2026 will bring dramatic shifts for Microsoft 365. AI is changing everything – accelerating permissions sprawl, making configuration management essential, and transforming how organizations tackle security. Read CoreView’s expert predictions to prepare for a year where resilience, automation, and cross-org collaboration redefine what's possible.
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2026 will introduce a future marked by complex new risks and opportunities in Microsoft 365. The spread of AI and automation will escalate oversharing and misconfiguration issues, requiring continuous, real-time monitoring and remediation. Resilience will become a function of delegated AI automation, not just manual oversight, and security will evolve into a collaboration involving all users, not just IT.
As Microsoft pushes its own solutions, third-party platforms will continue to be essential for closing vital gaps and empowering enterprise-wide governance. Organizations that adopt these forward-thinking approaches will set the benchmark for well-governed, resilient digital workplaces.
In 2025, the gaps in Microsoft 365 cracked open more widely than ever before, exposing the limits of a platform expected to handle every aspect enterprise security and operations. The rapid adoption of Copilot and custom AI agents, gaps in configuration management, and an explosion of overprivileging have amplified risk at every layer.
The CoreView team noticed a critical theme: even as Microsoft responds to market demands and rolls out new tools for configuration and tenant resilience, enterprises have begun to realize that native Microsoft technology – and technology itself – are no longer enough to drive security and resilience.
AI adoption will multiply complexity and accelerate misconfiguration and oversharing risks across Microsoft 365. Copilot, Copilot Studio, and a growing ecosystem of custom AI agents are rapidly changing how permissions are granted and lost track of.
CoreView’s CTO and Co-Founder Ivan Fioravanti explains, “When you use AI, everything seems easy. You start to do a lot of things… delegate, delegate, delegate, but at the end you see something not working properly. You need boundaries and checks.”
As AI is increasingly authorized to perform admin and user tasks, permission sprawl will accelerate. One misplaced permission or forgotten sharing link can exponentially multiply risk, especially when AI agents inherit admin-level powers. Enterprises must prepare for a reality where configuration drift and oversharing become everyday operational hazards.
CoreView’s Senior Director of Sales Engineering, Simon Hughes adds, “AI agents act outside human review, operating with delegated or nonhuman identities… Rapid proliferation [is] super difficult to stay on top of.”
Organizations will demand and require continuous, real-time visibility into permissions and sharing, paired with automated remediation. AI will be both the source and solution to new governance challenges, forcing IT and security teams to rethink their monitoring strategies.
Configuration backup, drift detection, and automated remediation are, as Simon Hughes states, “transitioning from advanced options to baseline requirements. Without automation, visibility and rapid restore, continuity and security goals are undermined”.
In 2026, Microsoft will push its own solutions, but as seen in 2025, critical gaps will remain for all but the simplest environments. Ivan Fioravanti applauds Microsoft’s acknowledgment of the gaps in their native abilities and the introduction of native tools, but explains that third-party tools like CoreView have been in the game with continuous config monitoring, configuration management and disaster recovery solutions at the tenant level for years.
Incidents, such as accidental lockouts, cyberattacks, lost or corrupted configurations, have taught organizations costly lessons. Backing up data alone is insufficient; enterprises without configuration backup and real-time monitoring will face extended downtime and greater risk.
In 2026, continuous configuration monitoring, backup, drift detection, and rapid rollback will be table stakes – expected, budgeted, and closely scrutinized as part of compliance and business continuity. Third-party platforms like CoreView will remain essential for completeness and usability.
AI will evolve from a productivity booster to an operational backbone for resilience. Rather than broad automation, AI will be delegated to handle precise, high-value tasks, such as automated health checks, playbooks, drift remediation, within tightly governed frameworks.
Both Simon Hughes and Ivan Fioravanti concur that AI will enable a picot from broad, sometimes risky AI use to delegated, controlled automation, potentially even helping to reduce risk and complexity in Microsoft 365. Enterprises will assign AI workflows only what can be tightly checked and audited, such as automatic alerting and fix routines for critical settings, ensuring that resilience does not sacrifice control.
Expect AI-driven automation for tenant management, with delegated permissions, robust identity validation, and continuous oversight. Automation will not be all-or-nothing: it will be precise, surgical, and always monitored by a human or a layered approval engine. CoreView predicts this “autopilot” layer will become best practice for M365 resilience.
Security is now a collaborative game. Asset reviews, permission checks, and oversharing prevention will be democratized and user-friendly, ensuring every employee becomes more invested in the organization’s digital safety.
Ivan Fioravanti illustrates this collaboration, “Security is a collaboration game… take something like oversharing of items… maybe I share a folder, and I forget about it. I created a security risk, and if no one tells me to, I will never check this again. Asset review will involve end users, not just IT.”
Security posture and tenant hygiene will be managed by workflows involving both administrators and end-users, facilitated by AI and automated prompts. We may see a future in which every employee will receive asset review tasks and real-time feedback, with AI guiding them to remediate risks.
These four predictions are the direction we have seen Microsoft 365 trends moving, but there are several other expected trends in 2026 as well:
It’s time for least privilege and Zero Trust principles to get real in practice. Compliance frameworks and security teams will require both enforcement and evidence – especially for non-human actors (AI agents).
CoreView’s Chief Revenue Officer, Mark Cravotta, explains, “It's very important that a company can demonstrate that it has a plan for business continuity. That it has tested the business continuity plan at least annually and is in compliance. This includes backing up critical data, as well as Microsoft tenant configurations, which are essential components of the critical infrastructure requirements. Many companies are unaware that their Microsoft tenant isn’t automatically backed up by Microsoft or their data backup provider. It is just a matter of time before compliance auditors require proof of a tenant backup from all organizations to satisfy key business continuity requirements.”
Microsoft will continue its heavy investments in AI, which will unlock productivity gains but open the door at the same time to big risks. Without widespread automated checks and monitoring, new attack surfaces and potential outages await.
Historically, organizations have relied on Microsoft’s shared responsibility model, assuming that Microsoft would back their data and configurations up for them. They are slowly waking up to the reality that shared responsibility falls more heavily on them than on Microsoft, which means prevention and preparation are critical, for example, taking responsibility for backing up one’s own Microsoft tenant configurations.
Mark Cravotta shares, “When we think about the idea of tenant resilience and the ability to prevent, withstand and recover from cybersecurity incidents, prevention is all about heading off the risks before they become issues and taking steps to reduce the number of vulnerabilities and limit the blast radius in the event of an attack. You can prepare for those things. If you know, for example, that you have taken care of least privilege and someone with limited access rights gets breached, the hacker also has limited rights. You cannot stop every attack – but you can proactively try to limit the damage they can do.” And one key realization for organizations is that they cannot rely on native Microsoft solutions alone to help them prepare.
2026 is likely to be a turning point, where AI uniquely defines both risk and opportunity in Microsoft 365. Configuration management and resilience will be built on continuous, delegated automation, not fragile manual oversight. Security, asset management, and posture monitoring will become organization-wide priorities, not IT-only chores.
Those who invest in automation, cross-functional collaboration, and deep visibility, leveraging advanced solutions like CoreView, will not just keep up, but set new industry standards for resilience and security.
Are you ready for the future of Microsoft 365 management? Reach out to CoreView to see how next-generation tools can empower your team and safeguard your business.
