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Windows Central

Technology

Sean Endicott

Microsoft shuts up Salesforce CEO with Copilot agents that are "the new apps for an AI-powered world" and run on OpenAI's latest models

Microsoft Salesforce Amazon Best Buy Dell LG McKinsey Company Supply chain

What you need to know

Microsoft's Copilot Studio will soon support creating autonomous agents if you're part of the company's public preview.
Copilot agents are AI-powered tools that can help with a wide range of tasks and processes.
Agents can respond to specific triggers autonomously or respond to prompts.
Microsoft also introduced ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 designed to help sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams.

Microsoft announced that the ability to create custom Copilot agents will enter public preview at Microsoft Ignite, which starts on November 19, 2024. Copilot agents are a step toward the future seen in films and television in which you can ask AI to take care of something for you. Agents can work either autonomously or respond to prompts to aid organizations and workers. Since it's possible to create custom Copilot agents, their capabilities will expand over time, but they can already help with tasks such as lead generation, processing orders, onboarding staff, assisting in sales, and automating a supply chain.

Copilot agents can get context from data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, and Dataverse and Fabric.

What is a Copilot agent?

Copilot agents are AI assistants that can be created to help with certain tasks. The agents can help departments such as IT, marketing, sales, customer service, and finance, according to Microsoft. The tech giant also sees value in the tools for travel, retail, and financial services.

Microsoft envisions a future in which organizations have a range of AI-powered agents acting autonomously or responding to prompts. Microsoft explains that you can think of Copilot agents " as the new apps for an AI-powered world."

Agents made with Copilot Studio run the "latest models," according to Microsoft. Most notably, OpenAI o1 powers some of the agents at the moment, though that is in limited private preview.

Copilot agents entered private preview recently and will enter public preview next month. Microsoft shared quotes from several companies that have used custom agents to showcase how the tool can help organizations.

“We’re using AI to do the time-consuming work so they can use their resource and expertise to make decisions quickly based on the data available,” said Pets at Home CIO William Hewish. “It’s truly helped us empower colleagues through both the level of information at their fingertips, and in time spent on more nuanced and insightful work. The agents solution allows the profit protection team to more effectively assess cases for potential profit loss and dedicate more of their time to skilled analysis, rather than simply information gathering.”

McKinsey & Company built a Copilot agent to help with reviewing client proposals and has seen early success. "We see tremendous potential for agents to help our clients rewire the way their businesses operate," said Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company Rodney Zemmel.

Salesforce CEO drama

Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff claims that Microsoft Copilot "doesn't deliver value." (Image credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Recently, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff called out Copilot, dubbing the new AI tool the "new Microsoft Clippy." The executive claimed that Copilot does not deliver value to customers and predicted the tool will not be around for long.

"When you look at how Copilot has been sold to our customers, it's disappointing. It doesn't work," said Benioff. "It spews data all over our floors, it doesn't deliver value. I haven't found a customer who has transformational work with Copilot. Copilot is just the new Microsoft Clippy."

Benioff believes that "Salesforce can beat Microsoft in AI." At least part of the CEO's confidence is due to Agentforce, a new tool from Salesforce that helps build customized AI agents. Agentforce can handle "a couple of trillion AI transactions per week," and Benioff has been effusive in his praise of the tool.

"This must be witchcraft, this is crazy with what's happening with my customers right now," said the Salesforce CEO.

Both Salesforce and Microsoft are working on tools for building custom AI agents, but it's early days for Agentforce and Copilot agents. Now that Microsoft's offering is in public preview, we'll be able to get a better gauge of how it stacks up against Agentforce.

Autonomous agents in Dynamics 365

Microsoft also introduced ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to help sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams. Microsoft highlights that the agents available in Dynamics 365 follow the tech giant's security, privacy, and AI responsibility standards and shared a few examples of agents now available in Dynamics 365:

Sales Qualification Agent: In a profession where time literally equals money, this agent enables sellers to focus their time on the highest priority sales opportunities while the agent Classified as Microsoft Confidential researches leads, helps prioritize opportunities and guides customer outreach with personalized emails and responses.
Supplier Communications Agent: This agent enables customers to optimize their supply chain and minimize costly disruptions by autonomously tracking supplier performance, detecting delays and responding accordingly — freeing procurement teams from time consuming manual monitoring and firefighting.
Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management Agents: A business gets one chance to make a first impression, and these two agents are game changers for customer care teams facing high call volumes, talent shortages and heightened customer expectations. These agents work hand in hand with a customer service representative by learning how to resolve customer issues and autonomously adding knowledge-based articles to scale best practices across the care team.

Microsoft will talk about custom AI agents at its Ignite conference, which runs from November 19-22. Tickets for attending Ignite in person are sold out, but you can also attend the event online. There, the tech giant will also showcase the tools in action and highlight how they help organizations.