AI employees? Microsoft launches autonomous agents to onboard workers or manage help desk

Microsoft customers will soon be able to build their own artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can work on tasks like onboarding new workers or answering help desk questions. 

Microsoft announced in a blog post on Monday that it is launching an “autonomous agent” feature in Copilot, their AI software, in the next month. 

Users can build their own AIs in Copilot or use 10 pre-made models in Dynamics 365, the package of customer relationship apps from Microsoft. 

The Dynamics 365 agents can either help prioritise the most valuable sales opportunities, optimise their supply chain management, or take over customer services. 

The agents have been around in private preview since May, but next month they’ll be available publicly so more companies can build their own AIs.

Who is using these AI agents?

Some of the early adopters of this new feature include consulting giant McKinsey & Company, law firm Clifford Chance, and media news service Thomson Reuters. 

The US company said the new AI agents are already helping their company scale, with one sales team closing 20 per cent more deals and achieving a 9.4 per cent revenue jump per seller. 

In a post from May, Microsoft explains that the AI agents use a mix of asynchronous learning, memory, context and feedback to be able to do this work for Microsoft clients. 

For example, the AI will remember basic information about the client, like name, policy number and address to offer “long-running, contextual and deeply personalised” customer care conversations, the company wrote. 

Charles Lamanna, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, told the Guardian that these agents would only do the mundane parts of people’s jobs, not replace them. 

The arrival of AI tools like agents, he continued, is comparable to personal computers several decades ago. 

Euronews Next reached out to Microsoft but didn’t get an immediate reply.