01 · The installed base
Where agents show up
Agents enter a firm in three postures, each with its own risk shape: bought with a licence, wired to the firm’s own systems, or built by staff.
You bought it
Assistants and agents arrive inside licences a firm already holds, some switched on by default. Which of them are on, for whom, and connected to what is configuration a firm can read out of its own admin consoles.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat needs no Copilot licence; the paid seat adds Copilot in the Office apps and custom agent creation.
learn.microsoft.com↗Gemini features are on by default in Workspace Enterprise Standard and Plus and eligible Education editions, managed in the Admin console under Generative AI.
knowledge.workspace.google.com↗SAP embeds Joule, its generative AI copilot, across its cloud portfolio, from SuccessFactors through S/4HANA Cloud and Ariba.
news.sap.com↗Salesforce's hosted MCP servers are generally available; they sit inactive until an administrator enables them.
developer.salesforce.com↗You wired it
Open protocols now connect models to business systems: MCP for tools and data, A2A for traffic between agents. Each server added is a door into something the firm runs.
MCP support in declarative agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot is generally available.
devblogs.microsoft.com↗Any MCP-compatible client, Claude, ChatGPT or a custom agent, can connect to a Salesforce org through its hosted servers.
developer.salesforce.com↗A2A, donated by Google to the Linux Foundation in June 2025, is backed by AWS, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow.
linuxfoundation.org↗You built it
Staff produce working software by describing it to a model, and most of it never passes through IT. The last time business logic was built outside IT at this scale was the spreadsheet era, which left a written record of what that costs and which controls answer it.
In Microsoft 365 tenants, creating apps and agents with Copilot Studio inside Teams is enabled by default, provisioning its own data environment on first use; admins can turn it off per user.
learn.microsoft.com↗