An expanded collaboration between the two industry giants is focused on making agentic-powered security a reality for customers, Accenture’s Damon McDougald tells CRN.
An expanded collaboration between Accenture and Microsoft is targeted at making agentic-powered security into a reality for customers, an Accenture executive told CRN.
The two industry giants, which announced the expanded partnership Thursday, are aiming to accelerate the use of GenAI and AI agents for improved cybersecurity outcomes, according to Accenture’s Damon McDougald.
[Related: Microsoft Debuts Security Copilot Agents: Five Big Things To Know]
Key focus areas for the collaboration include Security Operations Center (SOC) modernization through utilizing Microsoft’s Sentinel and Defender offerings along with Accenture’s Adaptive MxDR for Microsoft, said McDougald, global cyber protection lead at Accenture, No. 1 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025.
“We’re focusing on automation and even building out AI agents to start to automate the security operations flow from end to end,” he said.
Goals of the approach include “being able to have multiple agents work in concert with each other — to be able to identify threats, to be able to work with human security experts to alert them, but also to minimize the noise so they can focus on what’s most important — and be able to find patterns within all the noise,” McDougald said.
Such capabilities, he said, are undoubtedly “advanced” at this point in the industry, which has only recently begun to explore expanding from GenAI-powered security into a more-autonomous, agentic approach to cyber defense.
Up until this point, “we haven’t been able to do some of these things with some of the legacy tools that we’ve worked with,” McDougald said.
The companies’ expanded initiative around GenAI and agentic brings together Microsoft-developed AI agents with Accenture’s services, which can enable different agents to work together for securing customers, he said.
For Accenture, “we know the processes of the industries, we know the dependencies of those industries, and we can stitch that together with their software to have some very meaningful impacts and outcomes within the security space,” McDougald told CRN.
As an example, the collaboration could involve combining a Microsoft agent that monitors OneDrive activity for potential data exfiltration, with another agent to analyze the networks and see if data was sent out from the internal environment to an external network.
“We’re stitching those different agents together that they have from a capability perspective, and orchestrating them across the process,” McDougald said. “We can have an orchestration agent that sits on top that a human interacts with to be able to say, ‘Is this really a threat?’”
Other major areas of focus for the Accenture-Microsoft collaboration include automated data protection and AI security, “security-centric” platform migration and “enhanced” identity and access management, the companies said in a news release.
In March, Microsoft announced the first set of AI agents for its Security Copilot platform, including a Phishing Triage Agent for Defender, Alert Triage Agents for Purview and a Conditional Access Optimization Agent for Entra.
“Without the agent capability and the autonomous work that agents can do on behalf of humans, with human agency we cannot keep up with this tremendous volume of alerts and triage them,” said Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president for security, compliance, identity, management and privacy at Microsoft, in speaking with reporters in March.
