I’ve just recently returned from Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco, Microsoft’s flagship event for partners summarises my key takeaways as we enter a period of reflection and refocus for 2026.
It was an incredible week, capped with Data#3 celebrating our win as the Australian Partner of the Year, which is testament to the incredible work that the Data#3 team deliver for our valued customers every day.
Across the many sessions we attended, there were over 70 new product announcements, the majority AI-related one theme rang out clearly: AI is everywhere. Major announcements underscored how AI agents and copilots are transforming work, the streets of San Francisco echoed the same story. It was impossible to ignore AI’s presence billboards advertising AI solutions from the airport to downtown bus stop posters tout the latest AI innovations. Even our team’s taxi across town was a Waymo autonomous vehicle (a driverless, AI-powered ride that felt straight out of the future). In fact, Waymo’s robotaxi has become a regular part of city life in San Francisco, illustrating how AI has leapt from tech conferences into the everyday.
It’s hard to summarise all the announcements in one blog, so to see the full list of what was launched at Ignite, I encourage you to read the Ignite 2025 Book of News. I’ll highlight a few of the key ones below that I think are important based on the many conversations I’ve had with Data#3 customers in 2025.
We’ve heard loud and clear from our customers through the hundreds of Copilot projects we’ve delivered that governance and security are absolutely top of mind, as it should be. The announcement of Microsoft Agent 365 is an important step in governing AI, with the ability to govern and manage agents that are built to automate and streamline your business processes. Agent 365 debuted as a one-stop control plane to manage and secure AI agents across the enterprise. This “Active Directory for AI” helps IT discover, monitor and govern all the bots’ employees spin up, tackling the looming issue of “shadow AI”. Microsoft is also shipping ready-made agents (like a new Sales bot) to automate routine tasks.
To help govern AI use and risks, Microsoft introduced new tools for oversight. A Security Dashboard for AI (in preview) provides CISOs a unified, real-time view of all AI assets and their risk posture. It aggregates signals from Defender, Purview, and Entra to flag misconfigurations, data leaks, or rogue AI activity across the organisation. In parallel, Microsoft Purview’s suite gained AI-driven capabilities like Data Security Investigations, the first solution “born from the ground up”, with AI to help investigate data and AI usage risks using large language models. Together, these governance tools aim to ensure that you embrace AI and can maintain control over data, compliance, and security.
In one demo, the Security Dashboard for AI identified an “unregistered AI app” that an employee had connected to corporate SharePoint (a classic shadow IT scenario). From the dashboard, IT could see that the app was trying to read large volumes of data, triggering a Purview data-leak policy. The system flagged this in real time, and the admins could cut off the app’s access immediately. Without such an AI-specific view, that incident might have gone unnoticed until the damage was already done.
Another notable announcement was the welcome news that Microsoft’s AI assistant for cybersecurity, Security Copilot, is now included free for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Enterprise security teams with E5 licenses can now access Security Copilot’s AI capabilities integrated across tools like Defender, Entra (ID management), Intune, and Purview. Microsoft also expanded Security Copilot’s “agent” ecosystem – by adding 12 new built-in security agents (for threat hunting, identity protection, data risk analysis, device management, etc.) that work alongside your security analysts. There is a fantastic workshop available through our Security team that allows us to demonstrate the capabilities of Sentinel to provide the critical visibility against threats to your organisation, so please reach out to our team for more information on that.
So that’s the recap of Ignite for 2025. It was heavy on AI but included some welcome new announcements on governance and security as well. It was a fantastic event and showed the rapid progress Microsoft is making to mature and address customer concerns around the governance and security guardrails that customers are seeking to support their AI Adoption.
Looking ahead to 2026, I feel the possibilities are endless. Together with Microsoft, we’re on an exciting journey to help organisations improve productivity, enable smarter decision-making and deliver better services. Backed by decades of partnership and deep expertise across the Microsoft ecosystem, Data#3 is committed to bringing innovative solutions and services to market that empower businesses to thrive in a rapidly changing world. So watch this space.
Data#3 holds the highest level of partner accreditations across the Microsoft ecosystem. With expertise that extends from the network and the cloud, to the datacentre and workplace, you can rely on our expert team to guide and advise on the best technologies to meet the demands of the changing workplace.
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