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

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella advised prospects at a convention in Chicago on Tuesday that the corporate is instructing a brand new set of synthetic intelligence instruments learn how to “act on our behalf throughout our work and life.”

AI builders are more and more pitching the subsequent wave of generative AI chatbots as AI “brokers” that may do extra helpful issues on folks’s behalf. However the price of constructing and operating AI instruments is so excessive that extra traders are questioning whether or not the expertise’s promise is overblown.

Microsoft mentioned final month that it is making ready for a world the place “each group can have a constellation of brokers—starting from easy prompt-and-response to totally autonomous.”

Microsoft elaborated in a weblog submit Tuesday that such autonomous brokers “can function across the clock to overview and approve buyer returns or go over delivery invoices to assist companies keep away from expensive supply-chain errors.”

Microsoft’s annual Ignite convention caters to its huge enterprise prospects. The pivot towards so-called “agentic AI” comes as some customers are seeing limits to the massive language fashions behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s personal Copilot. These techniques work by predicting essentially the most believable subsequent phrase in a sentence and are good at sure writing-based work duties.

However tech corporations have been working to construct AI instruments which might be higher at longer-range planning and reasoning to allow them to entry the online or management computer systems and carry out duties on their very own on a consumer’s behalf.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s pivot. Salesforce additionally has its “Agentforce” service that makes use of AI in gross sales, advertising and marketing and different duties.

“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘brokers’? That is panic mode,” Benioff mentioned in a social media submit final month. He went on to assert that Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, referred to as Copilot, is “a flop” that’s inaccurate and spills company knowledge.

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