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

CHICAGO — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told customers at a conference in Chicago on Tuesday that the company is teaching a new set of artificial intelligence tools how to "act on our behalf across our work and life.”

AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI chatbots as AI “agents” that can do more useful things on people's behalf. But the cost of building and running AI tools is so high that more investors are questioning whether the technology’s promise is overblown.

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

Microsoft elaborated in a blog post Tuesday that such autonomous agents "can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or go over shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly supply-chain errors.”

Microsoft's annual Ignite conference caters to its big business customers. The pivot toward so-called “agentic AI” comes as some users are seeing limits to the large language models behind chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's own Copilot. Those systems work by predicting the most plausible next word in a sentence and are good at certain writing-based work tasks.

But tech companies have been working to build AI tools that are better at longer-range planning and reasoning so they can access the web or control computers and perform tasks on their own on a user's behalf.

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 rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode,” Benioff said in a social media post last month. He went on to claim that Microsoft's flagship AI assistant, called Copilot, is “a flop” that is inaccurate and spills corporate data.