The Biggest Copilot and Power Apps Announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2025

If you missed Microsoft Ignite this year, don’t worry, you’re about to get caught up on all the biggest news that actually matters for your Power Apps and Copilot journey. Ignite was absolutely packed with announcements, but instead of reading a 200-page Book of News, you’re going to get the highlights in a nice, easy walkthrough.

This is also available in Video and Newsletter format. We are trying to give you as many options as possible for keeping up with the constant onslaught of news. 🙂

Alright, let’s dig in.

What Is Agent 365?

Microsoft loves the word “Agent” so much that they created a whole new umbrella concept called Agent 365. It’s not a product, instead think of it as a marketing family for every new tool, server, or framework related to agents inside Microsoft 365.

At a high level, Agent 365 treats AI agents like coworkers. They have identities. They have permissions. They have audit trails. And they help you get rid of repetitive, boring tasks.

If you’re an IT admin, developer, or maker, this shift will matter a lot.

Key points you should know:

• Agents can be managed almost like users. They can have Exchange mailboxes, access SharePoint sites, and be assigned permissions.

• New MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers remove many of the complex steps we used to do manually in Copilot Studio tools.

• A brand-new Agents panel is coming to admin.microsoft.com so you can manage agents in one place.

• Every agent has a unique ID, with full auditing of what they touched, viewed, or updated.

Office MCP Servers

For Agent developers, the MCP servers are a big deal. Instead of wiring up 10–12 tools to talk to SharePoint or Outlook, you can now drop in a single “SharePoint MCP Server” and immediately say things like “Create a list” or “Update this file.” It drastically lowers friction.

This is one that has me very excited. Making it easier to build Agents. It was the first thing I tried in their announcements. Below are just a few of the new Frontier MCP servers.

I am certain they will get their own video soon.

Introducing Work IQ

Work IQ is one of the sleeper announcements that will become extremely important over the next year.

Work IQ is a blend of Graph API intelligence and AI intelligence rolled into one. It understands:

• Who you work with

• What department you’re in

• What types of documents you create

• What processes you repeat

• What tasks you struggle with

This context powers Microsoft’s new application-level agents in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and beyond. It also becomes something Copilot Studio agent developers will be able to tap into. If you’re building custom agents, Work IQ will help those agents feel far more “aware” and useful.

Vibe Power Apps – A Brand-New Way to Build Apps

One of the biggest surprises is Vibe Power Apps, available at vibe.powerapps.com. For the first time in years, we have a new app type in Power Apps to join Canvas apps and Model-driven apps.

These “Vibe Apps” are built completely with your words. You describe what you want:

“Build me an app to track customer issues with severity, status, and history.”

And Power Apps generates:

• Data tables in Dataverse

• Relationships

• A full UI

• Hundreds of lines of React code

Then you validate the structure, tweak anything you want using natural language, and publish. The app below was built from one sentence.

This isn’t just a toy—it’s a serious new app creation path that lowers the barrier even further for new makers.

If you want to see this one in Action, check out the full Vibe Coding Power Apps video.

App Builder Agent and Workflows Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

A couple weeks before Ignite, Microsoft announced two more powerful agents inside Microsoft 365 Copilot:

• App Builder Agent

• Workflows Agent

These let everyday users build apps and workflows directly inside Microsoft 365—no Power Apps studio required. They use the same vibe-coding engine as Vibe Power Apps, but inside Outlook, Teams, or Office.com.

This is the “starter path” for millions of people who don’t even know Power Apps exists yet. Once they outgrow the lightweight apps, they can move into full Power Apps.

You can see each of these in action with App Builder Agent video and Workflows Agent video.

Application Agents in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint

This is where Ignite delivered some real wow moments.

Microsoft is embedding agents directly inside Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. With deep knowledge of your organization, your processes, and your files. Think of this as having an Excel analysts or Power Point Ninja at your fingertips.

If you saw the example from the video version of the news show, an Excel agent took a badly structured dataset and, in a few minutes, rebuilt it into a clean table, added formulas, summarized the data, and generated multiple charts. This was work that normally takes hours. I basically did nothing.

Word Agent can draft structured documents like statements of work or contracts, based on your organization’s past patterns. And PowerPoint Agent can turn rough ideas into polished slide decks that don’t look like they were made in kindergarten.

This:

Becomes:

These are the agents that will introduce AI to everyday users long before they touch Copilot Studio.

SharePoint and OneDrive News (Or Lack Thereof)

SharePoint and OneDrive were not major stars of Ignite this year. The focus was almost entirely on Copilot and agents.

What did appear:

• SharePoint Knowledge Agent updates (mostly things already announced earlier in the year)

• Metadata reasoning improvements (the agent can now understand metadata, not just create it)

• OneDrive referenced mainly as the storage location for agent outputs

There were no big UI updates, no major new collaboration features, and no headline overhauls. Microsoft’s energy is clearly going into making SharePoint the backend intelligence layer for AI, rather than delivering new front-end features.

The New Copilot Retrieval API in Microsoft Graph

This announcement happened right before Ignite and it’s one of the most important developer updates.

Microsoft added a new endpoint to Graph:

POST /copilot/retrieval

This lets you call the same retrieval engine used by Microsoft 365 Copilot to query SharePoint, OneDrive, and Copilot Connector content using natural language. Instead of building your own index or writing complex search code, you can now send a simple natural language request:

“Find all safety policy updates in SharePoint from the past year.”

And the API returns:

• Extracts from documents

• Relevance scores

• Metadata

• Links to the source files

This is one of those features that seems small but is going to enable a whole new class of apps and agents.

Final Thoughts

Microsoft Ignite 2025 made one thing extremely clear: we’ve officially entered the era where everything is an agent. Power Apps, Microsoft 365, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and even the Graph API are becoming agent-enabled.

Whether you’re a Power Apps maker, a consultant, or an IT admin, you’re going to be working with agents more and more. And that’s a good thing because these tools remove complexity and get real work done.

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