Microsoft Agent Store: What the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Store Carries and Who Can Publish

Microsoft defines it plainly in its own documentation: "Agent Store is the central hub in Microsoft 365 Copilot where you can easily discover and install agents. By bringing together agents from Microsoft, trusted partners, and your own organization, Agent Store connects your team to a curated ecosystem of agents."

Two words in that sentence do a lot of work. Central means it is one surface reached from many places: Microsoft says the Agent Store is "accessible across Microsoft 365 apps including Teams, Outlook Word, Excel, and PowerPoint." Curated means somebody decided what is in it, and that somebody is your IT administrator, not Microsoft and not you.

The store launched in May 2025 with, in Microsoft's words, "over 70 agents and a growing catalog." That is a useful number to hold onto, because it sets expectations correctly. This is a governed enterprise catalog in the low hundreds, not a consumer app store with a million listings.

What you see on an agent listing

When an admin opens an agent in the Microsoft 365 admin center, the detail pane splits into tabs that are worth knowing about, because they are the actual evaluation criteria Microsoft expects you to use:

• Overview shows Publisher, Channel and Last updated.
• Users controls assignment: Just me, Entire organization, or Specific users and groups.
• Data and tools lists Capabilities, Knowledge and Actions, which together tell you what the agent can reach and do.
• Security and compliance shows agent risks and protections.
• Certification shows certification or publisher attestation information.
• Activity shows usage data once the agent is deployed.

The Certification tab is the one buyers skip and should not. Microsoft distinguishes between an agent that has been certified and one that merely carries a publisher attestation, which is the vendor telling you about itself.

Microsoft documents four routes, and they suit different people. Only the first requires no development work at all.

The admin gate is not optional

Every one of those four routes ends at the same checkpoint. Microsoft states it directly: "The agent isn't visible to users until an Admin approves the request." A maker who publishes from Copilot Studio has not shipped anything. The agent lands in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Agents, All agents, Requests, where an admin either selects Publish or selects Reject. If it is rejected, Copilot Studio notifies the maker to change it and resubmit.

Approved agents then sort into collections. Agents your own makers built appear under Built by your org. Agents integrated through the Agent 365 SDK appear in the Agents for your team collection.

What an admin needs first

Microsoft lists the prerequisites for running an Agent Store at all: a Microsoft 365 Copilot license assigned to your organization, access to the Microsoft 365 admin center with Global Admin or Teams Admin permissions, access to Copilot Studio if you plan to publish agents built there, and an Azure subscription with developer access if you plan to publish agents your organization built.

This is the part almost nobody checks before building, and it is the single most expensive thing to get wrong. Microsoft publishes a distribution matrix per build path, and the answers are not consistent. Two of the friendliest ways to build a Copilot agent are dead ends for commercial distribution.

Read that table before you pick a tool, not after. If your plan is to sell an agent to other companies, the in-context Agent Builder and a declarative Copilot Studio agent will both build something perfectly good that can never leave your tenant. Microsoft is explicit that standalone connector submission to the connectors gallery is not available at all, and that only connectors packaged as apps for Microsoft 365 can be submitted by verified publishers.

What the marketplace route involves

Selling means going through the Microsoft 365 and Copilot program in Partner Center, under the offer type "Apps and agents for Microsoft 365 and Copilot." Before submitting, an agent has to satisfy the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace certification policies, the Microsoft 365 store validation guidelines for agents, and Responsible AI validation checks, with Microsoft 365 App Compliance Program certification as an optional extra. Responsible AI validation runs on declarative agents during manifest validation, including when you sideload.

Once approved, the agent sits in the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace waiting for IT enablement. It appears in the Apps store across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and in the Agent Store within Microsoft 365 Copilot, but only after an administrator turns it on.

No, and the distinction matters for budgeting. The Agent Store is inside Microsoft 365 Copilot and is scoped to your tenant. The Microsoft Marketplace is the public commercial storefront that Microsoft created on September 25, 2025 by merging Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace into a single catalog. It launched a dedicated AI Apps and Agents category with more than 3,000 AI-powered solutions and, by Microsoft's account, reaches over six million monthly visitors. Channel partners including Arrow, Crayon, Ingram Micro, Pax8 and TD SYNNEX embedded it into their own ecosystems, and it opened in the United States first with a global rollout following.

If you are a buyer, that means vendor evaluation happens on the Marketplace and deployment happens through the Agent Store. If you are a vendor, it means the Marketplace is where the transaction lives and the Agent Store is a downstream surface you reach only through it. Two different questions, two different places, one confusingly similar name.

And the Apps store is a third thing

Microsoft also refers to an Apps store that spans Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. A published ISV agent shows up in both the Apps store and the Agent Store. That is why the query "microsoft agent app store" returns a mixture of results: two real Microsoft surfaces genuinely overlap there.

Not in the sense most searchers mean, at least not yet in Microsoft's own developer documentation. What Microsoft does describe for Windows is a platform rather than a storefront. Its agentic developer documentation covers building and running agents locally on Windows with "local execution and containment," giving each agent "distinct local agent identities and Microsoft Entra Agent ID integration where supported," and applying "identity, isolation, containment, governance, and policy based controls."

The isolation model is the interesting part for security teams. Microsoft describes an Execution Containers SDK that gives developers "a consistent way to apply containment across process isolation, session isolation, and future hardware backed options," and says organizations can apply guardrails such as filesystem rules and local access controls through Microsoft Intune and Agent 365 to define what an agent can access and do before it runs.

Agent distribution on Windows was part of the Build 2026 announcements and coverage has described a catalog of Windows agents, but Microsoft's developer documentation as of August 2026 describes governance through Intune and Agent 365 rather than a separate consumer-style Windows agent store. If you are planning around one, treat it as a roadmap item and confirm with your account team before you build against it.

Browsing is free. Running is not. There are three billing patterns and most tenants hit more than one.

The credit rate varies by what the agent does rather than how many people use it, so headcount is a poor predictor of the bill. If you are sizing a Copilot Studio deployment, the full rate card and the enforcement thresholds are worth reading before you commit: see our breakdown of Copilot Studio pricing and how Copilot Credits actually meter.

Partly, and the gap is narrowing. Microsoft has been rolling agentic Copilot capabilities into the United States government clouds progressively rather than all at once. Researcher and Analyst, Agent Builder and Copilot Studio are now available across GCC, GCC High and the Defense cloud environments, and publishing Copilot Studio agents to Teams and Microsoft 365 became available in GCC.

The practical limit reported for GCC High is narrower: support currently covers declarative agents created using Agent Builder and published through admin controls, rather than the full range of agent types available in commercial tenants. For a defense contractor or a federal agency, that is a real constraint on which vendors you can even evaluate, and it is worth confirming against the current service description rather than a blog post, because this area has changed several times in 2026.

The Agent Store is a good fit when your work already lives in Microsoft 365, you have Copilot licenses, and you have an admin willing to run an approval process. Three situations where it is a poor fit:

1. You do not have Microsoft 365 Copilot. A Copilot license assigned to your organization is listed as a prerequisite. Without it there is no Agent Store to browse, whatever else you are paying Microsoft.
2. You need an agent this week. Between the maker build, the admin queue and the pilot, the fastest path to a working custom agent is measured in weeks. Buying a finished agent is measured in minutes.
3. The work is not Microsoft-shaped. Agent Store agents reason over what Microsoft Graph can reach. Document extraction, vertical workflows and anything with a specialist data model usually needs a purpose-built tool rather than a Copilot agent pointed at a SharePoint library.

Those constraints are exactly why an open catalog exists alongside the vendor ones. On Agentmarketplace you browse ready-made agents by category, see the integrations and permissions each one needs before you commit, and deploy without a tenant license or an approval queue. For the wider landscape of vendor catalogs and how they compare, see AI agent marketplaces, and for the Microsoft stack specifically, AI agents for Microsoft 365 covers the licensing routes and what Agent 365 governs.