A365 going GA May 1 allow users to give each agent a unique identity designed for the agent’s needs. Users can apply trusted access policies at scale and identity protection and conditional access for agents to extend existing policies for real-time access decisions.
Those access decisions can be made based on risk, Microsoft Intune device compliance and custom security attributes to agents operating on behalf of a user. The goal is to prevent agent compromise and misuse by malicious actors, according to Microsoft.
