December 25, 2024

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at an artificial intelligence technology company event in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 30, 2024.

Dimas Adian | Bloomberg | Getty Images

london – Microsoft Starting next month, companies will be allowed to start making their own autonomous artificial intelligence agents to bring the fight back to salespersonthe company launched its own configurable agent AI tool 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 US tech giant’s platform for customizing and building so-called “co-pilot” assistants.

AI agents can act as virtual workers that can perform a range of tasks without supervision. They are considered a significant evolution from chat interfaces to artificial intelligence based on large language models, creating an experience that blends more seamlessly into the background.

In addition to adding the ability to create autonomous agents in Copilot Studio, Microsoft said it will launch 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365, the company’s suite of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications.

Microsoft will be an early promoter of artificial intelligence agents, says Melius' Ben Reitzes

Microsoft plans to introduce new agents in Dynamics 365 for sales, service, finance and supply chain teams.

How to use AI agent?

Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s vice president of modern work and business applications, showed off an example of an artificial intelligence agent developed by consulting firm McKinsey on Monday.

In the demo, the agent parsed an email to understand the content of the communication, examined its history, mapped it to industry standard terminology, found the right person in the company to take the next step, and then wrote and summarized a response .

Spataro said it may seem “magical,” but the company is able to develop its own artificial intelligence agents using only human language rather than programming language.

Microsoft demonstrated how its autonomous artificial intelligence agent works. In this example, a customer service agent receives a request for assistance with an order. Agents collect contextual data on the order and compare the issue to other common product issues. Then, after retrieving all the information, the AI ​​sends a follow-up email.

Microsoft

“We’re excited about this because of the business value it can bring,” he noted, adding that McKinsey found it could reduce delivery times by up to 90 percent.

competition is fierce

Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to develop artificial intelligence agents as competition in the red-hot field of artificial intelligence intensifies.

Last month, at its annual Dreamforce showcase in San Francisco, Salesforce showed off a new platform called Agentforce that allows organizations to launch their own AI agents.

Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce UK and Ireland, criticized the co-pilot mode of AI assistants for not meeting the needs of enterprises well.

Watch CNBC's full interview with Sierra co-founders Clay Bavor and Bret Taylor

Artificial intelligence strikes deal with UK government

Separately, Microsoft also announced a five-year agreement with the British government on Monday to provide public sector organizations with access to its artificial intelligence tools.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott says AI agents can work with each other and with humans

Microsoft said it will allow public sector organizations to access its Microsoft 365 suite of productivity tools, Azure cloud platform and Microsoft 365 Copilot through an agreement with the Royal Commercial Service, the UK government procurement agency.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a service from the tech giant that embeds generative artificial intelligence into its suite of productivity applications.

About The Author

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *