Today, 1 May 2026, Microsoft makes its new top-tier enterprise suite — Microsoft 365 E7, the so-called Frontier Suite — generally available, alongside Agent 365, a new control plane for AI agents. As announced on the Microsoft Partner blog, E7 bundles E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Entra Suite and Agent 365 into one US$99-per-user-per-month SKU — about 15% cheaper than buying the components separately.

The headline feature is Agent 365. It’s the first proper enterprise tool for inventorying, governing and securing the AI agents creeping into your tenancy — Copilot Studio agents, third-party agents, anything connecting through the Microsoft cloud. If your team is already letting Copilot summarise meetings, draft emails or pull data out of SharePoint, you have agents in your tenant whether you’ve planned for them or not. Agent 365 gives IT and security teams a single pane to see what’s running, what data each agent touches and who owns it.

For most Australian SMBs, jumping straight to E7 is overkill. The price tag alone — roughly A$150 per user per month at current exchange rates, before partner margin — puts it well outside the typical Business Premium budget. But the idea behind E7 matters even if you don’t buy it. Microsoft is signalling that AI agents are now a governance problem, not a productivity novelty. The same controls Microsoft is selling to enterprises will trickle down to mid-market SKUs over the next 12–18 months. Plan for that.

What to do now: take stock of which Copilot and AI features are already turned on in your tenant, who has access, and what data they can read. The 1 July M365 price rises in Australia (up to 33% on some plans) make this a good moment to review your licence mix anyway. If you’d like a sanity check on your current setup, our Microsoft 365 team does this kind of review every week.