Microsoft

Microsoft Corp. is joining the autonomous AI agent scrum next month, throwing its corporate elbows at the likes of Salesforce Inc. and ServiceNow Inc., both of whom plunged into the market a few months earlier.

The software giant on Monday announced an ambitious plan to let organizations create their own AI agents within Copilot Studio at an AI event in London. Previously, Microsoft made agents available in private preview for a few months. But in November, that will change and agents will be in public preview, allowing organizations to build their own AI agents.

Microsoft said it will launch 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365, its suite of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management apps; the company also intends to debut new agents in Dynamics 365 for sales, service, finance and supply chain teams.

Additionally, Microsoft said it reached a five-year deal with the UK government to offer public sector organizations access to its AI tools.

Microsoft’s decision to double down on AI agents is likely to send a ripple-like effect throughout the industry and  impact nearly every SaaS and business apps contender, says Daniel Newman, chief executive of The Futurum Group. A vast majority of software makers are scrambling to embrace AI in some manner, with many pursuing the deployment of AI agents to perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

At the London launch, Microsoft demonstrated how an AI agent evaluated an email at consulting firm McKinsey to determine its intent, history and phrasing to identify the right person within the organization to act on the message, and then summarize their actions.

McKinsey developed its customized AI agent through human language and not programming languages, according to Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of modern work and business applications, who was present during the demo.

“We’re excited about this because of the business value it can drive,” Spataro told CNBC, highlighting how McKinsey reduced lead time through its agent by up to 90%.

Microsoft’s agentic AI gambit comes roughly a month after Salesforce debuted a new platform, called Agentforce, that lets enterprises create their own AI agents. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was joined by NVIDIA Corp. CEO Jensen Huang in making the announcement. Both compared the creation of AI agents to an extended workforce of low-level task masters to increase efficiency and free up humans to do more complex work.

“There will be billions of these agents,” Huang predicted.

News of Microsoft’s agentic aspirations came the same day that CrewAI announced general availability of an enterprise edition of a platform that makes it possible to create and deploy AI agents using any type of large language model. On Tuesday, Anthropic unveiled AI agents that can use a computer to complete complex tasks like a human. And on Wednesday, Cisco Systems Inc. announced Webex AI agents and assistants that work alongside humans to ease customer service headaches. Hours later, ServiceNow Inc. said its AI agents will be released more broadly next month.

Earlier Monday, Elon Musk announced that xAI released its first API, and Nebius, the first publicly traded AI infrastructure company that some dubbed “Russia’s Google,” resumed trading on NASDAQ. Trading was halted in 2022 as part of sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. The company has since entirely divested from Russia in a record-breaking $5.4 billion deal and is now based in Amsterdam.

Last week, NVIDIA Corp. raised the stakes — not to mention performance — with a new AI model to significantly outperforms offerings from rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. The new model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct, emerged last week on Hugging Face, and it comes with benchmarks that leave OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, in the dust.

“AI is very good at automating tasks, not jobs,” Anurag Dhingra, Cisco’s senior vice president and general of collaboration, said in an interview. “It augments humans, and we think groups of agents will work in a coordinated, federated manner.”

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