Clients trapped in the Microsoft "Copilot Prison"

I’m running into a massive bottleneck with corporate clients right now. Because they’re handling market-sensitive data, their IT compliance teams have them completely locked down into Microsoft. No external APIs, no Claude—nothing.

Ideal world would be building solutions in CC.

I’m convinced the only real solution here is building custom tools and agents natively inside their system (Azure OpenAI, Power Platform, Copilot Studio, etc.) rather than trying to pitch external pipelines they'll just reject anyway.

Has anyone actually built robust, advanced agent workflows strictly inside an MS-only corporate environment?

Curious to know how you handled the architectural constraints, and if it's worth the headache of building inside their sandbox. Let me know what you've found works.

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