By Aditya Soni
(Reuters) – Microsoft will allow its customers to build autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting next month, in its latest effort to capitalize on the booming technology amid increasing investor scrutiny of its massive investments in artificial intelligence.
The company is positioning autonomous agents — software that needs little human intervention unlike chatbots — as “apps for an AI-driven world” that can handle customer inquiries, identify sales leads and manage inventory.
Other big tech companies, such as Salesforce, have also touted the potential of such agents, tools that some analysts say could offer companies an easier path to monetizing the billions of dollars they spend on artificial intelligence.
Microsoft said its customers can use Copilot Studio — an application that requires little computer code knowledge — to create such agents in public preview starting in November. It uses several AI models developed internally by OpenAI for agents.
The company also offers 10 ready-to-use agents that can help with routine tasks ranging from supply chain management to expense tracking and customer communications.
In a demo, McKinsey & Co., which had early access to the tools, created an agent that could manage client inquiries by checking the interaction history, assigning the advisor to the task, and scheduling a follow-up meeting.
“The idea is that Copilot (the company’s chatbot) is the user interface for artificial intelligence,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s vice president of business and industry, told Reuters.
“Each employee will have a co-pilot, which is their assigned AI agent, and then they will use that co-pilot to communicate and interact with the sea of AI agents that will be there.”
Tech giants are facing pressure to show returns on their significant investments in artificial intelligence. Microsoft shares fell 2.8% in the September quarter, underperforming the S&P 500, but remain up more than 10% for the year.
Some concerns have grown in recent months about the pace of Copilot adoption, with research firm Gartner saying in August that its survey of 152 IT organizations showed that the vast majority had not made progress on their Copilot initiatives beyond the pilot phase.
(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Varun HK)
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