Inside Microsoft’s big bet on AI agents – personal assistants for the digital age

On Microsoft's vast headquarters campus in Redmond, Washington, it's not hard to find employees excited about the company's push for everyone to have access to AI agents – personal assistants driven by artificial intelligence and tailored to an individual's needs.

One of the biggest proponents of these little helpers is the technology giant's vice president of autonomous agents, Ray Smith.

“I do think building agents and building capabilities to interact with AI is going to be a key kind of credential that every human will have in the future,” he told The National.

Microsoft's goal of putting AI agents into the mainstream was solidified in January with a social media post from chief executive Satya Nadella as he introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

“This is a big step forward in making AI accessible to every employee in every business. It’s not just about having access to Copilot. It’s about unleashing a swarm of intelligent agents to supercharge your productivity and unlock the full return on investment of AI,” he said in a video.

“People often mystify agents, but I think of it like creating an Excel spreadsheet. Building agents should be as simple as that.”

Microsoft described AI agents as a way for humans to have their own assistants that can be delegated to do certain tasks, in theory freeing up humans to pursue other items.

“Instead of just assisting you, agents can work alongside you or even on your behalf,” a portion of the company's AI agent website section explains.

The ability to plug-in existing AI agents and create new robot helpers is sprinkled throughout Microsoft's 365 Copilot offering, and it's a major feature within company's Copilot Studio tool.

Mr Smith explained the company's strategy to make agents prevalent throughout its Copilot AI platform, and therefore, if Copilot grows as the company hopes, the entire industry.

“Our vision is the future is going to be humans interacting with an AI assistant. … So you'll have one assistant, or you might have hundreds, if not thousands of agents or apps that are doing parts of your process, and it's going to be very much humans in the loop managing these agents as they do work for you, as they escalate, as they come back for more guidance.”

Mr Smith said Microsoft's tools allow for users with relatively limited experience to easily create agents to bolster their workflow.

It's relatively easy, he said, for someone to design an agent by giving it a goal or objective – like examining invoices as these are submitted, and extracting all their data to specific areas.

Pets At Home, Thomson Reuters and Dow Chemical are some of the companies that Mr Smith says are early adopters of using AI agents to streamline processes, quicken workflows and increase revenue.

With more experienced programming, he said, users can also create agents to evaluate other agents. But ultimately the tools are designed to help free humans up to get work done.

“At Microsoft, we look at them as the apps for getting work done that will surface within our user interface through Copilot, and agents really just get the work done and give us agency,” he said.

Microsoft is not alone with the idea, and the technology landscape is filled with players pitching similar AI agent visions. Tech's history is littered with once promising ideas that fail to gain traction.

Mr Smith, however, said Microsoft has several key differentiators to succeed with its AI agent push.

Microsoft has ample experience and “power automate connectors” to more than 1,500 existing systems, he noted. “That gives you action into Oracle, SAP, WorkDay and Salesforce … you can now add a connector to these agents.”

He also pointed to what he described as Microsoft's seasoned history of having enterprise-grade knowledge that gives the company the ability to hit the ground running and instil confidence in those wanting to implement AI agents into their workflow.

“Wherever you need a human to validate, check or cross reference something, that can be done by an agent,” he said, pointing out that they're perfect for insurance claims and invoice processing, just to name a few areas.

According to Microsoft, since launching autonomous AI agents in early 2024, more than 100,000 organisations have created agents using its Copilot Studio offering, which is still in the early stages of deployment.

“We're hearing back from customers who build these early agents and deploying them to production, and they like the speed of prototyping their use cases and getting them into production,” Mr Smith said, adding that in his eyes, Microsoft is building a steady pipeline of customers who are using the company's products to create AI agents.