Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, and Microsoft is wasting no time in developing ways to help businesses take advantage with workflow automation. For example, with Copilot Studio’s new multiagent orchestration capabilities, Microsoft 365 is evolving from a suite of productivity apps into a platform where custom AI agents collaborate to tackle complex business processes. IT leaders can now move beyond individual chat assistants and enable cross‑departmental agents that route, escalate and execute tasks that once required manual handoffs.
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What’s New: From Agents to Orchestration
With its orchestration capabilities in Copilot Studio, Microsoft is taking a big step forward in its vision for AI, which was introduced in 2023 as a personal assistant for individual workers. An agent is “able to perform tasks and achieve feats on behalf of a worker,” explains Zack Mabry, senior brand manager for Microsoft Copilot and Agents at CDW. “It just takes care of that repetitive rinse‑and‑repeat type of motions to provide more time and productivity for the human at work.”
With agent orchestration, multiple agents communicate and coordinate actions. Alongside this, a marketplace — a kind of app store for AI agents — launched in May 2025, offering prebuilt components that organizations can deploy and customize internally. Today, businesses can use orchestration as a workflow automation platform, using agents to simplify and automate entire processes.
“Copilot is the assistant for the individual,” says Jeff Cerreto, business manager for Microsoft solutions at CDW. Orchestrated together, multiple agents function as “the assistant for a department or multiple departments. And it can be even automated to a point where you don’t even think about them as a thing anymore because they’re so automated.”
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Why It Matters for IT Leaders
For IT leadership, the implications are profound. Imagine an HR onboarding workflow where one agent ingests a new employee’s benefit choices and other key information, the next sends welcome emails and schedules training, a third sets up accounts and equipment, and so on. Only the outliers require human intervention. A finance team could have incoming invoices scanned and processed by an agent that would flag a small number that would be routed to humans.
Or consider an IT incident scenario: A monitoring agent detects an issue, a ticketing agent creates an incident record, and a remediation agent attempts to fix the problem, escalating the few issues it can’t resolve to human engineers. Meanwhile, a communication agent posts updates to Teams for IT staff.
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In each of these examples, departments are increasing their output, reducing worker burnout, and freeing up time for workers to be creative and focus on strategic tasks — using AI to give the organization a measurable competitive advantage.
“After that first agent looks through the data, a separate agent takes those quick hitters and moves it through, and that workflow is then automated, and it leaves maybe just these 10 on the side that a human has to interact with,” Mabry says.
Many tech solution providers are already creating agents for tools that businesses use today and are placing these on the Microsoft Marketplace. Organizations can look for premade agents that can help them, but it’s also fairly simple to use the Copilot Orchestration tools to build bespoke agents for businesses’ unique situations, with little or no coding required.
The innovation with AI really happens after you set in place good security practices and you have really clean data.”
Zack Mabry
Senior Brand Manager, Microsoft Copilot and Agents, CDW
How to Prepare and Build Your Own
Here’s the catch. Only a few organizations are ready today to take advantage of AI-powered agent orchestration. The path to next‑generation automation typically breaks down into three phases:
- AI readiness. This is the foundation, Mabry emphasizes: “The innovation with AI really happens after you set in place good security practices and you have really clean data.” AI agents and models are only as good as the data that feeds them, so if yours is not yet well governed, secure and ready for automation, fixing that is your first step.
- Licensing and platform enablement. Just because you’re a Microsoft user doesn’t mean you have the necessary licenses to take advantage of AI automation, and Microsoft licensure can be a complicated matter. CDW offers guidance on Microsoft Copilot Studio licenses that enable agent creation.
- Design and deploy agents. With the foundation and licenses in place, you’re ready to architect your agents. Copilot Studio is a low code/no code environment where business users can “tell it what you want it to do … then you can tinker,” Cerreto says. Even so, he notes that “to get it right, it helps to have a professional by your side.” CDW offers customized guidance for agents through its professional services.
The next generation of workplace automation within Microsoft 365 is already here. With Copilot Studio and agent orchestration capabilities, IT leaders can shift from deploying tools to shaping workflows that span departments, reduce manual effort and align with the adaptive enterprise. As Cerreto says, “You’re only bound by your creativity and drive to harness AI to make your organization even stronger.”
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