Most organizations can now build AI agents faster than they can say who owns them. This article proposes a twelve-field inventory record and a seven-stage lifecycle from proposal to retirement, and maps each stage to what the Microsoft 365 Agent Registry, Microsoft Agent 365, Entra Agent ID and Power Platform inventory actually do as of September 2026, including where the tooling stops.
Every MCP server is two things at once: text your model will read, and code that acts with someone's credentials. This guide covers the current MCP specification and its OAuth 2.1 authorization model, five risk classes, a vetting checklist, where Microsoft's MCP hosting and gateway options stand in September 2026, and an allow-list model that holds up in an audit.
Once an AI agent can write to systems, send email or move money, "a human approves it" is not a design. This guide classifies agent actions by consequence and reversibility, maps each class to an approval pattern, and sets out what the audit record must hold to survive a review, grounded in what Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry and Purview actually provide as of September 2026.
Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry are not competitors — they sit at different levels of abstraction, and three changes in 2026 have quietly retired most of the advice written about choosing between them. A decision framework built on who owns the runtime, where the data already lives, and who operates the agent on day ninety, with the cost shapes, governance asymmetries and interop paths verified against Microsoft's own documentation.
Microsoft Foundry is no longer a place to call models — it is a platform for hosting, grounding, governing and operating agents. A working architecture guide to prompt and hosted agents, Foundry IQ, Toolbox, MCP and A2A, model choice and Claude, agent identity and RBAC, private networking, evaluation and Agent 365 — with every capability marked GA, Preview or retiring, and the places Microsoft's own documentation contradicts itself named rather than smoothed over.
A research-grounded enterprise reference architecture for autonomous AI agents: agent identity, task-bound authorization, tool and MCP gateways, memory security, runtime containment, observability, and incident response — with an OWASP agentic Top 10 mapping, a bounded-autonomy model, and a 38-control matrix.
Can agentic AI actually run security operations? The interesting problem is not the triage decision — it is everything around it: authority, tenant isolation, evidence, approval, and audit. This is the full target architecture, published as something you can click through.
Microsoft's AI portfolio is not five versions of the same product — it is a layered enterprise architecture with an experience layer, two build platforms, a control plane, and the identity, data and threat controls underneath. A practical architecture guide to what each platform is for, which workloads belong where, how agent identity and authority actually flow, and what has to be true before an organization scales any of it.