Autonomous agents are the next frontier of AI assistants. Microsoft is adding new capabilities to help you build and deploy AI agents.
Microsoft has many Copilot offerings that cater to businesses' specific everyday needs. To give organizations more control over their AI assistants, Microsoft's Copilot Studio allows users to build and customize Copilots -- and the tech giant is bringing major upgrades to the experience.
On Tuesday, at Microsoft Ignite, the company's annual developer conference, Microsoft made several upgrades to its Copilot Studio, allowing users to build capable agents more easily. One of the biggest standouts is the introduction of autonomous agents in public preview.
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Users can now create autonomous agents directly in Copilot. As the name implies, autonomous agents can perform tasks triggered by a series of actions from different tools, systems, and databases without human intervention, such as manual prompting, to carry out the work independently.
For example, Microsoft uses the example of an email arriving, and the autonomous agent understanding how to respond and using generative AI to trigger a chain of actions that can carry out the corresponding business process, such as looking at the sender's details, checking inventory, responding accordingly, and closing the ticket.
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"When people came out with the iPhone, we realized we could put apps on phones, and there was an explosion of people trying to build apps -- I see the same analogy now that, with these new agent-building capabilities, people are exploring the new apps and solutions that they want to build quickly," said Ray Smith, CVP of AI Agents at Microsoft to ZDNET.
"Because it's powered by AI, it's much simpler to build these apps [agents]: you don't need to be a coder, you just kind of give instructions in natural language."
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To address concerns about agents going rogue, Microsoft acknowledges that the tools must come with robust enterprise protections, including data protection, encryption, and data loss prevention, with administrators also able to set strict security and access controls.
Microsoft also announced its agent library in Copilot Studio, which is available in public preview. This library allows users to select from agents created from commonly used scenarios and autonomous triggers, helping businesses automate complex tasks more easily.
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Copilot Studio also has new multimodal capabilities, including audio, allowing organizations to embed the agents into their interactive voice system or create experiences that involve voice interactions, such as agents that can recognize speech or silence, and even handle interruptions.
The quality of user agents in Copilot Studio will also be enhanced with the addition of third-party sources, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. Microsoft says agents can pull knowledge from these sources and use optimized retrieval augmented generation capabilities for high-quality answers.
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To help make experiences even more seamless, a new agent builder in Power Apps uses the knowledge of action already built into the apps to develop agents that can handle tasks automatically.
Beyond Copilot Studio, the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK is now in public preview. Users can also access a simplified agent builder experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and you can find more details about the Microsoft 365 announcements in David Gewirtz's coverage for ZDNET.