Inception42 and Microsoft have announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate the adoption of agentic AI across government and enterprise sectors. By integrating Inception42’s Catalyst operating system with Microsoft 365 Copilot, the partnership enables organisations to deploy sovereign, governed AI agents while ensuring data processing remains in-country. The move supports the UAE’s national initiative to automate 50% of federal operations using AI agents within two years.
This is a key step in supporting the UAE’s national agentic AI initiative, which targets 50% of federal government operations to use AI agents within two years.
The rapid rise of AI agents is creating new opportunities for organizations, but also new challenges. As enterprises and governments deploy AI across more workflows, many are grappling with fragmented deployments, inconsistent governance, and growing complexity across their technology environments. At the same time, requirements for security, compliance, and data sovereignty are becoming increasingly important. This collaboration addresses those challenges by giving access to a single ecosystem of AI agents and everyday productivity tools in a governed, sovereign operating layer at national scale.
Catalyst, Inception42’s enterprise and government agent operating system, is built to operate with sovereign infrastructure, with all data processed in-country. It can run on premise, in a sovereign cloud, or in the public cloud, and it works across an organization’s existing data sources building institutional context, an AI Brain.
Agents composed in Catalyst are served through Compass, Core42’s sovereign model and infrastructure layer and surface directly inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, while agents built inside Copilot compose natively back into Catalyst. Accelerated by Microsoft Forward Deployed Engineers, it gives governments and enterprises a shared operational framework across people, data, applications and agents. This helps them deploy AI with greater consistency, accountability and impact as they move from experimentation to production-scale adoption.
Three critical layers of enterprise AI that organizations increasingly need but often source separately now come together: sovereign infrastructure, intelligent agent orchestration and everyday user adoption – reducing complexity and giving organizations a trusted foundation for scaling AI across industries, functions and teams.
“This integration reflects how sovereignty and interoperability work together,” said Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception42. “Catalyst gives governments and enterprises a comprehensive platform to build, govern, and observe their agents. Combined with Copilot, an agent built on Catalyst works in Copilot, and an agent built in Copilot works in Catalyst, with nothing to rebuild and no separate infrastructure to stand up. Demand for agents is moving faster than any single platform can meet on its own, and this puts Inception42 and Microsoft in a position to meet that demand together.”
Amr Kamel, General Manager, Microsoft UAE,said: “Customers are looking for AI that is powerful, trusted, governed and practical to adopt. This brings together Compass, Core42’s in-country infrastructure, Catalyst’s agent orchestration and Microsoft 365 Copilot’s productivity experiences, creating a foundation for organizations to scale AI with confidence. By enabling agents to run with data processed in country and integrated into the tools people use every day, we are helping governments and enterprises accelerate innovation while maintaining control, security and compliance.”
The collaboration reflects a broader shift underway across the region, as governments and enterprises look to build AI capability on their own terms – with the infrastructure, partnerships and talent to sustain it long term.
