Microsoft Mechanics Podcast

Latest Episodes:

New Conditional Access policy plans in Microsoft Entra Oct 28, 2026

Show notes

Group related Conditional Access policies into policy plans and define users, apps and conditions once for every rule in the plan. Add a rule for each requirement, like phishing-resistant MFA or compliant devices, and keep the shared scope in one place.

Build a plan around a user group, like headquarters staff, or a shared condition, like high agent risk, and start from templates. Merge existing policies into a plan with the migration tool. It pulls shared conditions up to the plan and turns each policy into a rule. Your current policies stay enforced until you cut over.

Etan Basseri, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Entra, shares how plans and rules fit together in the Microsoft Entra admin center.

👥 Who it's for:

Identity and security admins who manage Conditional Access in Microsoft Entra, and architects planning how to organize or migrate large policy sets, including access controls for AI agents.

⏱️ Chapters:

00:00 Conditional Access policy plans in Microsoft Entra

00:48 Track policies beyond naming prefixes

01:29 How shared conditions and rules work

02:41 Create a policy plan for HQ users

03:43 Add a phishing-resistant MFA rule

04:43 Add a compliant device rule

05:51 Block high-risk AI agents in one plan

06:56 Migrate existing policies into a plan

08:11 Keep policies enforced until cutover

What are Conditional Access policy plans? They organize access controls around an objective, either a persona like employees, external guests or administrators, or a security goal like requiring compliant devices or securing agent activity. Plan-level attributes cover identities, resources and applications, user actions and authentication context, plus shared conditions like risk levels, devices, network locations and client app types. Each rule layers its own conditions and grant or session controls on top. Plans live in a new Policy plans view, next to your existing policy list under Conditional Access.

The headquarters plan in the demo includes the HQ All Users group and excludes a break-glass group to prevent lockouts. Its first rule requires phishing-resistant MFA through authentication strength and starts in report-only mode. A second rule requires devices marked as compliant. Neither rule repeats the included or excluded groups.

The agent plan, built from a template, sets high agent risk as its shared condition. Separate rules block high-risk agent users and high-risk autonomous agents acting with their own agent-specific permissions.

How do you move existing policies over? Filter your policy list, for example by a branch office naming prefix, select the policies and merge them into one plan. The preview shows which resources become shared conditions and how each policy maps to a rule, with its identities, locations, grant and session settings. After you enforce the new plan, turn off or delete the original policies.

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Fight AI with AI | Multi-Agent Security Defense Oct 13, 2026

Show notes

Match AI-powered attacks at machine speed with Project Perception. Point red, blue, and green AI agent teams at a known threat actor, confirm which vulnerabilities attackers can reach, then deploy KQL detections, harden your posture, and merge a tested code fix in minutes with Microsoft Defender.

Stay in control and approve key actions before agents run them. Run Microsoft's pre-built playbooks or build your own, and manage sessions from the Defender portal or from your terminal with the MCP plug-in. Keep token costs low with MAI Cyber Flash, a purpose-built security model inside MDASH.

Dave Weston, CVP Microsoft Security, shares how Microsoft's threat intelligence and incident response expertise power agents you direct.

👥 Who it's for:

SOC analysts, security engineers, and red and blue teamers evaluating agentic AI for defense, plus AppSec and DevSecOps teams who own vulnerability remediation.

⏱️ Chapters:

00:00 Fight AI-powered attacks with AI agents

00:45 How AI attacks adapt mid-breach

01:39 Jailbroken and abliterated models

02:04 Inside the Project Perception security stack

03:28 Red, blue, and green agent teams

04:07 Playbooks that orchestrate agent workflows

04:43 Ask Perception if you're protected

06:06 Red team agents emulate a threat actor

06:59 Approve high-impact agent actions

07:26 MDASH findings confirm reachable vulnerabilities

08:22 Blue team agent writes KQL detections

08:54 WAF, auth check, and tested code fix

09:36 Pull request merged into production

10:14 Session reports and MCP terminal plugin

11:02 MAI Cyber Flash keeps token costs low

11:57 Join the Project Perception preview

AI helps attackers find, weaponize, and exploit vulnerabilities at a speed and scale no human team can match. Jailbroken and abliterated models generate custom tooling that adapts mid-breach, leaving defenses that hunt for known techniques chasing a target that changes every time.

Project Perception answers with a full agentic security stack. It starts with trillions of daily security signals, correlates them in the Microsoft security graph, and uses multiple AI models, including purpose-built ones, to reason over risk and prioritize what matters most. Specialized agents act on that reasoning: red team agents simulate attacks and prove where you're vulnerable, blue team agents investigate and build detections, and green team agents harden posture and remediate. Playbooks orchestrate them through proven SOC workflows, and codified actuators let agents perform the fix instead of only recommending it.

In the demo, one prompt, "Is my organization protected against Onyx Sleet?", launches threat intelligence, reconnaissance, and pen test agents. They pull MDASH code-scanning findings and confirm an internet-exposed SQL injection. A detection authoring agent writes KQL detections to cover the gap, and the posture remediation agent shields the app with a web application firewall, adds an authorization check, and produces a tested code fix merged through a pull request. Agents stop and ask before any high-impact action, so you stay in control.

Every session produces a shareable report with the attack path, remediation plan, and timeline. An MCP tool plugin runs the same work from your terminal, and MAI Cyber Flash, a dedicated cybersecurity model inside MDASH, handles most vulnerability work to keep token costs low.

🔗 Related links:

► Get started at https://microsoft.com/perception

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Build Automated Agents, Workflows, and Apps - New in Copilot Studio Oct 05, 2026

Show notes

Take a business process from prompt to production by building agents, workflows, and apps in one place with Copilot Studio. Describe the agent you need and generate its instructions and reusable skills, choose the model, connect MCP tools and specialist agents, then test its quality at scale with Evaluations.

Trigger workflows from incoming email, classify submissions, hand work to your agents, and pause for human review on the decisions that need it. Track timing and paths for every step in the Activity tab. Then generate a full stack app on your Dataverse data so your team can filter, review, and approve every bid from one shared view.

Jack Rowbotham, Copilot Studio Senior Product Manager, shares how to automate a procurement process for bids from multiple vendors, using agents that reason, route, and recommend.

👥 Who it's for:

IT admins, Power Platform makers, solution architects, and developers building agentic solutions, plus operations and procurement teams automating reviews and approvals.

⏱️ Chapters:

00:00 Build agents, workflows, and apps in one place

01:04 Automate a multi-vendor bid review end to end

02:18 Build an agent from a prompt

03:28 Add models, MCP tools, and specialist agents

04:13 Test the bid agent in Preview

05:05 Evaluations

05:59 Automated workflows

07:42 Track every run in the Activity tab

08:13 Build an app from a prompt

09:10 Approve bids from the team app

09:37 Get started with Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio brings agents, workflows, and apps together in one place, all running on the GitHub Copilot harness. In this video, a supplier email triggers a workflow, a bid evaluation agent checks the bid against tender requirements, and the procurement team makes the final call in a shared app.

Describe the agent you want, including the requirements to assess, the logic to apply, and the live data source to connect to. Copilot Studio reasons over your prompt, maps out its build steps, and generates the agent's name, instructions, and skills for requirement coverage and evidence verification. Connect Work IQ for supplier emails and the Dataverse MCP server for bid data, keep Claude Sonnet as the reasoning model, ground the agent in an RFP example PDF, and add a Supplier Risk specialist agent.

Test the agent in the Preview tab and watch its chain of thought as it flags gaps in certification, cold-chain handling, and insurance minimums. Then run Evaluations with your own conversations, auto-generated tests, or a CSV file. Here, 18 test cases met the evaluation criteria 89% of the time.

In the Workflows tab, drag in an Outlook "When a new email arrives" trigger, a Classify step for RFP submissions, a Get Attachment connector, and an Agent step running the Bid Evaluation Agent. An if/else Human Review step brings in a person on flagged bids, and the Researcher agent and a recommendation agent finish the job before results land in Dataverse.

Finish in Apps by describing a Bid Management App connected to your Dataverse table, or to sources like SharePoint through connectors. Apply company branding with a follow-up prompt, then filter bids that need human review and approve decisions from the app.

Try it for yourself at copilotstudio.microsoft.com. Subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics for more videos like this.

🔗 Related links:

— Get started with Copilot Studio: https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com

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Create agents fast with Agent Builder in Copilot Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

Build a specialist AI agent without writing a line of code. Describe what you want in one prompt, and Copilot Agent Builder generates the name, instructions, skills, and knowledge setup for you — grounded only in the SharePoint sites, files, and Copilot Connectors you choose.

Teach your agent a Skill to handle recurring work, like drafting weekly status emails from your own template, then test it in Preview before you publish. Share it with people or groups and set exact permissions, track real usage in the new Monitor tab, and push your best agents into your org's Agent Store catalog.

Ned Friend, Group Product Manager for Copilot Agent Builder shares how to turn an agent into a tool your whole team can run, measure, and trust.

👥 Who it's for:

Team leads and managers who want trusted, repeatable answers for their team, plus IT admins and Microsoft 365 power users building specialist Copilot agents without code.

⏱️ Chapters:

0:00 Build specialist agents inside Copilot

0:34 Ground agents in trusted org knowledge

1:31 Create a new hire onboarding agent

2:15 Natural-language agent creation

2:41 Ground answers in SharePoint knowledge

4:13 Skills for repeatable tasks

4:53 Precise knowledge grounding

6:37 Preview and test before publishing

7:03 Share your agent with set permissions

7:39 See the new hire's agent view

8:22 Usage monitoring

8:41 Publish agents to your org catalog

Copilot Agent Builder lets you create a specialist agent by describing what you want it to do in plain language. Agent Builder interprets that prompt and automatically generates the agent's name, description, instructions, skills, knowledge sources, and suggested prompts, which you can review and edit directly.

Ground every answer in the exact knowledge you choose: SharePoint and OneDrive files, Outlook email and calendar, Microsoft Teams chats and meetings, or external business systems connected through Copilot Connectors. Turn on web search only when you want the agent to research beyond your organization, like competitor or customer research.

Add Skills to teach the agent repeatable, multi-step work — in this video, a weekly status update email built from a real template, matching its tone, sections, and formatting automatically. Preview and test the agent before publishing, then share it with people or groups and set whether they can use it or edit it.

Once your agent is live, the Monitor tab tracks total sessions, daily active users, average messages per session, average duration, and which knowledge sources get used most. For agents with strong adoption, publish them to the Built by your org section of the Agent Store for wider use across your organization.

Try Copilot Agent Builder for yourself — it's included with Copilot. Subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics for more videos like this.

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New Agent 365 controls for Microsoft admins Sep 01, 2026

Show notes

Govern every AI agent running across your organization with Agent 365. Track agents from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce in one registry, sync in agents you're already running on AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud, Databricks Genie, and Anthropic Claude, and lock down shadow AI with default blocks and Execution Container isolation.

Agent 365 inspects your environment for every agent Microsoft and partners have registered, then layers control on top. Reusable security policy templates apply Conditional Access, Access Packages, and Custom Security Attributes the moment you approve an agent, Tools governance blocks risky MCP servers and connectors org wide, and the Adoption Dashboard breaks down usage by group, job function, and license type for every manager in your org.

Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, shares how to bring every agent in your organization under one governed registry, and how to shut down shadow AI before it ever compromises your environment.

👥 Who it's for:

IT admins, security engineers, and identity teams governing AI agents across Microsoft 365, Entra, Purview, Defender, and Intune; solution architects designing agent access, tools, and security policy at scale; developers and DevOps teams building and registering agents and custom MCP servers in Copilot Studio, Agent Builder, and Foundry; and team leads, finance, and IT leaders tracking agent adoption, usage, and spend across the organization.

⏱️ Chapters:

00:00 Why you need an AI agent control plane 02:00 See every AI agent across your environment with the unified agent registry 02:50 Track local AI activity with OpenTelemetry and the Agent Map 03:16 Sync AI agents from AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud, Databricks and Claude with Registry Sync 03:55 Approve, publish and block AI agents across your organization 04:42 Manage MCP servers, plugins and connectors with Tools governance 05:18 Apply reusable security policy templates across Entra, Purview, Defender and Intune 06:06 Block shadow AI and isolate local agents with Microsoft Execution Containers 06:23 Track agent adoption and usage with the Agent 365 dashboard 07:06 Set spending limits and cost alerts for AI agents 08:02 Monitor AI agent costs and buy prepaid credits 09:07 Get started with Agent 365 today

Agent 365 gives you one place to govern every AI agent running across your organization, no matter where it was built or who owns it. In this demo, the unified agent registry surfaces agents from Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio, Agent Builder, and SharePoint, alongside agents from Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, each with its identity, owner, permissions, and usage history attached. Local AI running on managed devices shows up too, logged through standardized OpenTelemetry and mapped visually in the Agent Map so you can trace connections between agents, people, data, and tools. Registry Sync pulls in agents you're already running on AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud, Databricks Genie, and Anthropic Claude with nothing more than a connection string, and from the same registry you approve agents for broader use, publish or pin them to specific groups, automate ownership handoffs when an employee leaves, and block any agent you don't want in production.

From there, Agent 365 puts you in control of what agents can touch and how they're secured. The Tools view gives you one place to see every MCP server, plugin, and connector your agents rely on, block the risky ones, and approve or reject new tool requests as they come in. Reusable security policy templates apply Conditional Access, Access Packages, and Custom Security Attributes the moment you approve an agent, drawing on native signals from Microsoft Entra, Purview, Defender, and Intune so your identity, data security, SecOps, and device teams enforce the same controls. Shadow AI running as unsanctioned local agents gets blocked by default through Intune policy and isolated from user sessions with Microsoft Execution Containers. Team leads and managers track adoption and usage in the Agent 365 Dashboard, filtered by group, organization, job function, or license type. IT and finance teams set monthly spending limits, per user budget caps, and weekly usage alerts for Copilot Cowork and the Work IQ API, and can pre purchase discounted credits to keep spend predictable.

🔗 Related links: ► Get started at https://aka.ms/agent365

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Windows 365: Five Years In, See What's New Aug 21, 2026

Show notes

An AI agent works inside your Windows 365 Cloud PC from a Teams chat on your phone — finding downloaded files, editing documents, and drafting emails with your laptop lid closed. Microsoft Scout, a new Autopilot agent powered by the open source OpenClaw project, runs on your own Cloud PC using your identity, your files, and your apps.

Developers get a Developer Optimized Cloud PC preloaded with GitHub, VS Code, and Node.js that runs Foundry Local for token-free AI coding, and input and output protection capabilities black out the screen when anyone tries to capture a sensitive file.

Bhavya Chopra, Windows 365 Partner Director, joins Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, to show how Windows 365 now covers every seat — end users, developers, admins, and the AI agents working alongside them.

👥 Who it's for: architects and IT teams deploying AI agents like Scout and Windows 365 for Agents, developers who want a pre-configured cloud coding environment with local AI, security and compliance teams enforcing data loss prevention on remote desktops, and admins managing Cloud PC connection health.

⏱️ Chapters:

0:00 What's new across Windows 365 Cloud PCs 0:59 Why Cloud PC adoption keeps accelerating 2:04 Healthcare and telecom Windows 365 case studies 3:14 Sign in to a full Windows desktop anywhere 4:10 Block screenshots with input and output protection capabilities 4:35 Pull table data from images with Click to Do 5:19 Resume your Cloud PC session on an iPad 5:52 Publish Cloud Apps with Windows 365 Flex 7:01 Give AI agents a dedicated Cloud PC 7:27 Run Microsoft Scout from a Teams chat 9:43 Code on a Developer Optimized Cloud PC 10:11 Run local AI with Foundry Local and Phi-4 11:57 Track Cloud PC connection health in Intune 13:03 Troubleshoot connection issues with an AI agent 14:03 What's next for Windows 365

Microsoft Scout takes instructions from a Teams chat and carries them out inside your Cloud PC — locating a report in the Downloads folder that never synced to OneDrive, summarizing it, appending the summary to the file, saving it, then drafting an email with the document attached and holding it for review. It reports progress back in Teams the whole time, so nothing requires touching the physical device. For agent workloads that need isolation instead, Windows 365 for Agents provisions a dedicated Cloud PC with its own unique identity and scoped access, and the same agentic infrastructure powers Computer Use in Researcher.

Developer Optimized Cloud PCs skip the environment build entirely: sign in to a machine already loaded with GitHub, VS Code, and Node.js, then run Foundry Local against the Phi-4-mini small language model to generate an app and run it — CPU spikes visible in Task Manager and Windows Machine Learning profiling in VS Code confirm inference is local, with no cloud tokens spent to code or to run the finished app.

Input and output protection capabilities black out the Cloud PC screen the instant someone attempts a screenshot from the accessing device, and extends the same block to third-party screen recorders and key loggers. Alongside it, AI-enabled Cloud PCs running at least 8 vCPUs add Click to Do, which lifts text out of non-selectable images and graphical tables straight into Excel, plus Semantic Search across the desktop. Sessions roam: disconnect on a laptop, reconnect on an iPad, and apps and display settings come back as you left them. Windows 365 Cloud Apps with Windows 365 Flex publishes individual apps from a shared Cloud PC pool with user experience sync across Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and the browser. And in the Intune admin center, new monitoring dashboards track connection health, failures, round trip times, and license utilization in near real time, while an admin agent in preview triages issues to a root cause — like a regional cohort set to TCP-only transport instead of UDP with RDP Shortpath.

🔗 Related links:

► Check out https://aka.ms/windows365

► See the latest Windows 365 updates at https://aka.ms/Windows365Turns5

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Build your first Power App from data in seconds Jul 16, 2026

Show notes

Build a fully working model-driven app from your existing Dataverse, SharePoint, or SQL data in under a minute — screens, navigation, and forms included. Generate new pages from a natural language prompt with Generative Pages, auto-populate records from any document in seconds with Automatic Form Fill, and embed Copilot to query your app data directly.

Layer in an Agent Feed to proactively surface decisions, missing data, and action items, then connect to Outlook and Microsoft 365 through Work IQ to act on your app data without leaving your inbox.

Jed Brown, Power Platform Group Product Manager, shares how to turn existing business data into a modern, AI-powered app.

► QUICK LINKS:

00:00 - Create apps using Power Apps

01:07 - Create an app from existing data

02:26 - Copilot + Form Fill Assist

03:46 - AI-generated pages from a prompt

04:53 - Agent feed for proactive intelligence

06:16 - M365 integration via Work IQ

06:46 - Wrap up

► Link References

Build your first Power App today at https://make.powerapps.com

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Microsoft Entra Suite hands-on tour of identity and network access protections Jul 15, 2026

Show notes

Unify identity and network access controls. Enforce least privilege access across every app and resource. Wire lifecycle workflows directly to your HR system to strip stale permissions on role changes, gate sensitive data behind biometric step-up verification, and replace your VPN with per-app, identity-scoped access that revokes tokens the moment risk spikes. Secure AI usage at every layer. Block confidential data from reaching public AI tools and stop adversarial prompt injections before your agents process them.

John Damon, Microsoft Entra Suite Senior Product Manager, shares how to lock down identity, network access, and AI usage from a single control plane.

► QUICK LINKS:

00:00 - Identity and network controls

00:45 - Lifecycle Workflows

01:28 - Verified ID with Face Check

02:15 - Request access for direct reports

03:17 - Global Secure Access + Token Revocation

04:32 - Secure AI usage

06:20 - Network DLP / ChatGPT Block

07:12 - Prompt Injection Protection

08:31 - Wrap up

► Link References

Check out our related deep dives at https://aka.ms/EntraSuitePlaylist

For more information, go to https://aka.ms/EntraSuite

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New agentic platform in Dynamics 365 for Sales and Service Jul 14, 2026

Show notes

Qualify a lead, close a case, or walk into a renewal meeting fully briefed, all from the sales and service agents built into Dynamics 365. Ask a question and pull a grounded answer straight from your CRM and your calendar. Hand a prompt to Copilot Cowork and walk away with updated records, a finished presentation, and a drafted email, ready before your next meeting. Auto-fill a case description as you work, and walk into every quality review already scored against your team's framework.

Eric Boocock, Dynamics 365 Principal Program Manager, shares how these agents move with you from first prospect touch to case resolution, right inside the apps you work in every day. Along the way, he explains the mechanics of how everything works and your options to customize the experience with your own skills and instructions.

► QUICK LINKS:

00:00 - Agentic platform in Dynamics 365

01:03 - Sales Qualification & Opportunity Agents

01:44 - Case Management & Quality Evaluation Agents

02:25 - Sales Agent in action

04:30 - Copilot Cowork

05:44 - Automate repeated tasks

07:33 - Power behind agentic platform

08:50 - Custom skills via Power Apps + Dataverse

09:57 - Wrap up

► Link References

Get started at https://aka.ms/AgenticCXPlatform

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Tokenomics | The new AI currency & your options explained Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

Control what you're billed on. Tokens are the currency of AI, and how you design your app determines how many you spend. Compress conversation history instead of resending it raw, cap output tokens with matching prompt instructions, and cache static context so each reuse costs a fraction of the first request. Route each prompt to the right model by complexity, or set Model Router in Microsoft Foundry to handle that automatically — balanced, quality, or cost mode.

Then optimize the whole stack. Run Agent Optimizer to test your prompt, model, and tool configurations together and surface better setups. Use Toolbox to dynamically select only the tools each request needs and cut input token overhead by 90%.

April Gittens, Microsoft Principal Cloud Advocate, joins Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, to share how to seize control of AI token spend through smarter app design.

► QUICK LINKS:

00:00 - Tokenomics foundation

01:06 - Token cost basics

02:11 - Context Window creep

03:46 - Reduce unnecessary tokens

04:29 - Trim context costs

05:21 - Cap output tokens

06:27 - Cache for savings

07:54 - Model cost tradeoffs

09:15 - Model Router

09:42 - Toolbox in Microsoft Foundry Toolbox

11:18 - Agent Optimizer

12:44 - Other cost drivers

13:57 - Wrap up

► Link References

Check out the tools in Microsoft Foundry at https://ai.azure.com

For more about managing AI costs go to https://aka.ms/FoundryTokenomics

► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics?

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