Five Governance Questions Microsoft Says Enterprises Must Ask Before Deploying AI Agents

As AI agents built with Microsoft Foundry move into everyday business use, enterprises face pressing governance challenges around ownership, access control, and accountability. Microsoft recommends teams answer five key questions before a broad rollout: who owns the agent, who can invoke it, which actions require approval, how incidents can be investigated, and how the agent can be disabled if needed. The Foundry Control Plane provides a subscription-level inventory of deployed agents, while the Microsoft Agent 365 Registry offers a broader organization-wide view for agents built across platforms like Copilot Studio. Access governance involves two distinct checks — one controlling who can call the agent and another governing what data or systems the agent itself can reach. Enterprises are also advised to pin agents to approved versions in production, since the default behavior serves the latest version, which could introduce unreviewed changes.