Microsoft Frontier Copilot and AI agents, governed

Human-led, agent-operated. Governed from day one.

“Human-led, agent-operated” is how Microsoft describes the Frontier Firm. Governance decides whether it works. We put identity, data protection and security in place before Copilot and AI agents go to work across your tenant — backed by 20+ years of experience delivering Microsoft solutions to enterprises across EMEA.

Get in touch Explore Microsoft Frontier
20+ years
Experience delivering Microsoft solutions to enterprises across EMEA
15+
Professional certifications across identity, security, development and delivery
MCT
Microsoft Certified Trainer
MSc
Software Engineering, with a thesis in machine learning (2006)

Microsoft Frontier

What Microsoft means by Frontier

Microsoft uses the word for several things, and it helps to keep them apart.

The target state Frontier Firm
Microsoft’s name for organisations that are “human-led and agent-operated”: people set direction, and AI agents take on a growing share of the work. It is a description, not a certification.
The strategy Frontier Transformation
Microsoft’s term for reimagining the business with AI. It rests on what Microsoft calls Intelligence + Trust: AI grounded in your own data, and the ability to observe, govern and secure every agent.
The licence Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite
Microsoft 365 E5 plus Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Agent 365 and the Microsoft Entra Suite, in one per-user licence.
Early access Frontier program
Microsoft’s opt-in preview channel for new Copilot and agent features, switched on by your own administrator. Preview features may not be covered by the usual support commitments.

Microsoft Frontier is the name of our practice for this work: Copilot, AI agents, Microsoft Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 E7, deployed on governed identity and data. We work on the Trust half — identity, data governance and security — and we build agents with guardrails.

Core practice

Microsoft Frontier

Six services, each of which stands on its own. Together they take you from a first assessment to agents in production, under governance.

Copilot and agent readiness assessment

A focused review of what has to be true in identity, data and security before Copilot and agents scale — and in what order to fix it.

What it covers
  • Three questions we ask first: is the data connected and governed, does every agent have identity controls, and who is accountable when an agent gets it wrong
  • Identity, data protection and security posture reviewed with agents in mind
  • An inventory of the agents you already have: sanctioned, unsanctioned and ownerless
  • Licence position: what your current licences cover, and what Microsoft 365 E7, Microsoft Agent 365 or the Microsoft Entra Suite would add
  • Informed by Microsoft’s published guidance, including its Frontier Playbook; the method and the findings are ours
  • Output: findings, a prioritised roadmap and a named owner for each goal

Agent identity with Microsoft Entra Agent ID

Each agent we onboard gets its own identity, least-privilege access and an accountable sponsor.

What it covers
  • Agent identity architecture: agent identity blueprints, agent identities, naming, and the owner and sponsor model
  • Conditional Access for agents, designed for each access pattern
  • Access packages and sponsor lifecycle workflows, so access is time-bound and no agent is left without a sponsor
  • Migration of agents that still run on app registrations, service principals or user accounts
  • The joiner-mover-leaver and access-review discipline you already run for people, extended to agents
  • A plain statement of what the controls do not cover, such as agents that authenticate with API keys

Agent governance with Microsoft Agent 365

One inventory and one set of rules for the agents in your tenant — and a routine for finding the ones that are not in it yet.

What it covers
  • Microsoft Agent 365 onboarding and administrative role design
  • The agent registry as the single inventory; ownerless and unmanaged agents dealt with
  • Discovery of shadow agents across Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry
  • Lifecycle rules: who may create an agent, who approves it, when it is reviewed and when it is retired
  • Zoned governance for Copilot Studio and Power Platform, with controls that tighten as agent risk rises
  • A fallback design for tenants without Agent 365 licences, built on Microsoft Entra Agent ID with signals from Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Defender

Data readiness for Copilot and agents

Copilot and agents see what your permissions allow. We fix the permissions and the labels first.

What it covers
  • Oversharing found and fixed with Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management, SharePoint Advanced Management and site access reviews
  • Restricted Content Discovery and Restricted Access Control for sensitive sites
  • Sensitivity labels, auto-labelling and Microsoft Purview DLP for Copilot
  • Agents added to DLP and Insider Risk Management policies; retention and eDiscovery for Copilot and agent interactions
  • EU Data Boundary settings and model choices reviewed
  • Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager assessments for the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001, where licensed, as input to your own compliance work

Security for agents

Agents are a new attack surface. We bring them into the detection and response you already run.

What it covers
  • Microsoft Defender protection for AI agents: inventory, posture and threat detection, enabled and tuned
  • Real-time protection for Copilot Studio agents, set up with your Power Platform administrator
  • Agent activity in Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender XDR: Microsoft’s built-in agent detections, plus hunting queries for the risks that matter in your environment
  • Agent alerts routed to your security operations, with a runbook for disabling an agent quickly
  • Zero Trust for AI: Microsoft’s Zero Trust Assessment, including its AI pillar, turned into a prioritised plan

Agent engineering with guardrails

We build agents the way we build software: versioned, tested, identified and observable.

What it covers
  • Use-case selection first — including when not to use an agent, because a predictable process will do
  • Low-code agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio; pro-code agents with Microsoft Agent Framework on Microsoft Foundry
  • A Microsoft Entra agent identity, least-privilege scopes and tool allowlists from the first sprint
  • Integration with line-of-business systems through Microsoft Graph, APIs and MCP servers
  • Evaluation and misuse testing before production, using Microsoft’s tooling; human review where a decision needs a person
  • Agent code, tests and release gates in a CI/CD pipeline on GitHub or Azure DevOps
  • Time-boxed pilots with go or no-go criteria agreed up front, then production

Why AMG

Why identity comes first

Every agent is one more actor in your tenant. It needs its own identity, least-privilege access and a person who answers for it — the discipline identity teams already apply to people. That discipline is our specialism.

  • Identity at the core.

    Deep specialisation in identity and access management — Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Identity Manager — from architecture down to troubleshooting.

  • Machine learning since 2006.

    Our founder’s MSc thesis measured how sampling affects the accuracy of classification algorithms — naive Bayes, decision trees, support vector machines — on large datasets. The models have changed since; the habit of measuring what a model gets right has not.

  • Architect and engineer in one.

    The people who advise also design, build and fix — agents included. Certified across infrastructure, development and security.

  • Delivery discipline, and knowledge that stays.

    Years of running consulting practices and delivery teams: clear scope, time-boxed pilots with decision gates, straight reporting — then documentation, training and handover led by a Microsoft Certified Trainer.

Approach

How an engagement runs

  1. Assess

    A readiness assessment across identity, data protection, security, licensing and the agents already in your tenant. You get findings, a prioritised roadmap and a named owner for each goal.

  2. Secure the foundations

    We fix what the assessment found: oversharing and labels in Microsoft 365, Conditional Access and governance in Microsoft Entra ID, detection coverage in Microsoft Defender — in the order Copilot and agents need it.

  3. Put agents under governance

    Microsoft Entra Agent ID and Microsoft Agent 365 go in before agents multiply: an identity and a sponsor for each agent, one registry, lifecycle rules.

  4. Pilot, then production

    A time-boxed pilot with go or no-go criteria agreed in advance: a first agent or two, built with guardrails. What passes moves to production in controlled steps; what does not is stopped.

  5. Enable

    Documentation, training and handover, so your team owns the result — or ongoing support if you prefer.

Foundations

The foundations Microsoft Frontier stands on

Microsoft builds Frontier Transformation on Intelligence + Trust. Trust is identity, data governance and security — where we have worked for 20+ years, and what every Copilot and agent rollout depends on. We also deliver each of these on its own.

Microsoft Entra ID

Identity for people and for agents.

Every access decision starts with identity, whether a person or an agent is asking. Microsoft Entra Agent ID extends the same controls to agents, so the directory has to be in order first.

What it covers
  • Zero Trust and Conditional Access design
  • Passwordless and phishing-resistant sign-in: passkeys, FIDO2, Windows Hello for Business
  • Microsoft Entra ID Governance: lifecycle workflows, access reviews, entitlement management, Privileged Identity Management
  • Hybrid identity and Microsoft Identity Manager: health checks, integration and migration
  • External identities: B2B collaboration and customer sign-in with Microsoft Entra External ID

Microsoft 365

Where Copilot finds its data.

Copilot and agents work with what your tenant holds and what your permissions allow. A governed tenant is the difference between useful answers and overshared ones.

What it covers
  • Tenant assessment, architecture and governance
  • Migrations and tenant-to-tenant consolidation: Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams
  • Device management with Microsoft Intune
  • Information protection and compliance with Microsoft Purview
  • Licence optimisation across E3, E5 and E7
  • Workshops and training delivered by a Microsoft Certified Trainer

Microsoft Defender

Detection and response, for users and for agents.

The platform that protects your users now sees agent activity too. We deploy it, tune it and connect it to your operations.

What it covers
  • Microsoft Defender XDR across endpoints, identities, e-mail and cloud apps
  • Microsoft Sentinel in the Defender portal: onboarding, detections and automation
  • Microsoft Defender for Identity and privileged-access hardening
  • Microsoft Defender for Cloud: posture and workload protection for Azure
  • Security posture and Zero Trust assessments
  • Technical controls mapped to NIS2, DORA and ISO 27001

Engineering that ships

Agents are software. We build them, and the pipelines around them, with the same discipline as any other system.

What it covers

  • Software development

    .NET and C# applications, APIs, Microsoft Graph and identity integrations, PowerShell automation.

  • DevOps

    CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code and release governance on Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.

  • Application lifecycle management

    Branching and release strategy, quality gates, test automation and traceability.

  • GitHub

    GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Advanced Security, GitHub Copilot enablement, single sign-on and provisioning with Entra ID.

Experience

Experience behind the work

The firm is led by a practitioner with more than 20 years of experience selling and delivering Microsoft solutions to enterprises across EMEA.

Portrait of Łukasz Gratkowski, founder of AMG Cloud Engineering

Łukasz Gratkowski

Founder IAM Architect & Delivery Director

An experienced digital advisor and delivery director with a solid background in identity and access management, cybersecurity and software development. His work with machine learning goes back to his MSc thesis in 2006.

Subject-matter expert in Microsoft Identity Manager and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory).

Łukasz on LinkedIn
Education, languages, award
Education
MSc, Software Engineering West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, 2006
Thesis: the impact of sampling on the accuracy of classification algorithms (machine learning)
Languages
Polish native
English Cambridge C1 Advanced
Award
Microsoft Poland General Manager Award Category: WIN, 2010
Expertise and skills

Hands-on expertise

  • Microsoft Entra ID / Azure AD B2C
  • Microsoft Identity Manager
  • Active Directory
  • PowerShell
  • Azure DevOps
  • .NET / C#
  • Machine learning (classification, sampling)

Skills

  • Solution architecture
  • Software development
  • Project and delivery management
  • Team leadership
  • Consultative pre-sales

Track record

Work our founder led or delivered over his career. Clients are described, not named.

  1. 2007–2012

    Enterprise delivery

    Five years in a global software vendor’s consulting organisation: identity management, application lifecycle management and test leadership on international projects, several of them worth more than a million dollars.

    Selected projects
    • A global engineering group: a programme to standardise software development across its business units, working towards a CMMI Level 3 appraisal — a global development platform sized for more than 2,500 developers, a migration from IBM Rational, and process and source-control workshops for its teams.
    • A telecom operator in Central Europe: an identity management system with separation-of-duties rules and role attestation.
    • A global logistics company: a mission-critical identity management solution — release management and test leadership through to production.
    • A large UK bank: an automated account-transfer system — process tooling, a test framework for the integration layer and automated tests of the whole solution.
    • A national telecom operator in Scandinavia: a contact-centre application that gives agents a single view of the customer — test leadership through to user acceptance.
  2. 2012–2015

    Workshops and teaching

    Three years as a field engineer for enterprise identity deployments, delivering identity workshops and classes across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

    In detail
    • Identity workshops and classes for enterprise teams
    • Design and supportability reviews, performance tuning, troubleshooting and migrations
    • On-site training and knowledge transfer during support engagements
  3. 2015–2023

    Identity programmes

    Architecture and delivery of identity lifecycle, provisioning and governance programmes in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, some of them for tens of thousands of users — in one case more than 100,000.

    Selected projects
    • A national oil company in the Gulf: identity lifecycle for more than 50,000 employees and contractors, from onboarding to clean-up, with self-service password reset.
    • An education-sector organisation with more than 100,000 users: automated provisioning of on-premises and cloud mailboxes, federated access to Office 365 and integration with the ERP system.
    • A bank in North Africa: automated account provisioning, self-service password reset and self-service group management, in support of its ISO security requirements.
    • A telecom operator in the Baltics: automated identity lifecycle and role-based access, with a full audit trail of access requests.
    • A European Union agency: central identity and permission management for internal and external users, with auditing and reporting.
    • A global logistics company: a managed service for Active Directory, cloud identity and identity management.
  4. 2019–today

    Leadership

    Running the teams that deliver this work, in senior roles at other firms.

    In detail
    • Today: leads a department that delivers Microsoft 365 and identity and access management solutions, across professional and managed services.
    • Before that: ran a cloud infrastructure consulting practice end to end — people, service portfolio, delivery quality, scoping and proposals.

Certifications 19

Microsoft — identity, security and Microsoft 365

7
  • Microsoft Certified Identity and Access Administrator Associate
  • Microsoft Certified Security Operations Analyst Associate
  • Microsoft Certified Information Protection Administrator Associate
  • Microsoft Certified Azure Security Engineer Associate
  • Microsoft 365 Certified Security Administrator Associate
  • Microsoft 365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert
  • Microsoft Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT)

Delivery and service management

2
  • AXELOS ITIL Foundation
  • Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master I

Software engineering and infrastructure foundations 2006–2009

10
  • MCPD Enterprise Application Developer
  • MCPD Web Developer
  • MCPD Windows Developer
  • MCSD Microsoft .NET
  • MCSE Windows Server 2003
  • Microsoft Certified IT Professional Enterprise Administrator
  • Microsoft Certified IT Professional Server Administrator
  • Microsoft Certified IT Professional Database Developer
  • Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist Team Foundation Server: Configuration and Development
  • Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist BizTalk Server 2006: Custom Applications

Contact

Let’s talk about your readiness for Copilot and agents.

Tell us where you are — a Copilot rollout that stalled, agents nobody owns, an identity migration or a security review. We will come back with a clear next step.

E-mail office@amgcloudengineering.com
Phone +48 883 381 031
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