News

Microsoft Expands AI Capabilities with Autonomous Agents at Ignite Conference

• By Gladys Rama
• October 22, 2024

At its Ignite conference next month, Microsoft will let more of its users spin up autonomous AI "agents" within Copilot Studio, its AI orchestration platform, the company says.
The public preview of this agent-building capability advances Microsoft's efforts to enable organizations to offload smaller, repetitive tasks to AI agents, which can be thought of as more nimble, programmable versions of the Copilot chatbot. In a blog post Monday, Microsoft 365 chief marketing officer Jared Spataro described agents as "the new apps for an AI-powered world."

"Every organization will have a constellation of agents," Spataro predicted, "ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process."

Launched last year, Copilot Studio connects the Copilot AI to an organization's various data sources, from the Microsoft Graph to Dynamics 365. With November's public preview, users will be able to build their own agents within Copilot Studio and train them on those same data sources.

The agents will be able to run on a variety of AI models, including OpenAI's "o1" model, which is optimized for reasoning through complex problems. Agents are meant to run largely without human intervention. They can be scheduled to run at set intervals, or programmed to perform actions in response to specific triggers from other applications or tools.

Though agents act autonomously, Microsoft users will be able to view their internal logic for each task that they resolve. Knowing why an agent reacts to a trigger will help users reinforce correct behavior or debug undesired behavior. Additionally, an "Activity" tab will keep a running log of each time an agent is triggered into action, with details such as task completion, decisions and more.
More information about the agent-building capability in Copilot Studio is available in this blog post.

For Microsoft's CRM and ERP customers, the company also announced a set of 10 specialized, prebuilt AI agents in Dynamics 365. These agents are meant to "build capacity for sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams," according to this blog post.

Microsoft will roll out public previews of these agents starting in late 2024 and into early 2025:

• Sales Qualification Agent (for Dynamics 365 Sales)
• Sales Order Agent (for Dynamics 365 Business Central)
• Supplier Communications Agent (for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management)
• Financial Reconciliation Agent (for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance)
• Account Reconciliation Agent (for Dynamics 365 Finance)
• Time and Expense Agent (for Dynamics 365 Project Operations)
• Customer Intent Agent (for Dynamics 365 Customer Service)
• Customer Knowledge Management Agents (for Dynamics 365 Contact Center)
• Case Management Agent (for Dynamics 365 Customer Service)
• Scheduling Operations Agent (for Dynamics 365 Field Service)

Microsoft is developing more Dynamics 365 agents for 2025, the company said.