Microsoft Corp. announced a set of autonomous artificial intelligence agents for Dynamics 365 aimed at business users today during the company’s AI Tour in London.

The company also said the ability to create AI agents with Copilot Studio will be in public preview next month. The capability was introduced in private preview in May at Microsoft Build 2024.

Agents are a type of AI assistant that automates tasks independently and does work for humans without the need for intervention. They can range from simple prompt-and-response chatbots to fully autonomous actors that can read emails, use company data, send messages and alerts, compose replies and prepare reports.

“Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world,” said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work at Microsoft. “Every organization will have a constellation of agents.”

Copilot Studio will soon provide an all-in-one platform for building and managing agents, including managing infrastructure, AI models and a low-code design interface with connectors. Users need only connect them to the data sources they want them to “know,” such as internal business knowledge databases, the web or other sources such as SharePoint and Salesforce, and assign them actions such as sending email, messages in Slack or adding rows to databases.

From there, users can describe what they want the AI agent to do in natural language by instructing it as they would an employee. For example, they could tell it to read incoming emails, pull out names and industry information, relate it to internal company database knowledge, and then send an email to team members to get them started for customer engagement. By setting the AI agent to trigger when an email is received, it can automatically run, read emails and do the busywork of summarizing, pulling out insights and picking the right team members for incoming marketing emails.

Copilot Studio agents have access to the latest models, including new models such as OpenAI’s o1, which is currently available in the limited private preview.

Bringing autonomous agents to Dynamics 365

Microsoft said 10 autonomous agents are coming to Dynamics 365 to assist business users across every facet of their practice by bringing the power of AI right to where they work.

“These new agents are designed to help every sales, service, finance and supply chain team drive business value and are just the start,” said Bryan Goode, corporate vice president of business applications and platform at Microsoft. “We will create many more agents in the coming year that give customers the competitive advantage they need to future-proof their organization.”

In sales, agents will help sellers focus more of their efforts on engaging customers and less time on tedious work. The Sales Qualification Agent within Dynamics 365 Sales will research and prioritize leads while assisting with developing personalized sales emails. The Sales Order Agent for Dynamics 365 Business Central can automate order intakes by interacting with customers and capturing their preferences.

Agents for finance and operations will be able to help prepare data to reduce the time for reporting and automate ledger transactions for accountants who need to keep the books straight. For example, the Time and Expense Agent for project management can assist with time entry, expense tracking and approval, and keep invoices going out to customers on time.

The Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management agents, available for Dynamics 365 Service and Contact Center, will work with customer service operators to assist them during calls. Having a way to determine customer intent from past and current customer conversations, will help operators better understand how they can help customers. The knowledge management agent will keep articles and documents up-to-date with the case notes and summaries taken by operators after calls.

Microsoft said these agents for Dynamics 365 will continue to learn and handle new situations as they happen. Agents will work to improve their quality of service based on how issues are resolved.

The company said the 10 agents introduced today will start to become available later this year in public preview, which will continue until early 2025.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer