A significant update to Microsoft’s Copilot offering is being announced at the company’s Ignite event. Several AI agents are being rolled out within the Microsoft portfolio. Those not satisfied with their degree of autonomy can build their own agents.
It isn’t the first announcement from Microsoft regarding agents: the Dynamics 365 platform, for example, received support for them in late October. Now all kinds of other components of the Microsoft suite will follow, including SharePoint, 365 Business Chat and Teams.
Copilot with extra vigor
Microsoft has observed that organizations are already adopting AI-driven features en masse. For example, 600,000 organizations today use AI and Copilot in Microsoft Power Platform, a fourfold increase from last year. The question is exactly which parts of said AI offerings are being adopted, and GenAI in particular is a question mark. Regardless, agents are now being rolled out more broadly, which may further strengthen adoption and effectiveness.
Within SharePoint, agents can make decisions based on specific SharePoint content, such as to immediately share information from certain folders to co-workers as soon as a file s uploaded. For HR and IT tasks, the Employee Self-Service Agent provides many options for employees, such as automatically requesting leave or a new work laptop. Also, Teams has been further enhanced with the Facilitator and Interpreter (interpreter) agents. The former is primarily intended as a summarizer, while the Interpreter can mimic someone’s voice in another language.
Actually agents?
Microsoft does stretch the definition of AI agents a bit. The examples above show this well; by no means are all the new features truly autonomous, which is after all core to the concept of an AI agent. Regardless, Microsoft does have “real” agents in the form of autonomous agents, now launching in public preview.
Developers are set to build autonomous agents within Copilot Studio, with a good starting point from the new agent library often being available, which is also launching today in public preview. The autonomous nature of these agents is, to be clear, the key to independent AI decisions. No prompt is required to enable these agents.
The big advantage for existing Microsoft 365 users is the deep integration with this suite. Through the Microsoft Agent SDK, grounding takes place right away for AI agents via the Copilot Trust Layer. Proprietary data is thus used to make the AI tool as targeted as possible.
2025 will only be the year of AI agents for Microsoft
We have seen the meteoric rise of AI agents in recent months. Within Salesforce, they are summarized under the banner of Agentforce and were launched as early as late October. It seems that Microsoft is a bit behind in this regard, especially since the promised capabilities of these Copilot agents are quite modest. In 2025, Microsoft will undoubtedly make a big move toward ready-to-use autonomous agents, but for now it’s still a while away.