Microsoft on July 8, 2026, commenced a private preview for a new ROI tracking dashboard within Microsoft Foundry, designed to measure the business value of AI agents. Simultaneously, Microsoft Forms Copilot—which uses natural language to generate surveys and quizzes—became generally available to customers worldwide with qualifying Microsoft 365 Copilot subscriptions.

What Microsoft Announced

Agent ROI Tracking in Foundry Enters Private Preview

Microsoft Foundry, the company’s integrated environment for building, monitoring, and managing AI solutions, now includes a dedicated dashboard for tracking return on investment (ROI) of autonomous agents. The feature aggregates metrics on task completion, time saved, error reduction, and cost avoidance attributable to each agent deployment. Organizations can compare agent performance against human baselines or predefined KPIs, and view trends over time.

According to a blog post by Microsoft’s AI platform team, the ROI dashboard pulls data from agents built with Foundry’s agent framework—whether they’re simple prompt-based bots or multi-step orchestrators—as long as instrumentation is enabled. Early adopters in the private preview, which is limited to select enterprise agreement and Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program members, will test integrations with Power BI for custom reporting and with Microsoft Viva Insights to correlate agent activity with employee productivity signals.

The preview is available immediately upon request; interested organizations must apply through Microsoft’s private preview nomination portal. General availability is not yet dated.

Microsoft Forms Copilot Rolls Out Worldwide

Microsoft Forms Copilot, first teased at Build 2025 and released in limited preview earlier this year, is now live for all customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. The AI assistant lets users describe a form or quiz in everyday language—“create a customer feedback survey for a new mobile app, including net promoter score, five-point satisfaction ratings, and an open-text suggestions field”—and Forms Copilot generates a ready-to-use form with appropriate question types, branching logic, and themes.

Available across the Forms web app, Microsoft Teams, and the Forms mobile experience, the Copilot can also analyze existing forms to suggest improvements, generate summary reports from response data, and translate forms into multiple languages while preserving logic. The rollout began on July 8 and will reach all geographies where Microsoft 365 Copilot is commercially available within two weeks.

Admins can manage Forms Copilot via the Microsoft 365 admin center under Copilot settings, with the ability to disable it at the tenant or user-group level.

What These Moves Mean for You

For Enterprise IT and Business Decision Makers

The Foundry ROI dashboard addresses a persistent question in boardrooms: “Are these AI agents actually paying off?” With granular metrics, IT leaders can quantify agent value, justify licensing costs, and make data-driven scaling decisions. A controlled private preview suggests Microsoft is cautious—ensuring the metrics are reliable before exposing them broadly—but also signals that agent cost accountability is becoming a product pillar.

For Forms Copilot, the worldwide availability immediately reduces the time knowledge workers spend building forms. IT teams should expect reduced help-desk tickets related to form creation, but also should review data handling, as Copilot-generated forms might collect sensitive information if users aren’t guided. Governance policies around Copilot usage in Forms (like restricting prompt types) are available in the compliance portal.

For Developers and AI Practitioners

Foundry’s ROI instrumentation likely requires developers to adopt specific telemetry SDK conventions. Preview participants will need to plan for integrating these into agent codebases. Early feedback from Microsoft’s AI engineering team indicates that the dashboard can track both deterministic and generative agent interactions, but accurate cost attribution for GPU consumption per agent session is still being refined.

Developers building custom solutions with Forms Copilot can leverage the newly available Graph API endpoints to programmatically create forms from natural language prompts, opening automation scenarios for customer onboarding, internal ticketing, or compliance checklists.

For Everyday Users and Small Businesses

Forms Copilot immediately brings an intuitive, zero-code form builder to everyone with a Copilot license—no more wrestling with branching logic or question types. Small business owners can generate client intake forms, event registrations, or employee feedback surveys in seconds. The ROI tracking in Foundry, while enterprise-focused, may trickle down eventually via Power Platform analytics, giving smaller orgs similar visibility into their chatbot and agent investments.

How We Got Here

Microsoft’s twin announcements reflect the maturation of its Copilot ecosystem, which has expanded rapidly since the launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot in late 2023. As enterprises deployed AI assistants and autonomous agents, a persistent gap was the inability to measure tangible outcomes. In early 2025, customer feedback on the Copilot Customer Connection (C3) program highlighted ROI reporting as the number-one request for agent workloads. Microsoft responded by integrating basic analytics into Copilot Studio in Q4 2025, but Foundry—launched publicly in March 2026 as a superset of Azure AI Studio and Copilot Studio—became the natural home for unified agent lifecycle analytics.

Forms Copilot’s journey was more straightforward. Microsoft introduced “Copilot in Forms” at its 2025 Build developer conference, initially in limited beta for North American enterprise customers. Throughout the second half of 2025, it expanded to more regions and added multilingual support. By July 2026, after addressing concerns around form logic accuracy and prompt security, Microsoft greenlit the worldwide release. The simultaneous timing may be coincidental, but it underscores a broader push: making AI’s utility visible (via ROI dashboards) and immediately practical (via everyday tools like Forms).

What to Do Now

  1. For Foundry ROI private preview:
    - If your organization has a Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program membership or an enterprise agreement, visit the Microsoft Foundry Preview Portal to submit a nomination. Include your agent use case and expected scale—Microsoft prioritizes manufacturing, financial services, and healthcare scenarios.
    - Prepare your development teams: review the newly published ROI telemetry documentation in Microsoft Learn (article “Instrument Agents for ROI in Foundry” dated July 8). Plan to update agent manifests with roiTracking: enabled by the end of Q3.

  2. For Forms Copilot worldwide launch:
    - Check that your users have Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. The Forms Copilot capability is automatically turned on for eligible tenants; no admin action is required to enable it.
    - To disable or scope access, navigate to Microsoft 365 admin center > Settings > Org settings > Microsoft Forms > Copilot settings. You can turn off Copilot for specific user groups or set data boundary policies.
    - Educate users: share a short guide on what Forms Copilot can and cannot do. Emphasize that it doesn’t access confidential data from other sources unless explicitly connected, and review the updated Microsoft Forms privacy documentation.
    - For developers, explore the new Create Form from Prompt Graph API endpoint (in preview) to integrate form generation into line-of-business apps.

What to Watch Next

Microsoft’s AI roadmap indicates that the Foundry ROI dashboard will gain granular cost-per-agent-run reports linked to Azure billing later this year, potentially allowing chargebacks to business units. On the Forms front, expect deeper integration with Microsoft Loop and Planner, where Copilot-generated forms can automatically feed data into collaborative workspaces and task assignments. Also keep an eye on the upcoming Microsoft Ignite conference in November 2026, where the company is likely to preview agent scorecards that combine ROI with responsible AI metrics like fairness and bias indicators.

For now, the private preview of agent ROI tracking and the global availability of Forms Copilot together signal that Microsoft is moving from “AI for experimentation” to “AI for measurable business results.”