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AI Agents at Forefront of Microsoft's Copilot Vision
AI agents are coming for your workflows.
That's a key takeaway from Microsoft's recent event spotlighting new and forthcoming capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot, its productivity-minded AI assistant.
Among the product's so-called "Wave 2" updates is the capability, now generally available, to create autonomous AI agents and embed them into Microsoft 365 workflows.
Microsoft previously described the agent capability at this May's Build conference. Microsoft envisions AI agents as smaller copilots that are capable of running autonomously to perform complex tasks with layers of dependencies.
As Microsoft described in a blog post Monday, agents play a central role in the company's AI vision. "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," wrote Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's Copilot chief.
"We believe organizations that embrace Al will create and use many Copilot agents," he added. "There will be as many agents as there are documents or SharePoint sites in an organization."
The new Copilot Agents capability announced Monday lets users build agents using Copilot Studio, ground them in organizational data like SharePoint or Dynamics 365, teach them skills such as creating support tickets or responding to e-mails, then deploy them across Microsoft 365, including within Microsoft Teams.
The agents are fully managed and orchestrated by Copilot. Per Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro during the presentation, the agents "can reason, remember, be trained and even know when to ask for help."
A separate Copilot Agents in SharePoint feature, rolling out as a public preview in October, will allow users to quickly create agents connected to specific SharePoint sites or folders.
Microsoft announced a slew of other enhancements coming to Microsoft 365 Copilot. More details are in this Redmond Magazine article.