As you know, deploying agents at enterprise scale is one of the key areas of my consulting work. Microsoft and Google are making it a lot easier. Microsoft shipped Agent 365 to general availability on May 1 at $15/user/month standalone, or bundled into the new Microsoft 365 E7 tier at $99/user/month. Days later at Cloud Next 2026, Google announced Agent Identity (a unique cryptographic ID for every AI agent) and Agent Registry (a central library indexing all internal agents and skills).
Agent 365 at $15/user/month sounds modest until you run the math for a 10,000-seat enterprise: $1.8M per year just for the right to manage your AI agents. The E7 bundle ($99/user/month) rolls in Copilot ($30), Agent 365 ($15), and Entra Suite ($12) on top of E5 pricing, saving roughly 15%. That discount is the same one Microsoft has used for two decades to make unbundling feel irrational.
Every AI agent gets a registered identity (Entra Agent ID at Microsoft, cryptographic certificate at Google), every action gets an audit trail through Purview and Defender, every permission gets a policy boundary. The architecture is identical to device management, extended to software agents.
I find it genuinely frustrating that we’re about to repeat the 1990s lock-in cycle with full knowledge of how it ends. This is Active Directory all over again. Whoever owns agent identity owns agent policy, owns agent data access, owns the enterprise. Microsoft is betting that Agent 365 becomes the directory service for autonomous software. Google is countering with cryptographic identity baked into infrastructure. Your governance choice is a ten-year commitment, and it will be harder to leave than your cloud provider. Microsoft knows this. So does Google.
Every company needs a Claw strategy. Do you have one?
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.