Microsoft has built the largest enterprise AI agent ecosystem, and is now extending its lead with powerful new capabilities that position the company ahead in one of enterprise tech’s most exciting segments.

The company announced Tuesday evening two significant additions to its Copilot Studio platform: deep reasoning capabilities that enable agents to tackle complex problems through careful, methodical thinking, and agent flows that combine AI flexibility with deterministic business process automation. Microsoft also unveiled two specialized deep reasoning agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot: Researcher and Analyst.

“We have customers with thousands of agents already,” Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Business and Industry Copilot Charles Lamanna, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview on Monday. “You start to have this kind of agentic workforce where no matter what the job is, you probably have an agent that can help you get it done faster.”

Microsoft’s distinctive Analyst agent

While the Researcher agent mirrors capabilities from competitors like OpenAI’s Deep Research and Google’s Deep Research, Microsoft’s Analyst agent represents a more differentiated offering. Designed to function like a personal data scientist, the Analyst agent can process diverse data sources, including Excel files, CSVs, and embedded tables in documents, generating insights through code execution and visualization.

“This is no...