Microsoft’s Althoff To Partners: Managed Services Are Your AI Superpower

‘The opportunity for partners around delivering a managed service to help customers get value out of their agents, tune their agents, secure their agents and govern and manage them is massive,’ Microsoft Commercial CEO Judson Althoff tells CRN.

**C**are to guess how many AI agents Microsoft is running inside its massive IT environment?

As the “proud owner of IT inside Microsoft,” Commercial CEO Judson Althoff didn’t want to guess; he needed to know. So last November as the company was preparing to launch its new Agent 365 observability and control plane offering to users in the Microsoft Frontier early access program, he asked his team to run the technology internally first to see what it would find.

The results, even for a company with the technical wherewithal of Microsoft, were stunning: 500,000 AI agents generating 65,000 responses per day over…