Microsoft pitches AI ‘agents’ that can perform tasks on their own at Ignite 2024

CHICAGO– Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opens a business conference in Chicago with comments that could set the stage for the company’s direction in artificial intelligence.

AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI chatbots as AI agents that can do more useful things for people. But the costs of building and deploying AI tools are so high that more and more investors are questioning whether the technology’s promise is overstated.

Microsoft said last month that it is preparing for a world where “every organization will have a constellation of agents – ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous.”

Microsoft explained in a blog post on Tuesday that such autonomous agents “could work 24 hours a day to review and approve customer returns or review shipping invoices to help companies avoid costly supply chain errors.”

Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference focuses on its large enterprise customers. The turn to so-called “agentic AI” comes as some users see limits to the big language models behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s own Copilot. These systems work by predicting the most plausible next word in a sentence and are good at certain writing tasks.

But tech companies have been working to build AI tools that are better at longer-term planning and reasoning, so they can access the web or control computers and independently perform tasks on behalf of a user.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s pivot. Salesforce also has its “Agentforce” service that uses AI in sales, marketing, and other tasks.

“Microsoft rebrands Copilot as ‘agents’? That is panic mode,” Benioff said in a social media post last month. He further claimed that Microsoft’s AI assistant, called Copilot, is “a flop” that is inaccurate and leaks corporate data.