Microsoft’s expansion of AI agents within the Copilot Studio ecosystem was a central focus of the company’s Ignite conference. Since the launch of Copilot Studio, more than 100,000 enterprise organizations have created or edited AI agents using the platform. Copilot Studio is getting new features to increase productivity, including multimodal capabilities that take agents beyond text and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enhancements to enable agents with real-time knowledge from multiple third-party sources, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. Integration with Azure is expanded as 1,800 large language models in the Azure catalog are made available.

VentureBeat calls that expansion “a significant move beyond its exclusive reliance on OpenAI’s models,” noting that “the company also unveiled autonomous agents that can work independently, detecting events and orchestrating complex workflows with minimal human oversight.”

“Now, with Copilot as the new UI for AI, any organization can build powerful agents that augment their workforce and execute business processes right inside Copilot Studio — without any coding,” Microsoft explains in a blog post.

“Users can now build their own custom autonomous agents or deploy out-of-the-box, purpose-built agents” using Microsoft tools, “and, they can do this via a bring-your-own setup that provides them access to the 1,800-plus models in the Azure AI catalog,” VentureBeat writes.

Without fanfare, “Microsoft has quietly built the largest enterprise AI agent ecosystem,” notes VentureBeat, calling the agent space “one of enterprise tech’s most closely watched and exciting  segments.”

ZDNet calls autonomous agents “the next frontier of AI assistants,” and talks about how the new multimodal capabilities in Copilot Studio “including audio, allow organizations to embed the agents into their interactive voice system or create experiences that involve voice interactions, such as agents that can recognize speech or silence, and even handle interruptions.”

Microsoft VP of AI Agents Ray Smith compares the agenting boom to the launch of the iPhone and the “explosion of people trying to build apps” for it. “I see the same analogy now that, with these new agent-building capabilities, people are exploring the new apps and solutions that they want to build quickly,” Smith told ZDNet.

Related:
AI Agents — What They Are, and How They’ll Change the Way We Work, Microsoft, 11/19/24