Starting next month, Microsoft will allow companies to start creating personalized autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents. It also announced that it will launch 10 new AI automatic agents (Autonomous Agents), designed to help corporate employees complete various tasks more efficiently. class tasks.
In the field of artificial intelligence, so-called intelligent agents usually refer to AI programs or systems that can autonomously perform a specific task or a series of tasks. They can sense their environment, make decisions, and take action to achieve some goal. As a result, AI agents can act as virtual employees, performing a range of tasks without supervision.
10 new AI agents
At its Artificial Intelligence Tour (AI Tour) event in London on Monday (October 21), Microsoft revealed a plan to allow enterprises to create their own autonomous AI agents in Copilot Studio. Copilot Studio is a platform launched by Microsoft for companies to customize and build Copilot assistants.
After Microsoft announced the initial version of the agent in May of this year, the program is now available in a private preview. Starting next month, they will move to public preview, meaning more businesses and organizations can start building their own AI agents.
Microsoft's move is intended to "declare war" on Salesforce, the world's largest SaaS (software as a service) company, which launched its first fully autonomous AI agent tool in September.
In addition to adding the ability to create autonomous agents in Copilot Studio, Microsoft also announced that it will launch 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365. Dynamics 365 is the company's all-in-one intelligent management platform, with a suite of applications that serve enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management.
The 10 new AI agents added to Dynamics 365 will be able to complete tasks autonomously in areas such as sales, service, finance and supply chain operations.
The launch of this series of AI automatic agents not only demonstrates Microsoft's leading position in the field of AI, but also provides enterprises with more digital transformation opportunities. How enterprises effectively apply these tools will be the key to the future.
How to use AI agent?
On Monday, Jared Spataro, Microsoft's vice president of modern work and business applications, demonstrated an AI agent developed by the consulting firm McKinsey: The AI agent parses an email, finds out what was communicated, examines its communication history, and maps it to industry standards terminology, and then find the right person in the company to take the next step before writing and summarizing the response.
It may seem "magical," but companies are able to develop their own artificial intelligence agents simply by using human language instead of programming languages, according to Spataro.
“We’re excited about this because of the business value it can bring,” he noted. Spataro also added that McKinsey has found that with AI agents, workflow times can be reduced by up to 90%.
Now, Microsoft is doubling down on autonomous agents at a time when competition in the red-hot field of artificial intelligence is intensifying. For example, customer management software maker Salesforce launched its own automated agent, Agentforce, at last month's Dreamforce conference, capable of handling tasks such as customer service without supervision, with initial pricing of around $2 per conversation.
At the same time, there is also some uncertainty surrounding Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI. Increasing disagreements over investment and resource allocation have led Microsoft to invest in other areas to reduce its reliance on OpenAI.