Microsoft to launch autonomous AI agents in November

Microsoft will soon let customers build autonomous AI agents that can be configured to perform complex tasks with little or no input from humans.

Microsoft on Monday announced that tools to build AI agents in Copilot Studio will be available in a public beta that begins at the company’s Ignite conference on Nov. 19, with pre-built agents rolling out to Dynamics 365 apps in the coming month,s too.

Microsoft first unveiled plans to let users create AI agents in Copilot Studio — its low- or no-code AI development platform — in May with a private preview for select customers. 

Generative AI (genAI) agents can be seen as the next stage in the evolution of conversational AI assistants such as Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While AI assistants respond directly to a user’s instructions — such as drafting an email or summarizing a document — autonomous AI agents are triggered by events and can perform more complex, multi-step processes on their own.  

For example, a business could configure an AI agent to respond to the arrival of a customer email. At this point, the AI agent can look up the sender’s account details, check for past communications, and then take a range of actions — such as checking inventory or asking the customer for preferences — on its own. 

There are a wide range of potential use cases, according to Microsoft, with the ability to tailor AI agents to a variety of tasks, from employee onboarding to supply chain automation.

“We think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world,” said Bryan Goode, corporate vice president for business Applications at Microsoft.   

AI agents can be created via a no-code graphical interface in Copilot Studio, meaning no software development is required, according to Microsoft. Agents can then be published and accessed in a variety of places: from Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, on a website, or within an app.

The new Copilot AI agents can help take sales orders, for exaample.
Microsoft

Goode sees a broad appeal for workers outside of developers and IT: “We think everyone will need to be able to create agents in the future, much like how everyone can create spreadsheets or presentations in Microsoft 365,” he said. 

“Agents really represent the democratization of AI for many enterprise users who have specific tasks they want to accomplish, but have no desire to become AI experts,” said Jack Gold, principal analyst with business consultancy J. Gold Associates.

Microsoft has taken steps to mitigate the impact of “hallucinations” –—a problem that’s exacerbated when AI agents can act independently and are given access to business applications. 

For example, agents created for Dynamics will require human approval before carrying out certain actions, said Goode, such as preparing outbound communications. A viewable record of actions taken by an AI agent and why it took a decision is also kept in Copilot Studio.

More generally, Goode pointed to improvements to Microsoft’s Azure Content Safety system, which helps “measure, detect and mitigate hallucinations” more effectively, he said.

Nevertheless, hallucinations will continue to be a consideration for businesses that deploy AI agents, said Rowan Curran, senior analyst at Forrester. 

“Buyers are rightly excited about the potential of agentic AI systems, but the reality of implementation is going to be just as challenging, if not more so, than the current generation of advanced RAG [retrieval-augmented generation] systems,” Curran said. “Having a strong data foundation will be essential for building useful AI agents: data quality and management aren’t problems that can be swept under the rug.”

Microsoft is developing 10 pre-configured AI agents for its Dynamics 365 business application suite. These include a “sales qualification agent” for Dynamics 365 Sales, a “sales order agent” for Dynamics 365 Business Central, and a “case management agent” Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The AI agents for Dynamics 365 will be available “over the coming months,” a Microsoft spokesperson said, with pricing and licensing details to be announced closer to the general availability launch.  

Microsoft is not alone in building AI agents into its products: other business software vendors are doing the same, from Salesforce, which unveiled its Agentforce platform last month, to SAP and ServiceNow, as well as digital work app vendors such as Atlassian and Asana.

“In the next couple of years, you’ll see virtually all enterprise solutions providers deploy agents into their apps,” said Gold.