Microsoft has announced that starting next month, companies will be able to create their own autonomous artificial intelligence agents through its Copilot Studio platform. During the ‘AI Tour’ event in London, Microsoft revealed its plans to offer more organizations the ability to create these agents, which until now were only available in a private preview since May. The announcement comes just a month after Salesforce also announced its own configurable AI agents.
Subscribe to the Softonic newsletter and get the latest in tech, gaming, entertainment and deals right in your inbox.
Subscribe (it's FREE) ►These AI agents function as virtual workers that can perform various tasks without supervision, representing an evolution in AI based on language models, providing a more integrated experience. In addition to customization capabilities, Microsoft also announced the launch of 10 new autonomous agents in its Dynamics 365 suite, aimed at relevant areas such as sales, services, finance, and supply chain.
Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft, offered a demonstration in which an AI agent developed by the consulting firm McKinsey analyzed an email, checked its history, related it to standard terms, and found the right person to manage the response. “It may seem like magic,” said Spataro, emphasizing that the interesting part is that the agent was created with human language and not through programming languages. According to him, McKinsey managed to reduce delivery times by up to 90% thanks to this technology.
However, Microsoft is not alone in this market. Salesforce recently launched its Agentforce platform, which allows companies to develop their own AI agents. In a statement to CNBC, Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce for the UK and Ireland, criticized Microsoft’s ‘copilots’ for ‘not being connected or rooted in the context of customer data,’ and pointed out that, in the business environment, agents are needed that are capable of acting autonomously, beyond the role of mere assistants.
