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Ryan is joined by Rosemary Wang, Developer Advocate at IBM, to explore what infrastructure as code looks like once AI starts writing and deploying it.
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Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Pennsylvania, USA
Hello Champions!
Here’s a recap and top Q+A from our May M365 Champions monthly call of 2026, featuring Agents 365 with Samer Baroudi ,Microsoft Senior Product Marketing Manager and Jessie Hwang, Microsoft Customer Experience PM II.
We kicked off the call by announcing the digital premiere of More Than Code: The SharePoint Community Film — a documentary-style experience that highlights the passion, innovation, and collaboration behind the global SharePoint community. Featuring stories and perspectives from MVPs, customers, and Microsoft leaders. Click here to check out the digital premiere and experience the story for yourself!
First, Samer Baroudi presented Microsoft Agent 365 as the control plane for agents, focused on helping organizations safely scale AI agent adoption through three pillars: observability, governance, and security. He explained that as AI agents rapidly expand across SaaS platforms, endpoints, and cloud environments, organizations need centralized visibility into what agents exist, who is using them, what data they can access, and how to manage risks like oversharing, shadow AI, and unmanaged “ownerless” agents. His demo walked through the Agent 365 experience in the Microsoft 365 admin center, including the centralized agent registry, shadow AI detection, agent maps, lifecycle management rules, policy templates tied to Entra/Purview/Defender, MCP tool controls, analytics dashboards, and conditional access policies for agents. He emphasized that Agent 365 extends existing Microsoft security and governance infrastructure—such as Entra, Intune, Defender, and Purview—to AI agents so organizations can adopt agents responsibly while maintaining visibility, compliance, and security controls at scale.
Jessie Hwang introduced the redesigned Copilot Adoption Hub on adoption.microsoft.com, describing it as a simplified and more approachable onboarding experience intended to help organizations accelerate Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption. She explained that the redesign focuses on foundational “L100” learning content for AI users, champions, and leaders. The new hub includes streamlined navigation, role-based resource filtering, embedded overview and demo videos, prompt galleries with direct “Open in Copilot” functionality, translated HTML-based content, leadership resources, community links, featured events, and curated adoption guidance. Jessie also highlighted ongoing investments including prompt deep linking, expanded multilingual support, new AI champion and admin resources, and a reorganized “Advanced Resources” section that still preserves deeper technical readiness and implementation materials for more experienced practitioners.
Q+A from this month's session:
1. I don't have admin access, but I work on agent governance, I made my own dashboard in streamlit that's now entirely redundant by Agent 365. My org will be hesitant to give me admin access, is there a role with minimal permissions that gives Agent 365 access but not all the other admin tools?
Answer: Today either AI Admin (read only) or Global Admin is required for end to end. I acknowledge your feedback however, and this is something our engineering teams are working on.
2. How does Agents 365 determine the risks of an agent?
Answer: Agent 365 determines risk using security telemetry and behavioral signals from Defender (identity signals), Purview (data signals), defender (threat signals). Together these provide a holistic view of agent risk posture.
3. If i have 10000 users in my tenant.. i have 3000 users are having permium license.. we have some enterprise agents published. how many additional agent 365 license i need to buy?
Answer: We recommend customers license for Agent 365, users that interact with agents, managers or sponsors of agents.
4. How is Microsoft balancing the needs of admins and the spirit of innovation for builders with A365 without requiring every E5 user to have A365 as well?
Answer: We don’t require every user to be licensed, Agent 365 is designed to let builders innovate freely, while giving admins centralized visibility, governance, and risk management at scale. Agent 365 is recommended for any user that interacts with agents, manager or sponsor of agents.
5. Wow so as things evolve I see having to have a paid license for this that and the other control or safeguard. Will MS in the future consider one license for all? Seems as though it can get very unaffordable fast the way it is trending.
Answer: Microsoft 365 E7 is the unified license that brings together Microsoft 365 E5, Entra suite, M365 Copilot and Agent 365.
6. Is the GCC implementation for Agent 365 on the Roadmap?
Answer: Currently no timelines we can share on this.
7. How granular is Agent 365 governance and RBAC?
Answer: The AI Administrator role was introduced to avoid overusing Global Admin permissions. Permissions dynamically update if an agent’s scope changes over time.
Agent 365 now supports expanded role-based access controls for:
- AI administrators
- Security admins
- Security readers
- Reports readers
- User experience success managers
8. Are permissions shown in Agent 365 reflect only original developer scopes or also evolving runtime scopes?
Answer: They are dynamic and update as agent capabilities evolve.
9. Can organizations automatically archive or govern inactive agents?
Answer: Agent management rules currently ship with:ownerless agent reassignment auto deployment of Microsoft-built agentsother out-of-box lifecycle rules. Full “if this then that” conditional automation is planned for a future summer release. Samer specifically called the retention/archive scenario “a fantastic suggestion” and said he would relay it to the PM team.
10. Why are so many duplicate Dynamics 365 agents appearing?
Answer: Please file a bug if duplicates are confirmed.
11. Should organizations that cannot afford Agent 365 should simply block agent creation altogether?
Answer: Blocking users does not prevent shadow AI usage and positioned Agent 365 as Microsoft’s recommended solution for scaling governance through centralized inventory, lifecycle management, and risk visibility.
12. Is a limited-access role for Agent 365 that would allow visibility without granting full admin rights?
Answer: Microsoft expanded RBAC capabilities through the existing AI Administrator role and introduced an AI Reader role for read-only access to agents, metadata, and reporting without edit permissions.
Join us on June 23rd for our next community call.
- Haven't joined the program yet? It's free! Join here: https://aka.ms/M365Champion.
- Bring your questions to our discussion forum: https://aka.ms/DriveAdoption.
Pennsylvania, USA
Agentic coding benchmarks are getting closer to real-world software development. For Kotlin teams, the most important question is how reliably AI agents can complete end-to-end Kotlin tasks, from reading an issue to producing a solution that passes validation.
We’re taking the first step in addressing that gap by releasing the Kotlin Benchmark, JetBrains’ official benchmark for evaluating AI coding agents on Kotlin software engineering tasks. Our goal is to give developers a credible, public way to assess how different agents perform on Kotlin and compare agent setups using tasks that are closer to day-to-day dev work.
Alongside the benchmark release, we’re publishing the benchmark assets on GitHub and launching the official leaderboard to track the evaluation results.
Explore the benchmark on GitHub
See the first results on the leaderboard
How the Kotlin Benchmark works
The first public iteration of the Kotlin Benchmark is based on the SWE-bench methodology and focuses on repository-level Kotlin software engineering tasks.
Kotlin already has strong model-focused evaluation assets, including Kotlin_HumanEval and Kotlin_QA, which help measure a model’s understanding of the language’s syntax and core concepts. The Kotlin Benchmark looks at a different layer: how well an AI coding agent can complete validated software engineering tasks in existing Kotlin projects.
The dataset features 105 engineering tasks sourced from active open-source repositories. Each task requires the AI agent to interpret a real issue description, navigate the project’s context, and generate a functional patch. Solutions are strictly verified in containerized environments, and a task is only marked as resolved when the generated solution passes the required test verification.
You can read more about our environment setup and data collection on the Methodology page.
First results
The first evaluations show that leading coding agents can complete a large share of the current Kotlin Benchmark tasks. These results reflect the first public iteration of the benchmark and do not yet include the most recent model releases. We are already working on the second iteration and will update the leaderboard as newer evaluations are added.
In this run, the top result came from Claude Code with Opus 4.7 xhigh, which resolved 90 of 105 tasks, an 85.71% resolution rate. JetBrains Junie with Opus 4.7 max (81.9%) and Codex with GPT 5.5 xhigh (81.9%) followed closely.
The full leaderboard is available on kotlinlang.org/benchmark, where you can compare agents and configurations in detail.
For teams evaluating coding agents, the benchmark provides a shared frame of reference for comparing setups on Kotlin tasks instead of relying only on vendor claims. The scores are intended as a signal, not a guarantee for every codebase. Real-world results depend on your architecture, internal APIs, coding standards, tooling, and validation process.
What’s next
We value an open approach, which is why we built this benchmark on the open-source Multi-SWE-bench infrastructure and made all datasets and test harnesses publicly available.
We treat benchmarks as a continuous quality measurement pipeline. Moving forward, we plan to expand the framework in these areas:
- Broader Kotlin ecosystem coverage: We want the task mix to better reflect how Kotlin is used in practice, including areas such as Android and Kotlin Multiplatform, and cover a wider range of task difficulty levels.
- More evaluation metrics: Passing tests is a useful correctness signal, but it is only one part of agent evaluation. Future iterations will look at cost, performance, maintainability, and code quality.
- More agents and model setups: We plan to evaluate more commercial agents, agent-model configurations, and open-weight models, so teams can compare a wider range of setups.
The benchmark is open, so you can inspect the tasks, compare results, and tell us which Kotlin scenarios we should cover next.
Pennsylvania, USA
Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.
Read Vanishing Culture for free at the Internet Archive or purchase in print: https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026
Download audio: https://media.transistor.fm/4537b4a9/11d62b68.mp3
Pennsylvania, USA
The aftermath of Apple's price hikes. Apple is taking its fight against Epic to the Supreme Court. More AI features coming to Apple's Creature Studio. And Apple is showing confidence in its upcoming iPhone Fold, expecting to sell 10 million units!
- America is having MacBook sticker shock.
- MacBook price hikes expected to contribute to 13.6% drop in global laptop shipments.
- Apple weighs buying RAM from two blacklisted Chinese suppliers to curb rising costs.
- Broadcom and Apple extend custom silicon pact to 2031.
- iPhone 18 Pro leaks: Qualcomm or Apple C2 model, A20 details, camera upgrades.
- Apple takes Epic fight over app store fees to the Supreme Court.
- Tim Cook's government liaison position comes into focus before stepping down as Apple CEO.
- Apple in Russia's crosshairs again, facing $52M fine for not installing state-required apps.
- If you wanted more AI in Apple's Creator Studio, Tuesday's update gives it to you.
- Safari's new MCP server lets coding agents inspect and debug websites.
- Siri AI can pull info from third-party apps in the latest developer beta.
- Apple to launch 5 new iPhone models to gain market share amid memory crunch.
- Confident Apple increases its iPhone Fold orders to 10 million.
- Apple TV teases major new sci-fi series: Neuromancer.
- iPhone 17 Pro Max buried in America's 250th anniversary time capsule: to be opened in 2276.
Picks of the Week
- Glenn's Pick: Turtles!
- Jason's Pick: Default Folder X
- Andy's Pick: Readest
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, and Jason Snell
Guest: Glenn Fleishman
Download or subscribe to MacBreak Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/macbreak-weekly.
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Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit
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Download audio: https://pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/294/cdn.twit.tv/megaphone/mbw_1032/ARML7625707220.mp3
Pennsylvania, USA
How can Azure Policies help you? While at Techorama in Belgium, Richard sat down with Barbara Forbes to discuss how Azure Policies have evolved and the techniques sysadmins are using to improve security, cost controls, efficiency, and more. Barbara talks about how the default policies are designed to get folks started in Azure quickly - not necessarily optimally. And there are plenty of policy templates out there, but before you implement them, it's worthwhile to review each policy and ask the question "why?" Keeping good documentation on policies makes it easier to know intent, especially when it comes to changing them - and you'll need to change them! There are a number of ways to apply policies, but in the end, they are just more Infrastructure-as-Code, and so easily repeatable. Azure Policies are there to help you provide freedom with guardrails if you implement them carefully!
Links
- Azure Policy
- Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark
- Azure Management Groups
- Azure Bicep
- Terraform on Azure
Recorded May 12, 2026
Download audio: https://cdn.simplecast.com/media/audio/transcoded/5379899c-61c5-43c3-aa3f-1128cffd9ef4/c2165e35-09c6-4ae8-b29e-2d26dad5aece/episodes/audio/group/2cb72b06-f432-41b3-8a92-d53ae257ff01/group-item/b58f58ce-3632-4bda-bc2b-18ffa4cd64e2/128_default_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed&feed=cRTTfxcT
Pennsylvania, USA
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