Some highlights from the article:
"Microsoft is introducing autonomous artificial intelligence agents, or virtual employees, that can perform tasks such as handling client queries and identifying sales leads"
"The US tech company is giving customers the ability to build their own AI agents as well as releasing 10 off-the-shelf bots that can carry out a range of roles including supply chain management and customer service."
"Early adopters of the Copilot Studio product, which launches next month, include the blue chip consulting firm McKinsey, which is building an agent to process new client inquiries by carrying out tasks such as scheduling follow-up meetings. Other early users include law firm Clifford Chance and retailer Pets at Home."
"Microsoft is flagging AI agents, which carry out tasks without human intervention, as an example of the technology’s ability to increase productivity – a measure of economic efficiency, or the amount of output generated by a worker for each hour worked."
"Nadella described Copilot Studio, which does not require coding expertise from its users, as a “no-code way for you to be able to build agents”. Microsoft is powering the agents with several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT."
"Microsoft is also developing an AI agent that can carry out transactions on behalf of users. The company’s head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, has said he has seen “stunning demos” where the agent makes a purchase independently, but that it has also suffered “car crash moments” in development. Sulyeman added, nonetheless, that an agent with these capabilities will emerge “in quarters, not years”."
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This isn't really a technical source who wrote the article, but it makes me curious how deep/far the "agency" of these agents really is...
Also, I additionally wonder if MS is simply using chatGPT tech like 4o in their own wrapper tool, or if this functionality is coming more directly from OpenAI as some agent-like model we havent seen yet. I'm guessing the former, but still, by now we have to safely assume that GPT-5 is slated to be a substantial leap forward, not just "better GPT-4", which means it will most likely have this kind of capability out of the box when it comes out... just speculation on my part.
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