One IT department expected 50 agents in their tenant. They found over 500. Welcome to agent sprawl — the SharePoint site sprawl story, just faster, more autonomous, and with a billing model nobody fully understands yet.
In this episode, Christian Buckley and Ragnar Heil sit down with Timothy Boettcher, SVP Go-to-Market & Global Product Marketing at AvePoint and fellow Microsoft MVP, to talk about what governance actually looks like when agents start creating other agents.
🔍 WHAT WE COVER
▪️ Why "agents" are the next governance frontier — and why this is different from Power Apps and InfoPath▪️ The 500-agents-in-one-tenant moment: how shadow agents happen and how to find them▪️ Agent 365 vs. AvePoint Agent Pulse: what each one actually shows you▪️ Why Microsoft's official inventory only reads the default Power Platform environment — and what that means for real customers▪️ Multi-tenant, multi-cloud agent discovery (yes, including Google Vertex)▪️ Purview DSPM for AI: where it shines and where label saturation breaks the model▪️ The E7 suite at $50/user/month: who actually saves money and who doesn't▪️ Building a Quality Gate: why one-click agent approval is a governance disaster▪️ Agent classification — not just data classification▪️ Operationalizing governance as a team sport (with AvePoint MyHub inside Teams)▪️ Lifecycle management: archive, back up, or delete — why this is where ISVs still beat the platform
⏱️ CHAPTERS
00:00 Welcome back — joyless again (sorry, Joy)01:30 Meet Timothy Boettcher: from Nintex to AvePoint Singapore to DC03:30 From chatting to autonomous agents: the new management challenge06:00 When agents meet other agents — Tinder for bots08:30 Are customers approaching agents like the Power Platform CoE?10:30 The turning point: customers asking for governance instead of being preached to12:30 Sprawl, cost, DLP, insider risk: what hurts most15:00 Why Microsoft's Agent 365 inventory only reads the default environment16:30 AvePoint Agent Pulse: multi-tenant, multi-cloud, published + unpublished19:30 Live demo walkthrough — inventory, activity, inactive agents22:00 DSPM scoring, label saturation, and the realistic governance stack23:00 Oversharing, configuration drift, and link expiration25:00 Lifecycle management for agents — the SharePoint playbook applied27:00 MyHub in Teams: democratizing governance to citizen developers29:00 The Quality Gate: why one-click approval needs a supervisory board31:30 The E7 reality check — $50/user/month and what customers actually want33:30 ISVs vs. Microsoft: the cycle of innovation and absorption36:30 Real life is messy — multi-tenant, M&A, government scenarios39:00 Wrap-up
👤 GUEST
Timothy BoettcherSVP Go-to-Market Strategy & Global Product Marketing, AvePointMicrosoft MVP | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothyboettcher/
🎙️ HOSTS
Christian Buckley — Microsoft RD & MVP, CollabTalk https://buckleyplanet.comRagnar Heil — Microsoft MVP, BDM at HanseVision (Bechtle Group) | https://ragnarheil.de
