Microsoft has merged its Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource into a single new Microsoft Marketplace, where enterprises can try out and deploy cloud and AI apps and agents to help enhance their customer experience.
The Marketplace offers a catalog of tens of thousands of applications across industries, in categories ranging from data and analytics to productivity and collaboration.
With the release, a new AI Apps and Agents category makes more than 3,000 AI apps and agents available directly on Marketplace and in Microsoft products, including Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Users can quickly deploy them within their Microsoft environment through industry standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP).
By tapping into industry-specific solutions, from financial services to healthcare, they can tailor improvements to what their customers need and want.
The vast range of tools allows businesses to augment every touchpoint of the customer journey. They can automate repetitive tasks, allowing employees to focus on high-value, customer-facing work and personalize customer interactions based on detailed insights and recommendations.
They can also support real-time decision-making, resulting in faster issue resolution and improved customer satisfaction.
For example, AI-powered agents integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot or apps in Microsoft Teams can streamline customer support workflows, so that companies can deliver more responsive and context-aware interactions.
Integrating AI solutions into everyday Microsoft tools allows leaders to empower their customer service teams without needing to adopt entirely new systems.
This streamlining is designed to simplify how enterprises find, try, buy, and deploy cloud and AI solutions. It also helps them innovate faster and start seeing results sooner.
For organizations focused on improving CX, that speed matters. Whether it’s rolling out AI-powered customer service agents or industry-specific analytics tools, the Marketplace makes it easy to set up and scale without the usual hassle.
Customer experience isn’t just a marketing or support function, it’s an enterprise-wide priority. As an extension of the Microsoft Cloud, the Marketplace brings together solutions integrated with Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Microsoft Security and more.
In doing so, it ensures systems are connected, secure, and ready to scale so that customer-facing tools are reliable and compliant from the start and IT leaders can provision new tools while maintaining governance and compliance.
Writing in a Microsoft blog post, Alysa Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer of Commercial Cloud and AI at Microsoft, explained how the new Marketplace can help deliver “both innovation and governance.
When you acquire a Copilot agent or an app running on Azure from Microsoft Marketplace, it’s provisioned and distributed to team members aligned to your security and governance standards.
This is key, given the growing risk to enterprise security from deploying third-party AI tools.
The aim is to empower customers to become “Frontier Firms,” as Taylor explained:
“These organizations blend human ambition with AI-powered technology to reshape how innovation is scaled, work is orchestrated and value is created.
“They’re accelerating AI transformation to enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, reshape business processes and unlock creativity and innovation.”
Microsoft cites Siemens Digital Industries Software as an example: The industrial digitalization firm has used the Marketplace to increase its efficiency, which translates directly to faster implementation of customer-facing technologies and an increase in customer adoption.
In speaking about the company’s experience, Jeff Zobrist, VP of Global Partner Ecosystem and Go To Market at Siemens, detailed how Microsoft Marketplace had helped reduce configuration time of AI apps from nearly 20 minutes to just 1 minute per instance.
“That efficiency boost has translated into increased productivity and lower operating costs. Marketplace is a strategic channel for Siemens, where we’ve seen an 8X increase in customer adoption. It’s a powerful platform for scaling both sides of our business,” he said.
The Microsoft Marketplace is available today in the US and coming soon to customers worldwide, according to Taylor.
Products listed on the Marketplace are available via integrations with Microsoft’s channel partners, allowing businesses to buy them from cloud service providers (CSPs) or procurement partners.
Microsoft is also making it easier for software companies and partners to work together through the Marketplace. It has added tools like multiparty private offers and CSP integration, so software developers and resellers can work together to build more complete solutions for customers.
Partners like Arrow, Crayon, Ingram Micro, Pax8, and TD SYNNEX are plugging Microsoft Marketplace into their own marketplaces, creating more ways for customers to find and buy the tools they need.
On top of that, there’s a new feature currently in preview, resale enabled offers, which lets software companies give their trusted partners the green light to sell on their behalf through private offers, opening up new ways to reach customers and grow faster.
