Microsoft to start offering AI autonomous agents from next month

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) will allow businesses to start making their own autonomous AI agents from next month, amid competition from Salesforce (CRM), which introduced its own configurable AI models in September.

“Copilot is the UI for AI, and with Copilot Studio, customers can easily create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot,” said Microsoft’s Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

The tech giant announced new autonomous agent capabilities across Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365.

The company said it has introduced 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build capacity for every sales, service, finance and supply chain team.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced several new capabilities in Copilot Studio, including the ability to create autonomous agents.

Next month, these capabilities would shift from private to public preview, allowing more customers to reimagine critical business processes with AI, according to Microsoft.

The company noted that agents draw on the context of work data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Dataverse and Fabric, and can support everything from IT help desk to employee onboarding and act as a personal assistant for sales and service.

Organizations like Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home and Thomson Reuters are already creating autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact, according to Microsoft.

Last month, Salesforce held its annual Dreamforce conference where it offered several positives on its cloud and AI initiatives, according to Bard.