Microsoft (MS) will enable businesses to create their very own autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents starting next month, with 10 recent additions to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) app suite, Dynamic 365. Launch autonomous agent. That is aimed directly at Salesforce.
On the twenty first (local time), Microsoft held an ‘AI Tour’ event in London, England and announced plans to support firms to customize and construct Co-Pilot Assistant through ‘Co-Pilot Studio’.
After first announcing the agent construction plan last May, it was provided as a personal preview starting September fifteenth. Moving into public preview starting next month, more organizations can construct their very own AI agents. The reason is that through this, it is feasible to construct a virtual employee that may perform a series of tasks without human supervision.
Microsoft also said that along with adding the flexibility to create autonomous agents in CoPilot Studio, it is going to launch 10 recent autonomous agents in Dynamic 365, the corporate’s suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) apps. This agent might be in public preview starting in December and running until early 2025.
Microsoft Vice President Jared Spataro demonstrated the case of an AI agent developed by consulting firm McKinsey. Customer support agents received requests for help with orders, collected situational data, and compared the difficulty to other common product issues. Then, after retrieving all the knowledge, the AI sent a follow-up email.
“This may increasingly look like magic, but we were in a position to develop our own AI agent using only natural language, not programming languages,” said Spataro. He also said, “Now we have high expectations due to the business value that may be gained through this,” and explained, “McKinsey has discovered that lead time may be reduced by as much as 90% through this.”
This agent announcement was made to deal with the sluggish corporate adoption of MS Co-Pilot. Detailed prices weren’t disclosed.
That is in direct conflict with the platform called Agentforce that Salesforce introduced last month. This can also be a platform that enables firms to construct their very own AI agents.
Salesforce has already criticized Microsoft’s QAI agent.
Salesforce CEO Mick Benioff criticized Microsoft Co-Pilot last week, calling it “useless.” Zahra Baroloumi, CEO of Salesforce UK and Ireland, also identified that Microsoft’s AI agent doesn’t meet the needs of firms.
Microsoft and Salesforce are famous for having a nasty relationship previously. Prior to now, CEO Benioff said that Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn amounted to a monopoly and called for an investigation by the European Union (EU).
With MS joining the ranks, there are signs that the competition for corporate AI agents will change into more intense. It’s because OpenAI and Google are also known to be developing AI agents.
Nevertheless, the performance and scope of labor of products currently called AI agents are limited of their early stages. For that reason, MS also released as much as 10 agents for every detailed function.
It is alleged that the event of a general-purpose agent that may handle a wide range of tasks without human intervention is barely possible after further development of the large-scale language model (LLM) and framework that support it.
Reporter Lim Da-jun ydj@aitimes.com
