Microsoft Teams Phone Agent picked up two admin-side updates on Aug. 31: AI disclaimer customization and maximum call length are now available in Teams admin center. The doc also makes the product shape clearer by framing Phone Agent as a Copilot Studio-backed voice layer for answering questions, booking appointments, and routing calls. Source: Microsoft Learn - Planning - Overview of voice applications.
Microsoft Intune’s agent story changed materially today: the Change Review Agent and Policy Configuration Agent are now marked as no longer available in the Intune admin center as of Aug. 31, 2026. That supersedes the earlier preview posture and is a concrete retirement signal for anyone building admin workflows around Security Copilot in Intune. Sources: Change Review Agent, Policy Configuration Agent.
GitHub Agentic Workflows shipped a fresh weekly update and a new “Agent of the Day” entry on Aug. 31. The weekly post says gh-aw cut three pre-releases (v0.87.5, v0.87.8, v0.87.9) and landed workflow-gating and reliability work like on.cooldown, typed on.stop-after, Bash support for Windows runners, and authenticated private-repo plugin installs; the daily spotlight shows Issue Arborist now conservatively linking related issues and creating parent issues when clusters are strong. Sources: Weekly Update – August 31, 2026, Agent of the Day – August 31, 2026, github/gh-aw.
Microsoft Research published two August agent papers worth watching. SkillHEX tackles autonomous skill evolution with hypothesis-driven self-verification plus evidence-guided tree search, and reports better pass rates on 87 SkillsBench tasks under a five-iteration budget; MESA focuses on long-horizon agent memory by selecting and fusing a query-specific subset of five memory structures, claiming 8.5% better performance while using 41% fewer evidence tokens than the all-structure baseline. Sources: SkillHEX, Microsoft Research publication page, MESA.