Microsoft Unveils Autonomous AI Agents and Copilot Studio for Business Automation

Microsoft officially unveils tools to create AI employees that work for humans

Microsoft has announced its releasing a suit of autonomous AI agents that will serve people as employees and carry out tasks as requested. Microsoft has taken to its blog to announce the release of a suite of autonomous artificial intelligence agents that will serve businesses as virtual employees. Redmond states in its blog post that it's announcing new capabilities that will enable customers to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio, along with ten new autonomous agents in Dynamic 365. Microsoft writes that agents should be thought of as the "new apps for an AI-powered world" and that it believes one day, every organization will have a "constellation of agents" that will range from simply prompt and response bots to bots that are completely autonomous. Copilot will be how customers interact with these agents, and their capabilities will range from sales, supplier communications, customer intent, and customer knowledge management agents. Microsoft states in its blog post that its AI agents will be able to increase the productivity of a business and is an example of how artificial intelligence can increase the output generated by a worker per hour. As for custom agents, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said that Copilot Studio is built as a "no-code way for you to be able to build agents," which means users won't need any prior programming knowledge to create a custom agent successfully.

Microsoft Debuting AI-Powered Employees for Companies

Microsoft is releasing a suite of autonomous AI models -- or "agents" -- that can serve as virtual employees for its customers. Not only that, the company is also giving users the ability to create autonomous agents of their own using its Copilot Studio. These can be tailored as needed, capable of working on your behalf, Microsoft claims, or assisting in your workflow. The products, which were first announced in May, represent Microsoft planting a flag in the world of AI agents, which are supposed to be more self-sufficient than conventional models and are designed to work, hypothetically, without human intervention. "Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. "Every organization will have a constellation of agents -- ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous." Microsoft views AI agents as a way of supercharging you -- or your company's -- productivity. The ten ready-made versions it will be releasing via Dynamics 365, Microsoft's suite of business app, can purportedly perform roles such as identifying sales opportunities for a human sales lead or helping customer service teams. If none of these are to your liking, you can always fire up Copilot -- which requires no real coding expertise -- and design an agent of your own. "These tools are fundamentally changing outsourcing, increasing value and reducing waste," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a London event where the products were revealed, per The Guardian. (The "reducing waste" claim is pretty rich, since AI's horrendous carbon footprint and water usage are undeniable at this point.) So far, Microsoft says that several companies are already putting its AI agents to use, including multinational consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which claims a pilot AI agent it designed could speed up lead time by 90 percent and reduce administrative work by 30 percent -- the key word there being "could." "I think it's much more of an enabler and an empowerment tool than anything else," Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's corporate vice president, told the Guardian, claiming that the agents would eliminate the "mundane, monotonous" aspects of a job. How these AI agents will perform in practice is likely to be a lot jankier, since there's no AI model out there that isn't prone to hallucination and producing errors, often unpredictably. Anthropic, which just announced AI agent capabilities of its own, admitted that its model still frequently failed to complete relatively simple tasks, like booking and changing flights. Perhaps the AI agents could take the drudgery out of certain jobs, only to replace them with the tedious work of correcting their mistakes. That is, if they aren't eventually used to replace people.

Microsoft will let you create your own AI agents to tackle the toughest work tasks

Microsoft has announced another significant expansion of its AI capabilities with the introduction of autonomous agents designed to integrate more tightly into business operations. Available in public preview, the agents are designed to let organizations use AI-powered automation to complete a variety of workloads, and can be customized from the company's updated Copilot Studio platform. Microsoft says that its agents can operate on behalf of employees to automate tasks, provide insights and streamline operations, with their uses being most anticipated in challenging industries like retail, finance and legal services. Key to the success of Microsoft's digital agents will be its upgraded Copilot Studio, which promises to combine personal, business and analytical data to help businesses build agents with greater control and transparency. The enhanced Studio allows developers to tailor their agents according to different paths. By displaying underlying logic, such as key details, steps and systems involved, developers will have a deeper insight into an agent's reasoning and context, helping them to tweak outputs and iron out bugs. In light of the demand for maximum transparency surrounding AI tools, Microsoft has also added a new 'Activity' tab for workers to identify progress, blocks and trends in a complete log of past runs. Announced at its recent Microsoft AI Tour event in London, the news was also accompanied by the release of 10 new prebuilt agents within Dynamics 365 to help sales, service, finance and supply chain teams. These agents will use some of the latest models, including the OpenAI o1 series, to handle complex tasks with little to no human intervention. Acknowledging that artificial intelligence requires a specific and advanced skillset, Microsoft declared any company can become an AI-first company with agents helping plug the gaps where companies are struggling with ongoing talent shortages to help them remain unique - a competitive advantage that they should not lose. It also added that security remains a priority, with robust data protection measures and governance tools in place.

Microsoft unveils AI agents that resemble virtual employees

In a nutshell: Microsoft is developing an enterprise-level Copilot tool that enables companies to build custom AI applications. Clients can create chatbots to interface with customers or AI "agents" that automate internal tasks. The Redmond firm started a closed beta earlier this year, and a public testing phase will begin next month. Microsoft Copilot Studio, a toolchain enabling companies to develop custom AI assistants, enters public preview in November. The assistants, which Microsoft calls "agents," can fulfill various administrative roles normally performed by employees. The concept of "virtual employees" could inflame one of the primary concerns regarding generative AI: that it might displace human workers. However, Microsoft stresses that Copilot agents simply automate tedious tasks, freeing employees to focus on higher-level responsibilities. For example, a company could build a chatbot that answers customer questions by referencing information from its website or internal company data. Another agent could automatically generate and resolve IT support tickets by understanding natural language queries and remembering prior customer cases. Upon receiving emails, a custom agent could generate proper responses based on context, information about the sender, and knowledge of a company's standard operating procedures. Clients could also automate job training with an agent that analyzes HR data, chats with new hires, makes reservations, generates meeting schedules, and learns from prior interactions. Copilot Studio uses a low-code environment, allowing companies to build assistants through a graphical user interface with little programming knowledge. Microsoft also offers pre-built agents for clients to build on. The company's Dynamics 365 service is gaining 10 new agents that clients can use to automate various roles. These include an AI sales qualification agent that can handle customer outreach and organize opportunities, a supplier communications agent that can optimize supply chains and resolve related issues, and a customer intent agent, which could assist human customer service employees by learning how to resolve issues and automatically generating knowledge base articles. Microsoft highlighted four companies that have deployed Copilot agents in various sectors. Thomson Reuters found that an AI could halve the time required to complete certain legal due diligence tasks. McKinsey & Company discovered that an agent could decrease client onboarding lead times by 90 percent and related administrative work by 30 percent. The UK's top pet care business, Pets at Home, could save millions with a profit protection AI that automatically assembles cases for human employees to review. Law firm Clifford Chance has also integrated a Microsoft Copilot agent. Microsoft hasn't provided a timeline for a full public release of Copilot Studio.

Microsoft Launching Autonomous AI Agents in Copilot Studio Next Month

Microsoft envisions AI agents taking on responsibilities across the workplace more than ever before. It's releasing 10 fine-tuned agents as well as the ability to create your own. Microsoft will make autonomous AI agents available next month for Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 users, according to a post published Monday. This means those with Copilot Studio -- Microsoft's platform that lets you create your own custom Copilot -- can cook up their own autonomous agents that can complete tasks or provide information. Microsoft's business platform Dynamics 365 will also get 10 different pre-made autonomous agent options to choose from to deploy across a business. The 10 agents include a "Sales Qualification Agent," a "Supplier Communications Agent," a "Customer Intent Agent," and a "Customer Knowledge Management Agent." The latter two agents are designed to work with customer service reps and provide links to existing help articles. Microsoft Copilot Studio costs $200 a month for 25,000 monthly messages, but users can create their own custom AI agents across multiple channels at this rate. Microsoft 365 Copilot with AI agent creation costs $30 a month, but requires an annual commitment. Copilot has already been deployed at other companies -- and doing work employees could otherwise complete. Microsoft says this is a huge win for companies and "empowers" staff. "Honeywell equates productivity gains to adding 187 full-time employees," Microsoft said of the firm's Copilot use -- a statement that suggests using AI could save companies money by having fewer staff. If you give Copilot access to your internal company accounts and data, the Copilot autonomous agents can assist with everything from the "IT help desk to employee onboarding and act as a personal concierge for sales and service." While adding AI agents to corporate IT, HR, and administrative departments could mean existing staff could do their jobs faster, it could also mean companies may no longer see the need for as many employees and result in job losses when fewer get more done. AI models can also hallucinate, resulting in made-up or incorrect answers -- a problem Microsoft is trying to use more AI to solve. Using AI to complete cumbersome tasks at work may be great for some, but AI more broadly has already led to job losses and may continue to do so. A Goldman Sachs report from last year predicted that AI could elevate global GDP by 7 percent -- but 300 million people may lose their jobs within the next 10 years as a result.

Microsoft will launch its AI agents very soon: this is everything they can do - Softonic

Subscribe to the Softonic newsletter and get the latest in tech, gaming, entertainment and deals right in your inbox. These AI agents function as virtual workers that can perform various tasks without supervision, representing an evolution in AI based on language models, providing a more integrated experience. In addition to customization capabilities, Microsoft also announced the launch of 10 new autonomous agents in its Dynamics 365 suite, aimed at relevant areas such as sales, services, finance, and supply chain. Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft, offered a demonstration in which an AI agent developed by the consulting firm McKinsey analyzed an email, checked its history, related it to standard terms, and found the right person to manage the response. "It may seem like magic," said Spataro, emphasizing that the interesting part is that the agent was created with human language and not through programming languages. According to him, McKinsey managed to reduce delivery times by up to 90% thanks to this technology. However, Microsoft is not alone in this market. Salesforce recently launched its Agentforce platform, which allows companies to develop their own AI agents. In a statement to CNBC, Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce for the UK and Ireland, criticized Microsoft's 'copilots' for 'not being connected or rooted in the context of customer data,' and pointed out that, in the business environment, agents are needed that are capable of acting autonomously, beyond the role of mere assistants.

Microsoft rolls out virtual employee AI agents for enterprises

Microsoft is launching Copilot Studio, a tool that allows companies to create custom AI assistants to automate a wide range of tasks. The tool will enter a public preview in November, following a closed beta that started earlier this year. With Copilot Studio, businesses can build AI-driven agents to streamline internal operations and improve customer interactions. Copilot Studio offers companies the ability to create AI "agents" that serve as virtual employees, handling routine administrative tasks typically performed by people. The agents can be used for several functions, such as answering customer queries, managing IT support tickets, and automating responses to emails. Microsoft's complicated Copilots explained in detail These assistants are highly customizable and can integrate with company data to provide accurate and contextually aware responses. For example, companies could create a chatbot to respond to customer inquiries using information pulled from their website or internal databases. Alternatively, they might build an agent to handle IT support by understanding natural language queries and resolving issues based on prior cases. Another potential use case is automating onboarding for new hires, where an agent could assist with HR-related tasks, schedule meetings, and offer personalized training. The system is designed for ease of use, with a low-code environment that allows companies to build custom assistants through a graphical user interface. This means that businesses can develop powerful AI tools without needing extensive programming skills. Microsoft also offers a set of pre-built agents that clients can customize to fit their specific needs. Many are concerned that tools like this could lead to job displacement, especially as these virtual assistants take on tasks traditionally done by employees. Microsoft, however, emphasizes that these agents are designed to handle repetitive, mundane work, freeing up human workers to focus on more strategic and creative responsibilities. By automating routine functions, the goal is to enhance productivity without replacing the need for human judgment and decision-making. Microsoft sees these tools as a way to complement human workers rather than replace them. Several companies have already started testing Copilot agents in their operations, with promising results. Thomson Reuters used an AI assistant to reduce the time needed for legal due diligence, while McKinsey & Company implemented an agent to cut client onboarding lead times by 90%. The UK's leading pet care company, Pets at Home, reported that a profit protection AI built through Copilot Studio could save the business millions by automatically assembling cases for human review. Other early adopters include the law firm Clifford Chance, which has integrated Copilot agents into its workflows to improve efficiency in document handling and administrative processes. These examples demonstrate the potential of AI agents to drive significant cost savings and operational improvements across industries. Microsoft is also integrating Copilot agents into its Dynamics 365 service, with ten new AI agents designed to automate various business functions. These include a sales qualification agent that can handle customer outreach and manage opportunities, and a supplier communications agent that optimizes supply chains and resolves related issues. These pre-built agents are intended to offer clients a foundation that they can further customize to suit their unique needs. Despite these early successes, some skepticism remains. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently expressed doubts about Microsoft's Copilot, suggesting that it has not lived up to expectations in terms of accuracy and responsiveness.

Microsoft's new AI agents will soon answer client questions

Microsoft users will be able to build artificial intelligence agents starting next month that can onboard employees or answer help desk questions. Microsoft customers will soon be able to build their own artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can work on tasks like onboarding new workers or answering help desk questions. Microsoft announced in a blog post on Monday that it is launching an "autonomous agent" feature in Copilot, their AI software, in the next month. Users can build their own AIs in Copilot or use 10 pre-made models in Dynamics 365, the package of customer relationship apps from Microsoft. The Dynamics 365 agents can either help prioritise the most valuable sales opportunities, optimise their supply chain management, or take over customer services. The agents have been around in private preview since May, but next month they'll be available publicly so more companies can build their own AIs. Who is using these AI agents? Some of the early adopters of this new feature include consulting giant McKinsey & Company, law firm Clifford Chance, and media news service Thomson Reuters. The US company said the new AI agents are already helping their company scale, with one sales team closing 20 per cent more deals and achieving a 9.4 per cent revenue jump per seller. In a post from May, Microsoft explains that the AI agents use a mix of asynchronous learning, memory, context and feedback to be able to do this work for Microsoft clients. For example, the AI will remember basic information about the client, like name, policy number and address to offer "long-running, contextual and deeply personalised" customer care conversations, the company wrote. Charles Lamanna, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, told the Guardian that these agents would only do the mundane parts of people's jobs, not replace them. The arrival of AI tools like agents, he continued, is comparable to personal computers several decades ago. Euronews Next reached out to Microsoft but didn't get an immediate reply.

Microsoft introduces autonomous AI agents

Microsoft on Monday said it was enhancing its AI offerings with new autonomous agent capabilities as the tech titan aims to accelerate business adoption of artificial intelligence. AI agents are specialized programs designed to perform routine tasks autonomously, such as sifting through sales leads or handling customer service inquiries. The AI agent has become the newest buzzword for major software companies that are investing billions in powerful AI models, which they believe will shape the future of computing. Microsoft has moved fast in pushing generative AI technology to everyday users, largely using the models from its $13 billion partnership with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Agents are intended to advance generative AI from ChatGPT-style chatbots, which require human prompts, to systems that can operate independently. In a blog post, Microsoft introduced ten autonomous agents for its Copilot AI platform, tailored to support sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams. These agents will be available for public preview starting in December, with a full rollout planned through 2025. "Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents -- ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous," Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Jared Spataro explained. The company envisions these agents facilitating a transition from today's traditional business routines to new work habits that are driven and increasingly carried out by AI. Additionally, Microsoft announced the upcoming public preview of Copilot Studio, a tool enabling companies to create and manage their own AI agents. Other tech giants are also exploring a deployment of AI agents, with venture capitalists poring money into startups offering their own take on the concept. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company last month announced its own slate of AI agents, criticized Microsoft's efforts. "When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it's disappointing. It just doesn't work, and it doesn't deliver any level of accuracy," Benioff said last week. AI chip juggernaut Nvidia, Google and Oracle have also announced AI agent projects. Although their powers remain limited for now, the development of autonomous agents capable of independent action has raised concerns about potential risks. Microsoft assured that these new agents, currently limited to non-complex tasks, adhere to strict security, privacy, and responsible AI guidelines. "Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use," it said.

Microsoft launches 'AI employees' that can perform some business tasks

AI 'agents' can carry out a range of roles such as handling client queries and identifying sales leads Microsoft is introducing autonomous artificial intelligence agents, or virtual employees, that can perform tasks such as handling client queries and identifying sales leads, as the tech sector strives to show investors that the AI boom can produce indispensable products. The US tech firm is giving customers the ability to build their own AI agents as well as releasing 10 off-the-shelf bots that can carry out a range of roles including supply chain management and customer service. Early adopters of the Copilot Studio product, which launches next month, include the bluechip consulting firm McKinsey, which is building an agent to process new client inquiries by carrying out tasks such as scheduling follow-up meetings. Other early users include law firm Clifford Chance and retailer Pets at Home. Microsoft is flagging AI agents, which carry out tasks without human intervention, as an example of the technology's ability to increase productivity - a measure of economic efficiency, or the amount of output generated by a worker for each hour worked. Microsoft boss Satya Nadella, who announced the AI agent move at a company event in London, said the tool would reduce "drudgery" and raise productivity by freeing up time to carry out more valuable tasks. "These tools are fundamentally changing outsourcing, increasing value and reducing waste," he said. Nadella described Copilot Studio, which does not require coding expertise from its users, as a "no-code way for you to be able to build agents". Microsoft is powering the agents with several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. Microsoft is also developing an AI agent that can carry out transactions on behalf of users. The company's head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, has said he has seen "stunning demos" where the agent makes a purchase independently but it has also suffered "car crash moments" in development. Sulyeman added, nonetheless, that an agent with these capabilities will emerge "in quarters, not years". Asked about fears of AI's impact on employment, Charles Lamanna, a corporate vice-president at Microsoft, told the Guardian agents would do away with the "mundane, monotonous" aspects of a job. "I think it's much more of an enabler and an empowerment tool than anything else," he said. Lamanna said the advent of AI tools such as agents in the modern office environment is comparable to the arrival of personal computers several decades ago. "The personal computer didn't show up on every desk to begin with but eventually it was on every desk because it brought so much capability and information to the fingertips of every employee," he said. "We think that AI is going to have the same type of journey. It's showing up in a subset of departments and processes, but it's only a matter of time till it shows up to all parts of an organisation." Andrew Rogoyski, a director at the Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey, said AI agents could help tech companies produce a return for investors who backed the technology strongly. In June, Goldman Sachs asked if a $1tn investment in AI over the next few years will "ever pay off". "AI companies have consumed a lot of investment money and need to generate some returns," said Rogoyski. "Assistive agents are a way of showing everyday benefits, although how much revenue these will generate is an open question." However, he warned that agents have been discussed as a concept for years but "we've yet to deliver an agent that is as capable as a human worker".

Microsoft's Copilot AI now lets you build your own autonomous agents

The company announced that users can now build their own autonomous agents in Copilot Studio that can "understand the nature of your work and act on your behalf." Microsoft customers will be able to create their own autonomous agents in public preview in November, the company announced during its AI Tour in London. AI agents range from simple prompt-and-response to being fully autonomous, meaning they can "work on behalf of an individual, team, or function" on business processes, Microsoft said. Users will be able to interact with the autonomous agents through Copilot. The company also announced 10 new autonomous agents for its enterprise platform, Dynamics 365. The new agents are designed for workers in "sales, service, finance, and supply chain," but the company plans to develop more agents, it said. The 10 autonomous agents will become available for public preview later this year and into early 2025, according to Microsoft. Microsoft said its Copilot Studio autonomous agents will use OpenAI's new "reasoning" model, o1 -- which is in preview -- as well as other new AI models "to boost their AI and reasoning abilities." "These models offer more precise predictions, enhanced natural language processing, and improved decision-making support," Microsoft said. In July, Nvidia (NVDA+0.77%) chief executive Jensen Huang said the next wave of AI is in the enterprise, where everyone at a company "will have an AI assistant." "We hope that we can give every single organization the ability to create their own AIs," Huang said during a fireside chat at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics conference. "So everybody would be augmented and have a collaborative AI that could empower them, help them do better work."

Microsoft's Copilot is adding AI agents for routine tasks

The company is positioning autonomous agents -- programs that need little human intervention unlike chatbots -- as "apps for an AI-driven world" that can handle client queries, identify sales leads and manage inventory. Other big technology companies such as Salesforce have also touted the potential of such agents, tools that some analysts say could provide companies with an easier path to monetizing the billions of dollars they are pouring into AI. Microsoft said its customers can use Copilot Studio -- an application that requires little knowledge of computer code -- to create such agents in public preview from November. It is using several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI for the agents.

Microsoft Expands AI Capabilities with New Autonomous Agents for Businesses

Companies like Lumen, Honeywell, and McKinsey are leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot for rapid results. Microsoft is accelerating its AI-driven business solutions with the introduction of new autonomous agents in Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365. These agents are designed to help organisations automate and scale critical business processes, ranging from sales and supply chain management to customer service and employee onboarding. Also Read: Microsoft Announces New AI Models and Solutions for Healthcare Starting next month, the public preview of Copilot Studio will allow businesses to create and manage custom autonomous agents. These AI-powered agents will leverage Microsoft 365 Graph, Dataverse, Fabric, and other systems to streamline processes such as employee onboarding, IT support, and sales management. Microsoft describes Copilot as your AI assistant that works for you, and Copilot Studio as the platform where you can easily create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organisation will have a constellation of agents -- ranging from simple prompt-and-response tools to fully autonomous systems. These agents will work on behalf of individuals, teams, or entire functions to execute and orchestrate business processes. Copilot Studio: With the upcoming public preview, businesses will be able to build their own autonomous agents. These agents, drawing from Microsoft's ecosystem (Microsoft 365 Graph, Dataverse, etc.), will handle tasks such as IT support, sales, and employee onboarding. Autonomous Agents in Dynamics 365: Microsoft is introducing ten new autonomous agents designed to enhance sales, service, finance, and supply chain functions. These agents will improve business efficiency by automating tasks like sales qualification, supplier communications, and customer service operations, according to an official release. Examples include the Sales Qualification Agent, which prioritises high-value sales leads, and the Supplier Communications Agent, which autonomously monitors and responds to supply chain disruptions. Additional agents include the Sales Order Agent, Financial Reconciliation Agent, Account Reconciliation Agent, Time and Expense Agent, Customer Intent Agent, Customer Knowledge Management Agent, Case Management Agent, and Scheduling Operations Agent. "New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy lines of business applications to AI-first business process. AI is today's ROI and tomorrow's competitive edge. These new agents are designed to help every sales, service, finance and supply chain team drive business value -- and are just the start," Microsoft said. In its blog post, Microsoft mentioned that 60 percent of the Fortune 500 are already using Microsoft 365 Copilot to accelerate business outcomes and empower their teams. With Copilot supporting sales associates, Lumen Technologies projects USD 50 million in annual savings. Honeywell equates its productivity gains to adding 187 full-time employees, while Finastra is reducing creative production time from seven months to seven weeks. Also Read: Microsoft Targets Ecosystem Partnerships to Make India as AI-First Nation: Report Organisations like Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home, and Thomson Reuters are already using autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs, and scale impact, Microsoft noted. Early adopters, such as the UK's Pets at Home and Thomson Reuters, have reported significant efficiency gains, including the potential for seven-figure savings and a 50 percent reduction in legal workflow time. McKinsey & Company is developing an agent to speed up the client onboarding process. Their pilot showed a 90 percent reduction in lead time and a 30 percent reduction in administrative work, Microsoft said.

Microsoft introduces autonomous AI agents

The AI agent has become the newest buzzword for major software companies that are investing billions in powerful AI models, which they believe will shape the future of computing. Microsoft has moved fast in pushing generative AI technology to everyday users, largely using the models from its $13 billion partnership with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.Microsoft on Monday said it was enhancing its AI offerings with new autonomous agent capabilities as the tech titan aims to accelerate business adoption of artificial intelligence. AI agents are specialised programs designed to perform routine tasks autonomously, such as sifting through sales leads or handling customer service inquiries. The AI agent has become the newest buzzword for major software companies that are investing billions in powerful AI models, which they believe will shape the future of computing. Microsoft has moved fast in pushing generative AI technology to everyday users, largely using the models from its $13 billion partnership with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Agents are intended to advance generative AI from ChatGPT-style chatbots, which require human prompts, to systems that can operate independently. In a blog post, Microsoft introduced ten autonomous agents for its Copilot AI platform, tailored to support sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams. These agents will be available for public preview starting in December, with a full rollout planned through 2025. "Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents - ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous," Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Jared Spataro explained. The company envisions these agents facilitating a transition from today's traditional business routines to new work habits that are driven and increasingly carried out by AI. Additionally, Microsoft announced the upcoming public preview of Copilot Studio, a tool enabling companies to create and manage their own AI agents. Other tech giants are also exploring a deployment of AI agents, with venture capitalists poring money into startups offering their own take on the concept. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company last month announced its own slate of AI agents, criticized Microsoft's efforts. "When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it's disappointing. It just doesn't work, and it doesn't deliver any level of accuracy," Benioff said last week. AI chip juggernaut Nvidia, Google and Oracle have also announced AI agent projects. Although their powers remain limited for now, the development of autonomous agents capable of independent action has raised concerns about potential risks. Microsoft assured that these new agents, currently limited to non-complex tasks, adhere to strict security, privacy, and responsible AI guidelines. "Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use," it said.

Microsoft to roll out new autonomous AI agents next month, fending off challenge from Salesforce

LONDON -- Microsoft will allow businesses to start making their own autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting next month, taking the fight back to Salesforce, which introduced its own configurable agentic AI tools in September. At its "AI Tour" event in London on Monday, Microsoft revealed plans to allow organizations to create their own autonomous agents within Copilot Studio, the U.S. tech giant's platform for customizing and building so-called "copilot" assistants. AI agents can act as virtual workers that can carry out a series of tasks without supervision. They are touted as a major evolution of large language model-based AI from chat interfaces, creating an experience that blends more seamlessly into the background. Beyond adding the ability to create autonomous agents in Copilot Studio, Microsoft said it would also launch 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365, the company's suite of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management apps. Microsoft plans to introduce new agents in Dynamics 365 for sales, service, finance and supply chain teams.

Microsoft to roll out new autonomous AI agents next month, fending off challenge from Salesforce

LONDON -- Microsoft will allow businesses to start making their own autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting next month, taking the fight back to Salesforce, which introduced its own configurable agentic AI tools in September. At its "AI Tour" event in London on Monday, Microsoft revealed plans to allow organizations to create their own autonomous agents within Copilot Studio, the U.S. tech giant's platform for customizing and building so-called "copilot" assistants. These agents had previously been available in private preview after Microsoft announced them initially in May. Starting next month, they'll move into public preview, meaning more organizations can start building AI agents of their own. AI agents can act as virtual workers that can carry out a series of tasks without supervision. They are touted as a major evolution of large language model-based AI from chat interfaces, creating an experience that blends more seamlessly into the background. Beyond adding the ability to create autonomous agents in Copilot Studio, Microsoft said it would also launch 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365, the company's suite of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management apps. Microsoft plans to introduce new agents in Dynamics 365 for sales, service, finance and supply chain teams. Jared Spataro, Microsoft's corporate vice president of modern work and business applications, on Monday displayed an example of an AI agent developed at consulting firm McKinsey. The agent was shown as it parsed out an email to find out what the communication is about, checked its history, mapped it to industry-standard terms, and then found the right person in the firm to take the next step before writing and summarizing a response. It may seem like "magic," but the firm was able to develop its own AI agent just by using human language, not programming languages, according to Spataro. "We're excited about this because of the business value it can drive," he noted, adding that McKinsey found it could reduce lead time by as much as 90%. Microsoft is doubling down on AI agents at a time when competition is intensifying up in the red-hot artificial intelligence space. Last month, at its annual Dreamforce showcase in San Francisco, Salesforce showed off a new platform called Agentforce, which allows enterprise organizations to spin up their own AI agents. Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce's CEO of U.K. and Ireland, criticized the copilot model of AI assistants as not serving the needs of enterprises that well. "All of these copilots activated on the edge, or in email -- they're not connected to or grounded within the context of customer data," Bahrololoumi told CNBC in an interview earlier this month. "How is it going to represent a company accurately and responsibly? It isn't." "I think we won't see so many copilots for enterprise AI activity," she added. "I'm not saying copilots won't exist for other purposes. But in the context of enterprise, for autonomous enterprises to be able to plan, execute and take action -- you're no longer in Copilot there." Microsoft declined to comment on Bahrololoumi's remarks when contacted by CNBC. Microsoft and Salesforce have a storied feud. Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff once called on European regulators to investigate Microsoft's deal to buy LinkedIn, suggesting it was in breach of competition rules. Separately, Microsoft also on Monday announced it had struck a five-year deal with the U.K. government to offer public sector organizations access to its AI tools. Through an agreement with the Crown Commercial Service, the procurement agency of the U.K. government, Microsoft said it will allow public sector organizations to access its Microsoft 365 productivity tool suite, the Azure cloud platform and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a service offered by the tech giant that embeds generative AI into its suite of productivity apps.

Microsoft to allow autonomous AI agent development starting next month

Microsoft will allow customers to build autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting in November, the software giant said on Monday, in its latest move to tap the booming technology. The company is positioning autonomous agents -- programs which require little human intervention unlike chatbots -- as "apps for an AI-driven world," capable of handling client inquiries, identifying sales leads and managing inventory. Other big technology firms such as Salesforce have also touted the potential of such agents, tools that some analysts say could provide companies with an easier path to monetizing the billions of dollars they are pouring into AI. Microsoft said its customers can use Copilot Studio - an application that requires little knowledge of computer code - to create autonomous agents in public preview from November. It is using several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI for the agents. The company is also introducing ten ready-for-use agents that can help with routine tasks ranging from managing supply chain to expense tracking and client communications. In one demo, McKinsey & Co, which had early access to the tools, created an agent that can manage client inquires by checking interaction history, identifying the consultant for the task and scheduling a follow-up meeting. "The idea is that Copilot [the company's chatbot] is the user interface for AI," Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business and industry Copilot at Microsoft, told Reuters. "Every employee will have a Copilot, their personalized AI agent, and then they will use that Copilot to interface and interact with the sea of AI agents that will be out there." Tech giants are facing investor pressure to show returns on their significant AI investments. Microsoft's shares fell 2.8% in the September quarter, underperforming the S&P 500, but remain more than 10% higher for the year. Some concerns have risen in recent months about the pace of Copilot adoption, with research firm Gartner saying in August its survey of 152 IT organizations showed that the vast majority had not progressed their Copilot initiatives past the pilot stage.

Microsoft introduces 10 AI agents for sales, finance, supply chain in Dynamics 365

Hot on the heels of Salesforce's announcement last month of artificial intelligence agents for sales, Microsoft on Monday announced it will make ten agents available in Dynamics 365 for use in sales, customer service, finance, and supply chain operations. The company is also previewing an addition to its Copilot Studio development tool to let programmers make their own agents with hooks into proprietary corporate data. Also: Microsoft's upgraded Copilot Studio is like a LEGO set for building AI agents Microsoft says the use of agents can save companies as much as $50 million annually, or the equivalent of "adding 187 full-time employees." "AI is today's ROI and tomorrow's competitive edge," according to Microsoft. The announcement comes a year after Microsoft announced multiple Copilot offerings for sales and customer support at Ignite, its annual developer conference. Also: I'm a ChatGPT power user - and this new feature instantly made me more productive The "ten new autonomous agents," functioning inside of Microsoft's Dynamics 365 back-office suite, can do things ranging from qualifying sales prospects to automating time and expense tracking: The ten agents "will start to become available in public preview later this year and continue into early 2025" in Dynamics 365, said Microsoft, and the company plans to introduce "many more agents in the coming year," it said. Microsoft's announcement predicted that "every organization will have a constellation of agents -- ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous." Also: AI agents are the 'next frontier' and will change our working lives forever The agents, working to "execute and orchestrate businesses process" will draw upon data sources that include "the context of your work data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Dataverse and Fabric," said Microsoft. Microsoft cited customer examples of Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, and Pets at Home, as those organizations that "are already creating autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact." The announcement promises "guardrails and controls" and "stringent security measures and controls" for "robust data governance,' to be "managed in Copilot Studio." Protections, said Microsoft, include "loss prevention, robust authentication protocols, and more." Copilot Studio is billed on a usage basis, quoted at $200 per month for 25,000 messages. You can start a free trial in Studio on Microsoft's site. Microsoft will discuss more about Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 at its virtual event, the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, on October 29th.

Microsoft brings autonomous agents to Dynamics 365 and Copilot Studio - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft brings autonomous agents to Dynamics 365 and Copilot Studio Microsoft Corp. announced a set of autonomous artificial intelligence agents for Dynamics 365 aimed at business users today during the company's AI Tour in London. The company also said the ability to create AI agents with Copilot Studio will be in public preview next month. The capability was introduced in private preview in September at Microsoft Build 2024. Agents are a type of AI assistant that automates tasks independently and does work for humans without the need for intervention. They can range from simple prompt-and-response chatbots to fully autonomous actors that can read emails, use company data, send messages and alerts, compose replies and prepare reports. "Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world," said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work at Microsoft. "Every organization will have a constellation of agents." Copilot Studio will soon provide an all-in-one platform for building and managing agents, including managing infrastructure, AI models and a low-code design interface with connectors. Users need only connect them to the data sources they want them to "know," such as internal business knowledge databases, the web or other sources such as SharePoint and Salesforce, and assign them actions such as sending email, messages in Slack or adding rows to databases. From there, users can describe what they want the AI agent to do in natural language by instructing it as they would an employee. For example, they could tell it to read incoming emails, pull out names and industry information, relate it to internal company database knowledge, and then send an email to team members to get them started for customer engagement. By setting the AI agent to trigger when an email is received, it can automatically run, read emails and do the busywork of summarizing, pulling out insights and picking the right team members for incoming marketing emails. Copilot Studio agents have access to the latest models, including new models such as OpenAI's o1, which is currently available in the limited private preview. Microsoft said 10 autonomous agents are coming to Dynamics 365 to assist business users across every facet of their practice by bringing the power of AI right to where they work. "These new agents are designed to help every sales, service, finance and supply chain team drive business value and are just the start," said Bryan Goode, corporate vice president of business applications and platform at Microsoft. "We will create many more agents in the coming year that give customers the competitive advantage they need to future-proof their organization." In sales, agents will help sellers focus more of their efforts on engaging customers and less time on tedious work. The Sales Qualification Agent within Dynamics 365 Sales will research and prioritize leads while assisting with developing personalized sales emails. The Sales Order Agent for Dynamics 365 Business Central can automate order intakes by interacting with customers and capturing their preferences. Agents for finance and operations will be able to help prepare data to reduce the time for reporting and automate ledger transactions for accountants who need to keep the books straight. For example, the Time and Expense Agent for project management can assist with time entry, expense tracking and approval, and keep invoices going out to customers on time. The Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management agents, available for Dynamics 365 Service and Contact Center, will work with customer service operators to assist them during calls. Having a way to determine customer intent from past and current customer conversations, will help operators better understand how they can help customers. The knowledge management agent will keep articles and documents up-to-date with the case notes and summaries taken by operators after calls. Microsoft said these agents for Dynamics 365 will continue to learn and handle new situations as they happen. Agents will work to improve their quality of service based on how issues are resolved. The company said the 10 agents introduced today will start to become available later this year in public preview, which will continue until early 2025.

Microsoft to allow autonomous AI agent development starting next month

(Reuters) - Microsoft will allow customers to build autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting in November, the software giant said on Monday, in its latest move to tap the booming technology. The company is positioning autonomous agents - programs which require little human intervention unlike chatbots - as "apps for an AI-driven world," capable of handling client inquiries, identifying sales leads and managing inventory. Other big technology firms such as Salesforce have also touted the potential of such agents, tools that some analysts say could provide companies with an easier path to monetizing the billions of dollars they are pouring into AI. Microsoft said its customers can use Copilot Studio - an application that requires little knowledge of computer code - to create autonomous agents in public preview from November. It is using several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI for the agents. The company is also introducing ten ready-for-use agents that can help with routine tasks ranging from managing supply chain to expense tracking and client communications. In one demo, McKinsey & Co, which had early access to the tools, created an agent that can manage client inquires by checking interaction history, identifying the consultant for the task and scheduling a follow-up meeting. "The idea is that Copilot (the company's chatbot) is the user interface for AI," Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business and industry Copilot at Microsoft, told Reuters. "Every employee will have a Copilot, their personalized AI agent, and then they will use that Copilot to interface and interact with the sea of AI agents that will be out there." Tech giants are facing investor pressure to show returns on their significant AI investments. Microsoft's shares fell 2.8% in the September quarter, underperforming the S&P 500, but remain more than 10% higher for the year. Some concerns have risen in recent months about the pace of Copilot adoption, with research firm Gartner saying in August its survey of 152 IT organizations showed that the vast majority had not progressed their Copilot initiatives past the pilot stage. (Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Varun H K)

Microsoft Steals the Spotlight with Autonomous AI Agents

This new development comes in the backdrop of Salesforce chief Marc Benioff's criticising Microsoft Copilot -- calling it Clippy 2.0. Microsoft is expanding the capabilities of its Copilot platform by introducing new autonomous agents that aim to enhance business processes across industries. On October 21, the company announced that the ability to create autonomous agents within Copilot Studio will enter public preview next month. These agents are designed to work across various business functions, including sales, finance, and supply chain, to automate tasks and streamline operations. "Copilot is the UI for AI, and with Copilot Studio, customers can easily create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot. Today we announced new autonomous agent capabilities across Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 to help scale the impact of every individual, team, and business function," said Microsoft chief Satya Nadella. This development comes following Salesforce chief Marc Benioff's criticism of Microsoft Copilot, comparing it to Clippy 2.0. "When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it's disappointing. It just doesn't work, and it doesn't deliver any level of accuracy," Benioff said in a post on X. He further mentioned that major analyst firms say it's spilling data everywhere, leaving customers to clean up the mess. To add insult to injury, customers are then told to build their own custom LLMs. "I have yet to find anyone who's had a transformational experience with Microsoft Copilot or the pursuit of training and retraining custom LLMs. Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0," he said. Microsoft has introduced ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365. These agents are built to help organisations drive business value by automating processes like lead generation, customer service, and supplier communication. For instance, a new Sales Qualification Agent assists sellers by prioritising leads and personalising customer outreach, while a Supplier Communications Agent autonomously tracks supplier performance to minimise supply chain disruptions. Already used by 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies, Microsoft 365 Copilot has demonstrated significant results, including projected savings of $50 million annually for Lumen Technologies and productivity gains for Honeywell equating to adding 187 full-time employees. Microsoft highlighted examples of companies already utilising these capabilities. Pets at Home, the U.K.'s leading pet care business, is using an agent for profit protection, which could potentially lead to significant annual savings. McKinsey & Company has developed an agent to reduce client onboarding time, and Thomson Reuters is using a legal due diligence agent that speeds up workflows and increases new business pipeline efficiency. As these agents become more integrated into enterprises, Microsoft assures customers of strong data governance and security measures. All agents built in Copilot Studio adhere to stringent protocols, including data loss prevention and robust authentication. Microsoft is also leveraging these technologies internally, and is seeing notable gains in areas including sales, customer service, and marketing. Meanwhile, at Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce launched its Agentforce Partner Network. This global ecosystem brings together top partners, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM, and Workday, to enhance the capabilities of its AI-driven Agentforce platform. The new network will give businesses access to a wide array of third-party agent actions and pre-built agent templates, automating complex tasks across various systems. Agentforce is a platform that enables companies to deploy AI agents to complete intricate tasks by integrating actions across Salesforce and various third-party systems. The newly launched partner network expands the platform's scope by allowing these agents to interface seamlessly with external systems, enabling users to accomplish more in less time.

Microsoft Banks on Copilot Agents in 'AI-Powered World'

Users will be able to create their own agents to handle customer management tasks or rely on agents designed by Microsoft. Microsoft (MSFT) is launching artificial intelligence (AI) -- driven "autonomous agents" for its Copilot AI assistant software, the company announced Monday in a move seemingly designed to compete with Salesforce (CRM) in customer management software. Customers can utilize agents that range in capability "from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous" working for a team and performing tasks like sending emails and handling employee onboarding. Microsoft announced in May the ability to create agents using Copilot Studio. It will be previewed publicly next month, said Microsoft. Copilot, which utilizes large language models (LLMs), is trained using the workplace data for that specified client, according to a 2023 company blog post. The latest agents function "as the new apps for an AI-powered world," Microsoft said. The tech titan is also rolling out 10 pre-designed agents, including some designed for prioritizing high-potential sales leads, communicating with suppliers, and managing customer service interactions. Shares of Microsoft slid about 1% intraday Monday but are up 10% in 2024. Salesforce, the cloud software giant, launched a suite of autonomous AI agents with similar features, known as Agentforce, in September. The company said it planned for Agentforce to become generally available on Friday. Salesforce is the No. 1 provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software and has been for the past 11 years, according to a Salesforce press release touting a study from International Data Corp.

Microsoft's Copilot AI agents available in November

Let bots manage your supply chain? What could possibly go wrong? Since announcing Copilot Studio last year, Microsoft claims it has achieved significant efficiency gains across multiple business units using its tools. Starting next month, customers will be able to put those claims to the test. The service provides a no-code-style interface for building task-specific AI agents to automate employee tasks. If you're not familiar with the concept of AI agents, this refers to applications that use a combination of large language or vision models, sometimes more than one, and conventional automation frameworks to proactively process information -- a sales lead for example -- without human interaction. Although Copilot Studio can be used to build custom agents to automate any number of tasks, Microsoft is making 10 ready-made ones available under its Dynamics 365 offering, which targets everything from sales and customer service, to finance and supply chain management. In the case of its supply chain agent, Microsoft claims it can "minimize costly disruptions by autonomously tracking supplier performance, detecting delays, and responding accordingly," adding that it will free teams from monitoring and firefighting. Naturally, these services are designed to be plugged into customers' existing Microsoft 365 services to extend their knowledge base, presumably through a technology called retrieval augment generation (RAG) -- a concept we've explored in depth here. Long term, many industry hopefuls believe the technology will help to automate entire departments. However, for the moment, Microsoft's ambitions appear a little more grounded, with Redmond pitching its service as an efficiency driver that will help existing workers get more work done or focus on higher value tasks. Microsoft says Honeywell has seen productivity gains equivalent to adding 187 full-time employees from the use of Copilot, which really begs the question of whether these tools are really aimed at improving worker productivity or driving workforce reductions. That's exactly what Klarna is doing, but rather than letting the AI hand out pink slips, the Fintech outfit is using its agents as an excuse not to replace departing workers. In its own testing, Microsoft claims at least one of its sales teams has seen 9.4 percent higher revenue per seller and closed 20 percent more deals using Copilot. Meanwhile, the software giant says its AI HR assistant is now helping answer questions with 42 percent higher accuracy. Of course, we recommend taking these claims with a grain of salt. Percentages aren't always as impressive as they look, especially when you don't know what the baseline is. A 42 percent increase in accuracy is a lot if the HR assistant was only answering questions correctly three-quarters of the time. But, if the HR agent already responded accurately 9 out of 10 times, that's a much smaller improvement. For all the benefits Microsoft prescribes to these agents, it remains to be seen whether enterprises will actually let these agents make decisions on their own or if they'll just add to the cacophony of other alerts already demanding these teams' attention. There's certainly plenty of reason to believe it'll be the latter. Earlier this month, Redwood Research's CEO Buck Shlegeris shared with The Register how an AI agent designed to scan his network, identify a computer, and connect to it, went a little off the rails and began pushing updates to machines which it promptly botched. To be clear, this particular agent was custom-written in Python and used Anthropic's Claude LLM as its backend. So, perhaps Microsoft's Copilot Studio will have better guardrails built in to prevent this kind of thing from happening in production. ®

Microsoft To Grant Users More Access To Autonomous AI Agent Capabilities

'Every organization will have a constellation of agents -- ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous,' Microsoft CMO Jared Spataro says. Autonomous agent creation with Microsoft Copilot Studio will move from private preview to public preview in November, and 10 new autonomous agent types in Microsoft's Dynamics 365 are set to enter public preview later this year and into early 2025. Microsoft made the news as part of its AI Tour London event held Monday, during which the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor said that 2.1 million users engage with copilot in business applications monthly. "Every organization will have a constellation of agents -- ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous," Jared Spataro, Microsoft's chief marketing officer for AI at work, said in a blog post Monday. "They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process. Copilot is how you'll interact with these agents, and they'll do everything from accelerating lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain." [RELATED: New Microsoft Copilot Update Wave Focuses On App Integration, Agents] Microsoft is billing agents as the new applications for an AI-powered world that connect to an AI copilot. Agents range from simple prompt-and-response apps to full autonomy executing and orchestrating business processes. Agents mark an evolution in Microsoft's AI wares, adding on to the copilot brand of AI assistants the vendor had been releasing. Microsoft-which has a partner ecosystem of more than 400,000-has been criticized for how well copilots perform by customer relationship management (CRM) software rival Salesforce. The agents draw on work data in the Microsoft 365 Graph, Dataverse, Fabric and systems of record for context. And Copilot Studio-made agents follow data loss prevention, authentication protocols and other guardrails and controls established by makers. Agents can show the underlying logic for their business process paths to users, with details, steps and systems involved, according to the vendor. "This provides insight into why the agent chose a particular method, its decision process, and context, along with detailed steps, including variables and outputs, which are crucial for debugging," Charles Lamanna, Microsoft corporate vice president of business and industry copilot, said in a blog post Monday. Microsoft will provide users an "activity" tab of past agent runs, with progress tracking, block identification, trend analysis and previous decisions reviews. Autonomous agents have a limited private preview of Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 model for better predictions and natural language processing. As for the 10 new autonomous agents users can make in D365, Microsoft revealed several of them in a Monday blog post. More agents are planned for the coming year, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft to allow autonomous AI agent development starting next month

Oct 21 (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab will allow customers to build autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting in November, the software giant said on Monday, in its latest move to tap the booming technology. The company is positioning autonomous agents - programs which require little human intervention unlike chatbots - as "apps for an AI-driven world," capable of handling client inquiries, identifying sales leads and managing inventory. Advertisement · Scroll to continue Other big technology firms such as Salesforce (CRM.N), opens new tab have also touted the potential of such agents, tools that some analysts say could provide companies with an easier path to monetizing the billions of dollars they are pouring into AI. Microsoft said its customers can use Copilot Studio - an application that requires little knowledge of computer code - to create autonomous agents in public preview from November. It is using several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI for the agents. Advertisement · Scroll to continue The company is also introducing ten ready-for-use agents that can help with routine tasks ranging from managing supply chain to expense tracking and client communications. In one demo, McKinsey & Co, which had early access to the tools, created an agent that can manage client inquires by checking interaction history, identifying the consultant for the task and scheduling a follow-up meeting. "The idea is that Copilot (the company's chatbot) is the user interface for AI," Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business and industry Copilot at Microsoft, told Reuters. "Every employee will have a Copilot, their personalized AI agent, and then they will use that Copilot to interface and interact with the sea of AI agents that will be out there." Tech giants are facing investor pressure to show returns on their significant AI investments. Microsoft's shares fell 2.8% in the September quarter, underperforming the S&P 500 (.SPX), opens new tab, but remain more than 10% higher for the year. Some concerns have risen in recent months about the pace of Copilot adoption, with research firm Gartner saying in August its survey of 152 IT organizations showed that the vast majority had not progressed their Copilot initiatives past the pilot stage. Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Varun H K Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Microsoft's upgraded Copilot Studio is like a LEGO set for building AI agents

Microsoft is conducting "AI tours" in 60 cities. These one-day events are designed to connect AI-curious business folk with Microsoft engineers and sales teams to help explore what Microsoft is calling the "AI-first company" and its enabling technology, Copilot. At Microsoft's London stop today, the tech firm announced new features for Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) designed to help companies build and deploy AI agents. Also: I'm a ChatGPT power user - and this new feature instantly made me more productive I really like Microsoft's shorthand for describing AI agents: "Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world." The idea is that you can apply AI specifically to your vertical problems and create automated smart code that can accomplish tasks for you. The challenge, of course, is that if the AIs are going to be focused on solving your unique business challenges, they have to be tuned to solve those challenges. Rather than deploying a team of engineers to hand code every new AI agent, Microsoft has created Copilot Studio, which can help operational managers build their own solutions. For example, the UK's Pets at Home retailer has used Copilot Studio AI to deploy autonomous agents for profit protection workflows. Profit protection is the current business buzzword for the teams that act to prevent fraud and theft throughout the supply chain. Pets at Home has more than 450 stores across the UK, so profit protection is a high-profile, mission-critical task within the company. According to Pets at Home CIO William Hewish, as quoted in Microsoft's announcement, "We're using Al to do the time-consuming work so they can use their resource and expertise to make decisions quickly based on the data available." Also: AI agents are the 'next frontier' and will change our working lives forever He says, "It's truly helped us empower colleagues through both the level of information at their fingertips, and in time spent on more nuanced and insightful work. The agents solution allows the profit protection team to more effectively assess cases for potential profit loss and dedicate more of their time to skilled analysis, rather than simply information gathering." With Copilot Studio, you're not coding as much as you're configuring. It's on the same level of configuring as setting up an email filter. You assign rules, specify triggers, and describe workflows. You can start with a pre-built agent template and then tweak the template to your company's business operations. You can change behavior, modify data inputs, and specify prompts and vocabulary used in the agent. It's kind of a LEGO set for building AI apps. In today's announcement in London, Microsoft is spotlighting four new capabilities for Copilot Studio. They include ten new autonomous agents, which are available for sales, service, finance, and supply chain workflows within Dynamics 365. Think of these agents as pre-built templates that you can tune to meet your business processes and procedures. Also: CIOs must also serve as chief AI officers, according to Salesforce survey Agents can now be triggered automatically based on certain business signals. They can start tasks without any human input, which can increase efficiency but also makes me worry about robots taking over the world. Copilot Studio agents can now also do dynamic task planning, which means they can modify and change workflows based on situational awareness. It's another powerful business automation tool that, for some reason, doesn't reduce my concerns about AIs taking over the world. Also: Networks of collaborative AI agents will transform how we work, says this expert Look, having watched a lot of Terminator and then writing about AI for a living is not good for the psyche, okay? Copilot Studio agents also now have activity tracking, which doesn't sound threatening at all. Actually, this is an important debugging tool because humans can look at detailed logs of an agent's actions to see what it's been up to without adult supervision. All this intelligence-based automation is inherently worrisome in a science-fiction kind of way. But it's also a powerful business tool that can augment staff activities, speed up responsiveness, and identify concerns much faster than human team members will be able to. Blue chip management consulting firm McKinsey & Company is transforming itself into an AI-first company, presumably to eat the dog food before taking that strategy on the road to its clients. Also: Early adopters are deploying AI agents in the enterprise now, with scaled adoption in 2025 So far, it's working out. The company built a copilot to help teams process new client proposals quickly. Among the processes it automates, the agent can identify the most appropriate experts and teams to staff client projects. The company says it also provides a "single place where colleagues can ask questions and request follow-ups." It's not clear if those are questions to the AI in the form of a help desk or some sort of intelligent Slack for collaboration, but both seem possible with Copilot Studio. Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company Rodney Zemmel seems pretty stoked about the possibilities. As quoted in Microsoft's announcement, he said, "We are excited about the power of copilot agents in taking Al transformations to the next level." Another important feature of the current Copilot Studio announcement is the ability to add guardrails and controls. According to Microsoft, these are established "by maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions." You can "implement access controls for creating, sharing, and using agents" and "establish policies and information labels to safeguard data and monitor agent usage." Also: Meet Agentforce, Salesforce's autonomous AI answer to employee burnout Microsoft is heavily centered on becoming an AI-focused company. Many of the announcements discussed here provide insights into the technologies that could make that possible. It is encouraging that Microsoft also seems to be including safeguards into its offerings so that, as companies share management reins with AI, the outcomes are more predictably positive and the scary Cyberdyne Systems Terminator-like future stays firmly in the realm of science fiction.

Microsoft Banks on Copilot Agents in "AI-Powered World"

Users will be able to create their own agents to handle customer management tasks or rely on agents designed by Microsoft. Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) is launching artificial intelligence (AI) -- driven "autonomous agents" for its Copilot AI assistant software, the company announced Monday in a move seemingly designed to compete with Salesforce (CRM) in customer management software. Customers can utilize agents that range in capability "from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous" working for a team and performing tasks like sending emails and handling employee onboarding. Microsoft announced in May the ability to create agents using Copilot Studio. It will be previewed publicly next month, said Microsoft. Copilot, which utilizes large language models (LLMs), is trained using the workplace data for that specified client, according to a 2023 company blog post. The latest agents function "as the new apps for an AI-powered world," Microsoft said. The tech titan is also rolling out 10 pre-designed agents, including some designed for prioritizing high-potential sales leads, communicating with suppliers, and managing customer service interactions. Shares of Microsoft slid about 1% intraday Monday but are up 10% in 2024. Salesforce, the cloud software giant, launched a suite of autonomous AI agents with similar features, known as Agentforce, in September. The company said it planned for Agentforce to become generally available on Friday. Salesforce is the No. 1 provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software and has been for the past 11 years, according to a Salesforce press release touting a study from the International Data Corporation.

Microsoft unveils new autonomous AI agents in advance of competing Salesforce rollout

AI agents are reigniting the competition between Microsoft and Salesforce. Microsoft announced 10 new AI agents for its Dynamics 365 line of business applications -- tools that can complete tasks autonomously in areas including sales, service, finance, and supply chain operations. "Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world," wrote Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer for Microsoft's AI at Work initiatives, in a post about the news. "Every organization will have a constellation of agents -- ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process." The news, announced Monday at Microsoft's "AI Tour" stop in London, comes a few days in advance of the planned Oct. 25 general availability of Salesforce's competing Agentforce autonomous AI technology for sales and service. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been pointed in his criticism of Microsoft's Copilot AI technology in recent weeks, saying Microsoft is disappointing its business customers and exposing their data to security risks. Over the past decade, Microsoft and Salesforce have become a classic example of tech-industry frenemies, partnering when it's mutually convenient, but for the most part competing fiercely on a variety of fronts. The new AI agents from both companies reflect broader efforts across the industry to take AI beyond the realm of assistant, giving the technology the ability to also complete assignments and tasks autonomously. Microsoft is looking to AI to fuel new growth across its business, in products and services including GitHub, Windows, and Microsoft 365. Dynamics products and cloud services generated about $6.5 billion in revenue in Microsoft's 2024 fiscal year, ended June 30. That represented steady growth -- up from $5.4 billion in 2023 and $4.7 billion in 2022 -- although Dynamics is still a small portion of Microsoft's more than $245 billion in overall annual revenue. Microsoft says it will make its new AI agents available in public preview for Dynamics 365 starting later this year and stretching into early next year. These AI agents come in a few categories: Others include a Financial Reconciliation Agent that prepares and cleanses data sets for financial reporting; an Account Reconciliation Agent that automates the matching and clearing of transactions; and a Time and Expense agent for time entry, expense tracking, and approval workflows. Microsoft also said it will release a public preview next month of the previously announced ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio.

Microsoft Launches AI Agents, Deepening Rivalry With Salesforce

Microsoft Corp. is launching a set of artificial intelligence tools designed to send emails, manage records and take other actions on behalf of business workers, expanding an AI push that intensifies competition with rivals like Salesforce Inc. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker said Monday it would roll out 10 "autonomous agents" to complete tasks on behalf of people in areas such as sales, customer support and accounting. The agents will be available in "public preview," beginning in December and continuing through early 2025. Microsoft also said that Copilot Studio, which lets companies build their own agents, will soon get the capability to have those agents act on their own initiative. That will be released in a preview version next month.

Microsoft launches AI agents, deepening rivalry with Salesforce

Microsoft is launching a set of artificial intelligence tools designed to send emails, manage records and take other actions on behalf of business workers, expanding an AI push that intensifies competition with rivals like Salesforce. The Redmond-based software maker said Monday it would roll out 10 "autonomous agents" to complete tasks on behalf of people in areas such as sales, customer support and accounting. The agents will be available in "public preview," beginning in December and continuing through early 2025. Microsoft also said that Copilot Studio, which lets companies build their own agents, will soon get the capability to have those agents act on their own initiative. That will be released in a preview version next month. The agents are like smartphone apps for the AI age, said Jared Spataro, who oversees Microsoft's workplace AI products. The AI tools, some acting autonomously and others in concert with a worker, can complete tasks like researching and sorting through sales leads or updating a customer support ticket after a phone call. "We have just found places where people spend tons of time and tons of money," Spataro said. "They tend to be tasks and processes that they wish they didn't have to do, but they have to do over and over again. There's high yield if we can essentially automate that." Microsoft, thanks largely to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is at the forefront of the technology industry's effort to infuse software with the ability to generate text and images and display humanlike reasoning. Since early 2023, Microsoft has focused on AI features that require a prompt from the user - a prominent example being the company's Copilot, which it has deployed across Word, Outlook and other products. The next phase is building agents -- tools that can complete established tasks without human intervention by combining reasoning powered by generative AI with existing databases and software. ServiceNow Inc., Workday Inc., HubSpot Inc. and SAP SE are among the cadre of software companies now emphasizing AI agents. Salesforce, the biggest maker of customer management software, spent much of its annual Dreamforce conference last month touting the new approach, saying its agents can handle tasks like customer service without supervision. Its tool -- Agentforce -- will become generally available later this month, with initial pricing of about $2 per conversation, the company has said. While promoting Salesforce's tools, Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff has also taken repeated shots at Microsoft's effort over the past few weeks. "When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it's disappointing," Benioff posted Wednesday on X. Microsoft hasn't announced pricing on its agents, which will be added to the company's Dynamics 365 software. Copilot Studio, the custom agent-building tool, is included in Microsoft 365 Copilot, which it sells to business customers for $30 a month per user. "All the competitive positioning will really come down to who's really got product that real customers are using and what are they realizing," Spataro said.

Microsoft Strikes Back at Salesforce, Announces New AI Agents That Can Take Over Finance, Sales, and Service Tasks

A month after Salesforce announced its AI agent technology and its CEO Marc Benioff criticized Microsoft's AI efforts, Microsoft announced 10 new AI agents that can take care of tasks like sales, finance, and customer service. AI agents are different from chatbots in one key way: they can act on an organization's behalf instead of simply reciting information. So they can help process orders, for example. Related: Can Anyone Beat Microsoft at AI? The CEO of Salesforce Thinks His Company Can. The tech has been in private preview since May and the agents will become available in public preview next month, per a press release. Microsoft noted that McKinsey & Company is creating an AI agent to help onboard clients, with a pilot showing that the agent decreased admin work by 30%. Microsoft's decision to publicly preview its AI agents follows Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff calling Microsoft's Copilot AI "disappointing." He compared its staying power to that of Clippy, an infamous office assistant Microsoft ended in 2007. Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant that integrates with popular Microsoft products, like Word and Excel. "I don't think Copilot will be around, I don't think customers will use it," Benioff said earlier this month. Microsoft, meanwhile, says two out of five Fortune 100 companies have used Copilot, meaning that "tens of thousands of people" have interacted with it. Microsoft counts McDonald's and biotech company Amgen as some of its AI clients.

Microsoft Launches AI Agents, Deepening Rivalry With Salesforce

The agents will be available in "public preview," beginning in December Microsoft is launching a set of artificial intelligence tools designed to send emails, manage records and take other actions on behalf of business workers, expanding an AI push that intensifies competition with rivals like Salesforce Inc. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker said Monday it would roll out 10 "autonomous agents" to complete tasks on behalf of people in areas such as sales, customer support and accounting. The agents will be available in "public preview," beginning in December and continuing through early 2025. Microsoft also said that Copilot Studio, which lets companies build their own agents, will soon get the capability to have those agents act on their own initiative. That will be released in a preview version next month. The agents are like smartphone apps for the AI age, said Jared Spataro, who oversees Microsoft's workplace AI products. The AI tools, some acting autonomously and others in concert with a worker, can complete tasks like researching and sorting through sales leads or updating a customer support ticket after a phone call. "We have just found places where people spend tons of time and tons of money," Spataro said. "They tend to be tasks and processes that they wish they didn't have to do, but they have to do over and over again. There's high yield if we can essentially automate that." Microsoft, thanks largely to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is at the forefront of the technology industry's effort to infuse software with the ability to generate text and images and display humanlike reasoning. Since early 2023, Microsoft has focused on AI features that require a prompt from the user - a prominent example being the company's Copilot, which it has deployed across Word, Outlook and other products. The next phase is building agents -- tools that can complete established tasks without human intervention by combining reasoning powered by generative AI with existing databases and software. ServiceNow Inc., Workday Inc., HubSpot Inc. and SAP SE are among the cadre of software companies now emphasizing AI agents. Salesforce, the biggest maker of customer management software, spent much of its annual Dreamforce conference last month touting the new approach, saying its agents can handle tasks like customer service without supervision. Its tool -- Agentforce -- will become generally available later this month, with initial pricing of about $2 (roughly Rs. 168) per conversation, the company has said. While promoting Salesforce's tools, Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff has also taken repeated shots at Microsoft's effort over the past few weeks. "When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it's disappointing," Benioff posted Wednesday on X. Microsoft hasn't announced pricing on its agents, which will be added to the company's Dynamics 365 software. Copilot Studio, the custom agent-building tool, is included in Microsoft 365 Copilot, which it sells to business customers for $30 (roughly Rs. 2,522) a month per user. "All the competitive positioning will really come down to who's really got product that real customers are using and what are they realizing," Spataro said. © 2024 Bloomberg LP

Microsoft's new AI agents set to shake up enterprise software, sparking new battle with Salesforce

Available in public preview starting next month, these AI agents aim to automate complex tasks and orchestrate business processes across organizations. They surpass traditional chatbots and Microsoft's earlier AI offerings by reasoning over intent and context, making judgments based on a broader set of data. "We think of these agents as really the apps of the AI era," said Bryan Goode, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, in an interview with VentureBeat. "Every line of business system that exists today is going to get reimagined as an agent that sits on top of a copilot." AI titans clash: Microsoft's counterpunch to Salesforce's Agentforce The move comes just weeks after Salesforce unveiled its Agentforce platform, which CEO Marc Benioff has been aggressively promoting while criticizing Microsoft's Copilot. Benioff recently called Microsoft Copilot "more like Clippy 2.0," referring to Microsoft's much-maligned Office assistant from the 1990s. Microsoft's new offering appears to be a direct challenge to Salesforce's Agentforce. While Salesforce's platform relies on its Atlas reasoning engine, Microsoft's agents are powered by advanced language models and the company's vast troves of enterprise data. Goode emphasized that these agents are not meant to replace human workers but to enhance their capabilities. "In many cases, these agents can actually enable people to add capabilities that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do," he explained. Battle for AI dominance: Microsoft and Salesforce lead the charge The tech industry is witnessing a paradigm shift as AI agents move from experimental technology to core business tools. Microsoft and Salesforce are at the forefront, each leveraging their unique strengths to shape the future of enterprise software. Microsoft's strategy hinges on its ubiquitous presence in office productivity and cloud computing. By integrating AI agents with familiar tools like Microsoft 365 and Azure, the company aims to make AI adoption seamless for its vast user base. Salesforce, on the other hand, is banking on its CRM expertise and the power of its recently developed Data Cloud to create AI agents that understand and optimize customer relationships. The success of these platforms could redefine the future of work and enterprise software. As AI agents become more sophisticated, they may blur the lines between human and machine tasks, potentially reshaping organizational structures and job roles. However, challenges remain. Data privacy concerns, the need for transparent AI decision-making, and the potential for job displacement are issues both companies must navigate carefully. Their ability to address these concerns while delivering tangible business value will likely determine the pace and extent of AI agent adoption. As this AI revolution unfolds, one thing is clear: the enterprise software landscape is on the cusp of a major transformation. Whether it's Microsoft's vision of "agents plus copilot plus humans" or Salesforce's "human at the helm" approach, the future of work is being rewritten -- one AI agent at a time.

Microsoft Launches AI Agents, Deepening Rivalry With Salesforce

(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. is launching a set of artificial intelligence tools designed to send emails, manage records and take other actions on behalf of business workers, expanding an AI push that intensifies competition with rivals like Salesforce Inc. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker said Monday it would roll out 10 "autonomous agents" to complete tasks on behalf of people in areas such as sales, customer support and accounting. The agents will be available in "public preview," beginning in December and continuing through early 2025. Microsoft also said that Copilot Studio, which lets companies build their own agents, will soon get the capability to have those agents act on their own initiative. That will be released in a preview version next month. The agents are like smartphone apps for the AI age, said Jared Spataro, who oversees Microsoft's workplace AI products. The AI tools, some acting autonomously and others in concert with a worker, can complete tasks like researching and sorting through sales leads or updating a customer support ticket after a phone call. "We have just found places where people spend tons of time and tons of money," Spataro said. "They tend to be tasks and processes that they wish they didn't have to do, but they have to do over and over again. There's high yield if we can essentially automate that." Microsoft, thanks largely to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is at the forefront of the technology industry's effort to infuse software with the ability to generate text and images and display humanlike reasoning. Since early 2023, Microsoft has focused on AI features that require a prompt from the user - a prominent example being the company's Copilot, which it has deployed across Word, Outlook and other products. The next phase is building agents -- tools that can complete established tasks without human intervention by combining reasoning powered by generative AI with existing databases and software. ServiceNow Inc., Workday Inc., HubSpot Inc. and SAP SE are among the cadre of software companies now emphasizing AI agents. Salesforce, the biggest maker of customer management software, spent much of its annual Dreamforce conference last month touting the new approach, saying its agents can handle tasks like customer service without supervision. Its tool -- Agentforce -- will become generally available later this month, with initial pricing of about $2 per conversation, the company has said. While promoting Salesforce's tools, Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff has also taken repeated shots at Microsoft's effort over the past few weeks. "When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it's disappointing," Benioff posted Wednesday on X. Microsoft hasn't announced pricing on its agents, which will be added to the company's Dynamics 365 software. Copilot Studio, the custom agent-building tool, is included in Microsoft 365 Copilot, which it sells to business customers for $30 a month per user. "All the competitive positioning will really come down to who's really got product that real customers are using and what are they realizing," Spataro said.

Microsoft set to launch autonomous AI agents in November, challenging Salesforce's dominance By Invezz

Invezz.com - Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) will enable businesses to create their own autonomous AI agents starting next month, escalating its competition with Salesforce, which introduced its agentic AI tools in September. This move aims to expand Microsoft's offerings in AI, allowing more companies to design custom AI solutions through its Copilot Studio platform. At the "AI Tour" event in London, Microsoft announced the public preview of autonomous agents through Copilot Studio, building on the private preview phase that began in May. These AI agents are designed to function as virtual assistants, performing tasks without human intervention, and are considered a significant step forward in the evolution of large language model-based AI. Microsoft's Copilot Studio provides a platform for businesses to design these agents using natural language commands, simplifying the creation process. With this update, companies can now integrate more advanced AI capabilities into their workflows. Microsoft also revealed plans to introduce ten new autonomous agents within its Dynamics 365 suite, which includes tools for sales, customer service, finance, and supply chain management. These agents aim to streamline processes across different business functions, offering tailored solutions for various enterprise needs. The introduction of these AI agents in Dynamics 365 positions Microsoft to compete more directly with Salesforce, which recently launched its Agentforce platform for enterprise AI. By integrating autonomous agents into its product suite, Microsoft is working to enhance the automation capabilities of its enterprise customers. Autonomous AI agents can perform a wide range of tasks, from analysing customer data to managing emails and workflows. An example showcased during Microsoft's event involved an AI agent developed at consulting firm McKinsey. The agent efficiently processed client emails, mapped them to relevant industry terms, and identified the appropriate person to handle follow-up actions. This automation, according to McKinsey, has the potential to reduce lead times by up to 90%. Such time savings demonstrate the potential benefits of AI agents for businesses aiming to improve productivity and operational efficiency. The race between Microsoft and Salesforce is heating up in the AI sector. At the Dreamforce event last month in San Francisco, Salesforce introduced Agentforce, which enables businesses to create their own AI agents. Salesforce has positioned its solution as more integrated with enterprise data, questioning whether Microsoft's Copilot model can adequately serve the needs of large organisations. The competition between the two companies extends beyond AI tools. Salesforce's CEO, Marc Benioff, has previously called on regulators to scrutinise Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn, highlighting the longstanding rivalry between the two tech giants. In addition to its AI announcements, Microsoft revealed a new agreement with the UK government. This five-year deal, secured through the Crown Commercial Service, will provide public sector organisations with access to Microsoft's AI capabilities. The agreement includes services like Microsoft 365, Azure, and the AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot. By offering these tools to public sector entities, Microsoft aims to support digital transformation across government departments. This partnership reflects the broader trend of public sector organisations adopting advanced AI solutions to improve service delivery and operational efficiency.

Microsoft's new generative AI agents are more autonomous than Copilot

Why it matters: Giving autonomy to generative AI tools opens up a range of tantalizing possibilities for increased productivity, but also vastly increases the potential of catastrophic risk. Driving the news: Microsoft on Monday announced a new series of semi-autonomous agents that business customers can either configure to their liking or use straight out of the box. The big picture: Agents that can act autonomously (within confined boundaries) are the logical next evolution of generative AI, which has thus far largely been limited to providing information for humans to act on. Zoom in: On the plus side, agents can work 24/7 and a small number of humans can theoretically oversee vast numbers of AI agents. Even with a great AI assistant, there are finite limits to human productivity. Between the lines: Microsoft says it sees agents as separate from, and an addition to, highly personalized AI copilots that help an individual worker with their tasks. The other side: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, meanwhile, has been bashing both the notion of a copilot and Microsoft's interpretation, comparing it to Clippy, the company's ill-fated Office assistant. What's next: Consumer chatbots aren't going anywhere, nor are copilots, but AI agents will likely start to attract even more of the buzz. Over time, their purview could also grow to handling larger tasks and taking more steps without involving people.

Microsoft, Salesforce Battle Heats Up As AI Agent Technology Takes Center Stage - Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Microsoft to let businesses develop autonomous AI agents starting in November. Microsoft Corp MSFT announced during its "AI Tour" event in London that businesses will be able to develop their own autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting in November. These autonomous AI agents, which act as virtual assistants capable of performing tasks without supervision, are part of the company's Copilot Studio platform. The technology aims to streamline enterprise functions, allowing organizations to customize and create AI-driven agents. Also Read: OpenAI's For Profit Structure Adds Valuation Complexity to Microsoft And Other Equity Investors: Report Microsoft's Jared Spataro drew parallels between the AI-driven agents and smartphone apps for the AI age, Bloomberg reports. In addition to the Copilot Studio updates, Microsoft plans to launch ten new AI agents for its Dynamics 365 suite. These will support various business operations, from sales to finance and supply chain management. The integration of AI agents is expected to boost efficiency across multiple industries, and Microsoft will show examples of real-world applications during the London event. The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant also demonstrated how its AI agents could transform customer service. The announcement follows Salesforce Inc's CRM unveiling its AI tools in September with the launch of Agentforce. Salesforce's platform allows businesses to build AI agents for enterprise-level tasks, positioning itself as a competitor in this rapidly growing space. Microsoft also revealed a five-year deal with the UK government to offer its AI tools to public sector organizations. The agreement will provide access to Microsoft's productivity tools, including Microsoft 365 and Azure, as well as AI-powered solutions such as Microsoft 365 Copilot. Northland Capital found Salesforce's Agentforce platform "on par" with Microsoft. Wedbush's Dan Ives projected upside from technology companies, including Salesforce from the AI wave led by Microsoft and Nvidia Corp NVDA. Microsoft gained 27% in the last 12 months. Salesforce is up over 45%. Investors can gain exposure to Microsoft through SPDR Select Sector Fund - Technology XLK and iShares S&P 500 Growth ETF IVW. Price Action: MSFT stock is down 0.36% at $416.66 premarket at last check Monday. Also Read: Salesforce's Free Cash Flow Could Double by 2029 Amid AI Push, Analyst Says While Upgrading Stock Image: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs