Microsoft To Allow Businesses To Make AI Agents, Competing With Salesforce

Microsoft is taking the fight back to Salesforce, as it will allow businesses to develop their own autonomous artificial intelligence agents by next month.

Salesforce has already introduced configurable agentic AI tools in September and Microsoft may be competing with it head on with the introduction of its AI agents.

On Monday, at the company's "AI Tour" in London, Microsoft unveiled its plans to allow entities to build their own autonomous agents within Copilot Studio, the platform that allows users to build their own co-pilot assistants, NBC News reported.

Previously, the agents were available in private preview after Microsoft announced its availability in May. By next month, the company would be moving to public preview, which would give more organizations to start building their own AI agents.

AI agents act like "virtual workers," where they can do specific set of tasks independently without supervision. These agents are often regarded as the higher evolution of the large language model-based AI from chat interfaces. The operations of these agents tend to blend seamlessly in the background, creating a better experience for users.

Aside from launching the agents within Copilot Studio, there would also be 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365, Microsoft's enterprise resource planning suite. The company is planning to introduce agents for service, finance, sales and supply chain teams.

On Monday, Microsoft's corporate vice president of modern work and business applications, Jared Spataro, showed an example of an AI agent, which was developed at the McKinsey consulting firm.

The example that was shown by Spataro was that of an agent that parsed an email, identified the subject of the communication, checked the communication's history, then mapped it to industry-standard terms. Thereafter, the agent found the right person at the firm who will be taking the next step before coming up with a response. The best part perhaps was that, the firm developed the agent using human language.

"We're excited about this because of the business value it can drive," Spataro said, Techstrong reported.

A month before Microsoft's launch of its AI agent, Salesforce already showed off Agentforce, which also allowed businesses to develop their own AI agents at its Dreamforce showcase in San Francisco.

"All of these copilots activated on the edge, or in email — they're not connected to or grounded within the context of customer data," Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce's CEO of U.K. and Ireland said.