Microsoft will allow its customers to build autonomous artificial intelligence agents from next month, in its latest push to tap the booming technology amid growing investor scrutiny of its hefty AI investments.
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.
The company is also introducing 10 ready-for-use agents that can help with routine tasks ranging from managing supply chain to expense tracking and client communications.
In a 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 pressure to show returns on their big 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 the vast majority had not progressed their Copilot initiatives past the pilot stage.
—Aditya Soni, Reuters
Autentifică-te pentru a adăuga comentarii
Alte posturi din acest grup
As Elon Musk announced plans over the Fourth of July weekend to establish a third political party,
Dolores Ballesteros, a Mexico-based mother of two, was getting desperate. Her 6-year-old son kept hitting his brother, age 3, and seemed angry at her all the time. No matter what she did, she coul
Rarely has Silicon Valley experienced a more profound period of transformation than it has in the past handful of years. The big VC boom of 2020–2021. The great VC hangover starting in 2022. The g
A YouTube executive needed only 27 minutes to make the case that the company is taking over all aspects of how people create and consume video online.
That was the length of a recent tal
Every time I read about another advance in AI technology, I feel like another figment
Racist AI-generated videos are going viral on
Scientists are tracking a large gas planet experiencing quite a quandary as it orbits extremely close to a young star – a predicament never previously observed.
This exoplanet, as
