From Agent 365 to the General Ledger: Giving Every Microsoft Agent an Owner and a Budget

AI agents are becoming a workforce. A company running Microsoft 365 Copilot can have Microsoft's own agents, like Researcher and Analyst, third-party agents from vendors like HubSpot and Shopify, and agents its own people built. Microsoft gave that workforce a directory: Agent 365, a registry of the agents in your tenant.

A directory tells you who works for you. It doesn't tell you what they cost.

That's the gap Onaro Meridian closes, and Meridian now reads that directory.

What Agent 365 gives you, and what finance still needs

Agent 365 is Microsoft's control plane for agents: one inventory, with identity and governance. It answers "which agents do we have?"

Finance needs the next answers: what does each agent cost, who owns it, and whose budget does it come out of? That's harder than it sounds, because agents are paid for in four different ways:

• Seat licenses, like Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Credits, like Copilot Studio
• Vendor subscriptions, for third-party agents
• Model tokens, for the agents your teams build on Azure OpenAI, OpenAI or other providers

Meridian is the system of record that brings those together: it attributes, controls and books what AI agents spend.

How it works

1. An admin connects the tenant. In Meridian, under Settings, Microsoft Teams & Copilot, a Microsoft Global administrator or AI administrator grants consent for two read-only Microsoft Graph permissions. Nothing else.
2. Meridian checks the license up front. Agent 365's registry requires a Microsoft Agent 365 license, or Microsoft 365 E7 or G7. Meridian tells you right away whether the registry is available for your tenant, instead of failing quietly later.
3. Your agents come into Meridian, with their owners. The agents in your registry appear in Meridian's agent list. When the registry names an agent's owner and that person is a member of your Meridian organization, Meridian shows them as the owner. We tested it end to end with a licensed tenant this week.
4. Finance takes it from there. Assign each agent a department (and an owner, where the registry didn't name one), set budgets and alerts, and as its spend arrives from your connected providers, gateways, invoices or seat files, it flows into chargeback and the journal entries Meridian posts to your general ledger.
5. You stay in control. An admin can stop the import at any time from the same screen, and Meridian explains how to remove Microsoft's consent in Entra too.

Why ownership matters

Ownership is the hinge between governance and finance. Once an agent has an owner and a department, its spend has somewhere to go. Unowned AI spend is the new shadow IT: real money that nobody is accountable for. With the registry feeding Meridian, the agents in Agent 365 become lines you can budget, not just names in a directory.

What's next

Seat-licensed agents, like the Microsoft 365 Copilot agents, don't have a per-use price, so today their cost is the license itself. Next, Meridian will use Microsoft's Copilot usage reports to spread seat cost across the agents people actually use, so you can see which agents earn their licenses, and which seats sit idle.

We're also bringing Meridian into Microsoft Teams, so finance and IT leaders can ask what their AI agents cost, right where they work. The app is in Microsoft's store review now.

See it for your company

Start with an Agent Spend Assessment: connect your providers and your Microsoft tenant, and see what your AI agents cost, who owns them, and where the money goes.

Start your assessment →

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Microsoft, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Teams, Copilot and Agent 365 are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. HubSpot and Shopify are trademarks of their respective owners.