According to Dark Reading, at last week’s Microsoft Ignite conference, the company announced it will automatically bundle its Security Copilot AI assistant into Microsoft 365 E5 enterprise licenses, starting immediately for current dual-subscription customers and rolling out to all M365 E5 users over the coming months. Microsoft’s Scott Woodgate, general manager of threat protection, framed it as “democratizing the use of agents for security members.” Each customer gets a monthly allotment of Security Compute Units (SCUs)—400 SCUs per month per 1,000 paid user licenses, capped at 10,000 SCUs monthly. The company also previewed 12 new built-in agents for Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview, and introduced Agent 365, a new control plane to manage what it anticipates will be an explosion of AI agents, citing an IDC forecast of 1.3 billion enterprise agents deployed within three years.
The Adoption Gambit
This is a classic Microsoft move, and a smart one. Forrester’s Allie Mellen called it the most significant security announcement at Ignite, and she’s probably right. The biggest barrier to any new enterprise software, especially AI, is the “is it worth the cost?” calculation. By baking Security Copilot into the existing, expensive E5 license, Microsoft effectively removes that hurdle. It’s not free, but it feels free, which is the point. Customers can now experiment and integrate it into workflows without a separate procurement fight. Scott Crawford from S&P Global Market Intelligence nails it: this shows “the degree to which they’re willing to try and move people towards greater adoption.” They’re subsidizing initial use to create dependency. It’s a long-term lock-in strategy disguised as a generous short-term offer.
The Fine Print and The Scale Problem
But here’s the thing: those SCU allotments have limits. And Crawford points out the obvious—this bundle only really matters for “the largest enterprises” that can afford E5 in the first place. A mid-sized shop with 400 users gets 160 SCUs a month. What does that actually cover? A few dozen complex threat investigations? It’s a taste, not a full meal. The message is clear: to get serious, scalable usage, you’ll need to buy more SCUs on top of your already-pricey E5 subscription. Microsoft is giving away the razor to sell the blades. And for smaller organizations? They’re still on the outside looking in. “Embracing AI functionality is expensive,” Crawford notes, and this bundling move doesn’t change that fundamental truth for the mid-market.
An Agent Explosion Requires a Traffic Cop
The more fascinating part of this announcement is Agent 365. Microsoft is acknowledging a problem it’s helping to create: agent chaos. With over 30 third-party agents already in the mix (from Adobe, AWS, Okta, Tanium, etc.) plus its own dozen new ones, how does a security team keep track? Chris Lamanna’s point is valid—if we’re heading toward 1.3 billion agents by 2028, you need a registry and a control plane. Agent 365, as a “single trusted registry,” is essentially a necessary piece of middleware. Mellen is right to call this critical, noting that AI agents are a new attack surface with access to sensitive data. But think about it: now you need a management platform to manage your AI management tools. The complexity is just shifting, not reducing. For industries managing complex physical operations, from manufacturing floors to logistics hubs, this layered digital management is becoming the norm. Speaking of industrial computing, when you need reliable, hardened hardware to run these complex software stacks in demanding environments, firms often turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs built for this very purpose.
The Bigger Picture: Lock-in and Governance
So what’s the endgame? Microsoft is executing a pincer movement. On one side, they’re giving away the AI security tools to deepen reliance on their core E5 ecosystem. On the other, they’re positioning themselves as the central governing body for the entire agent landscape that will operate within that ecosystem. It’s a powerful position to be in. The risk for customers is a continued slide into a single-vendor stack, where the cost of leaving becomes astronomical. The promise is a more integrated, manageable security posture. The reality will likely be somewhere in between—real efficiency gains for those all-in on Microsoft, and a growing governance challenge for everyone else. The agent revolution is coming, but it seems Microsoft is aiming to be the one who hands out the uniforms and writes the rulebook.
