Microsoft is unveiling a slew of new AI agents to solve even your toughest business problems
- Microsoft unveils a host of AI-powered agents at Ignite 2024
- AI agents even promise to solve specialized business problems
- Microsoft Teams and SharePoint are among the tools getting the upgrades
Microsoft has unveiled a host of new AI-powered agents that it says will help both users and businesses tackle some of their most pressing problems.
At Microsoft Ignite 2024, the company unveiled several new specialist agents working in the Microsoft 365 suite, alongside well-known office software such as SharePoint and Teams, as part of a first look at how transformative the technology can be.
The company says that at launch, the agents will “take on unique roles, working alongside or on behalf of a team or organization to handle both simple, mundane tasks and complex, multi-step business processes.”
AI agents for Microsoft 365
One of the new agents is the Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat (BizChat), which can provide employees with quick answers about specific HR and IT policies within their company. Users can use BizChat to get information on everything from payroll details, holiday pay, requesting a new laptop from IT and much more, all in one location.
Microsoft also revealed that users can create and customize agents for its SharePoint collaboration platform to support daily tasks and processes. For example, an agent can be designed to learn about a specific project or business area, where users can ask the agent questions about specialized areas, and the answers can be shared in real time through emails, meetings, and chats.
As for Microsoft Teams, there’s a new Facilitator agent that the company says can provide more effective collaboration and communication by taking notes in real time, before sharing a summary of key information as the chat continues. There’s also a new interpreter agent that can translate up to nine languages simultaneously in a Teams meeting, allowing participants to speak and listen in the language of their choice.
Finally, a new Project Manager agent can automate project management in the Microsoft Planner platform, by creating a plan from scratch or providing one from a range of preconfigured templates. The agent can then assign tasks, track progress, and send reminders and notifications to receive status updates.
Build it smarter
Elsewhere, Microsoft has also announced several updates to Copilot Studio, the platform used for building new agents.
In the future, users will now be able to build smarter autonomous agents that can take action on their behalf, such as responding to an email or recording an uploaded file, without having to ask the agent every time.
There will also be a library of agent templates for common business scenarios, allowing users to create an agent for the first time, in addition to the existing range of customizations.
Users can also upload images to Copilot Studio, where agents can analyze the uploads and ask questions about the images to gain additional context and insight. Any unanswered questions can be resolved by matching specific instructions to close a knowledge gap at the root of each unanswered question, with the ability to add new resources and build the agent’s intelligence over time .
Developers will also be able to build “full-stack, multichannel, trusted agents” using a new Agent SDK that brings together tools from Azure AI, Semantic Kernel and Copilot Studio, and can be deployed across multiple channels such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot , the web and other third-party messaging platforms.
