Microsoft’s new Copilot AI agents act as virtual employees that automate tasks

Microsoft will soon enable businesses and developers to create AI-powered Copilots that can act as virtual employees and perform tasks automatically. Instead of waiting idly for inquiries, Copilot will be able to do things like monitor email inboxes and automate a number of tasks or data entry that employees normally have to do manually.

It’s a big change in how Copilot behaves in what the industry commonly calls AI agents, or the ability of chatbots to perform complex tasks intelligently and autonomously.

“We realized very quickly that limiting Copilot to conversation only was extremely limiting in what Copilot could do today,” explains Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of enterprise applications and platforms at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. “Instead of having a Copilot that waits there until someone chats with them, what if you could make your Copilot more active and work in the background on automated tasks.”

Microsoft is making this new feature available to a very small group of early access testers today ahead of a public demo in Copilot Studio later this year. Businesses will be able to create a Copilot agent to handle IT help desk service tasks, staffing and much more. “Copilots are evolving from copilots that work with you to copilots that work for you,” Microsoft said in a blog post.

These Copilot agents will be triggered by certain events and will work with the enterprise’s own data. Here’s how Microsoft describes a potential Copilot for employee onboarding:

Imagine you are a new employee. A proactive co-pilot will welcome you, brainstorm HR data and answer your questions, introduce you to your buddy, provide you with training and dates, help you with forms, and set up your first week of meetings. Now HR and employees can work on their regular tasks without tedious administration.

This type of automation will naturally lead to questions about job losses and concerns about where AI will go next. Lamanna argues that Copilot agents can remove repetitive and mundane tasks from jobs, such as data entry, rather than replacing jobs entirely.

“What makes a job, what makes a role? It’s a bunch of different tasks, and generally a very large number of very diverse and heterogeneous tasks. If someone were to do one thing over and over again, it would probably be automated by today’s technology,” says Lamanna. “With Copilot and Copilot Studio, we think some tasks will be completely automated … but the good news is that most of the things that are automated are things that nobody really wants to do.”

Microsoft’s argument that it just wants to cut down on the boring bits of your job sounds idealistic for now, but with the constant battle for AI dominance among tech companies, it seems we’re increasingly on the verge of more than basic automation. Lamanna believes that human judgment and collaboration are still an important part of work and that not everything will be suitable for automation.

There are also still a lot of issues with generative AI right now, especially around hallucinations where they just confidently make things up. Microsoft says it built a number of controls into Copilot Studio for this AI agent push so that Copilot doesn’t simply fail and automate tasks freely. That’s a big concern, and one we’ve seen before when Meta’s AI ad tools misfired and chased the money.

You can build Microsoft Copilot agents with the ability to flag certain scenarios for people to review, which will be useful for more complex queries and data. All of this means that Copilot should work within the boundaries of what has been defined and the instructions and actions that are associated with these automated tasks.

Microsoft also makes it easy for businesses to bring their own data into their own Copilot with data connections to public websites, SharePoint, OneDrive and more. This is one part of a broader effort within Microsoft to make Copilot more than just a chatbot that generates stuff.

“Copilot in 2023 – and Microsoft – has been very focused on searching your data, summarizing your content and generating new content. We think Copilot in 2024 will be very focused on customization,” says Lamanna. The new Copilot extensions will enable some of this customization, allowing developers to create connectors that extend Copilot across different business systems.

Microsoft also wants Copilot to work more collaboratively with groups of people, instead of these one-on-one experiences that have existed for the past year. The new Team Copilot feature will allow an assistant to manage meeting agendas and notes, moderate long team chats, or help assign tasks and track deadlines in Microsoft Planner. Microsoft plans to show Team Copilot later this year.

At Google I/O last week, the search giant also showed off some early concepts for its own AI agents that automate tasks for you, showing how Gmail users could use an AI agent to automatically fill out a form to return some shoes and have someone collect them.

The big question remains how all these AI agents will work in reality. We’re constantly seeing AI fail basic text prompts, give incorrect answers to questions, or add extra fingers to images, so do businesses and consumers really trust it enough to automate background tasks? I guess we’ll find out.