Microsoft’s new Copilot AI agent works like a virtual employee to automate tasks. Microsoft will soon allow companies and developers to create an AI-powered copilot that can act like a virtual employee and perform tasks automatically. For example, rather than sitting idle waiting for requests, Copilot can monitor email inboxes and automate many tasks and data entry that employees would normally have to do manually.
This is a major shift in the way his Copilot works in the ability of what the industry commonly refers to as AI agents: chatbots that perform complex tasks intelligently and autonomously.
“We quickly realized that limiting Copilot to just conversations would severely limit what Copilot could do today,” said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business apps and platforms at Microsoft. Don’t wait until you chat.” What if you could make your copilot more proactive and work on automated tasks in the background?
Microsoft is making this new feature available to a small group of early access testers today ahead of a public preview in Copilot Studio later this year. Businesses can create copilot agents that can handle IT help desk service tasks, employee onboarding, and more. “The copilot is evolving from a copilot working with you to a copilot working for you,”
These Copilot agents are triggered by specific events and work with your company’s proprietary data. Here’s how Microsoft describes new first officer candidates:
Imagine you are a new employee. A proactive co-pilot will greet you, discuss personnel information, answer questions, introduce you to colleagues, give you training and deadlines, help with paperwork, and prepare you for your first week of meetings. HR departments and employees can now go about their normal business operations without any administrative hassles. This type of automation naturally leads to questions about job losses and concerns about where AI goes next. Ramanna claims that copilot agents can handle repetitive and routine tasks such as: data entry, can be eliminated rather than replacing the job completely.
“What is a job and what is a role? It involves many different tasks, and usually different and disparate tasks.” If you were repeating it, it’s probably already automated with today’s technology,” says Ramanna. “We believe that with Copilot and Copilot Studio, some tasks can be completely automated but the good news is that most of what is automated is something no one really wants to do.
Microsoft’s claim that it just wants to make work less boring sounds idealistic at this point, but given the constant battle for AI supremacy among tech companies, we’re increasingly as It sounds that you’re looking for more than just basic automation. Ramanna believes that getting work done still relies on human judgment and collaboration, and not everything lends itself to automation.
Furthermore, there are still many problems with generative AI right now, especially when it comes to hallucinations, where the AI is just making things up in its own self-consciousness. In promoting this AI agent, Microsoft says it has integrated a number of controls into its Copilot Studio to ensure that Copilot cannot simply cheat and automate tasks at will. This is a big problem we’ve already seen with Meta’s own AI advertising tools failing and wasting money.
Building Microsoft’s Copilot agent allows you to flag specific scenarios for human review. This is useful for more complex queries and data. All of this means that Copilot needs to operate within what is defined and the instructions and actions associated with these automated tasks.
Microsoft also makes it easy for businesses to bring their own data into custom Copilot with data connections to public sites, SharePoint, OneDrive, and more. This is part of a broader effort within Microsoft to make Copilot more than just a chatbot that generates things. “In 2023, Copilot and Microsoft are very focused on mining data, aggregating content, and generating new content. We believe that in 2024, Copilot will be highly customizable,” Lamanna said. The new His Copilot extension enables some of this customization, allowing developers to create connectors that extend His Copilot to various business systems.
Microsoft also wants Copilot to be able to work with larger groups of people rather than the one-on-one experience that existed until last year. New Team Copilot features let your assistant manage meeting agendas and notes, moderate long Team Copilot chats, and help assign tasks and track deadlines in Microsoft Planner. Microsoft plans to preview Team Copilot later this year.
At last week’s Google I/O, the search giant showed off some early concepts for its own AI agent that automates tasks on your behalf, with a Gmail user using an AI agent to collect a collection of shoes someone had collected. We demonstrated how to automatically fill out the return form.
The big question remains how all these AI agents will actually work. We constantly see AI fail on simple text prompts, give inaccurate answers to questions, or add extra fingers to images. So, do businesses and consumers really trust it enough to automate tasks in the background? We’ll soon find out.
