Microsoft Corp. is going all in on agents as it expands its line of Copilots to take on unique roles handling mundane tasks as well as complex, multi-step business processes.

Agentic artificial intelligence refers to AI systems that are designed to act autonomously, make decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals, using reasoning, planning, and adaptability to function with minimal human intervention. Gartner Inc. has picked agentic AI as a top strategic technology trend for 2025 and predicts that by 2028, one-third % of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% now.

Microsoft is expanding the role of Copilots to take on some limited agentic capabilities, mostly within the confines of the Microsoft product suite. The new capabilities touch on nearly every office application.

Agents in SharePoint will now empower more informed decisions grounded in specific SharePoint content. Users can create agents tailored to specific SharePoint files, folders or sites that support common business processes. Agents can be personalized with names and behaviors and shared. Available now, they follow existing SharePoint user permissions and sensitivity labels.

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat will answer most common workplace policy-related questions and take action on human resources and information technology-related tasks. Now in private preview, it lets people retrieve benefits and payroll information, start a leave of absence and get assistance for Microsoft 365 products and services.

A new Facilitator agent works within Microsoft Teams meetings to take real-time notes and share summaries of important information. An interpreter agent due early next year adds real-time translation to Teams meetings in up to nine languages,

The Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams is getting new abilities to analyze meeting content as captured in screenshots. Users will be able to ask Copilot to summarize screen-shared content, consolidate the content of conversations and presentations and draft new content based on the entire meeting. The capability will enter preview in early 2025.

In a preview beginning early next year, Teams users will also be able to get a quick inline summary of a file shared in a Teams chat without having to open and read the entire document. The Copilot respects the file’s security policies, and summaries carry the same sensitivity label as the original file.

The Project Manager agent now in preview will automate project management in Planner. It can automatically create a new plan from scratch or use a preconfigured template and then oversee the entire project, including the assignment of tasks, progress tracking, reminders and status reporting.

Microsoft’s Copilots aren’t technically fully agentic but they’re well on their way, said Jason Wong, a Gartner distinguished VP analyst. Gartner and others define AI agents as having the ability to plan, use tools and access a memory of interactions to support goal attainment.

“Microsoft has announced a spectrum of AI agents from the simplistic RAG [retrieval-automated generation]-based tools as agents to more sophisticated autonomous agent entities that can make transactions,” Wong said. “Right now, Copilot Studio agents are not quite at that sophisticated level without the need to dive deeper into Azure AI services to fulfill.”

Easier agent creation

Updates to Microsoft Copilot Studio, now in preview, are designed to help users create agents to take desired actions on their behalf without the need for continuous prompting. Autonomous agents can act in the background to respond to events like receiving an email or recording an uploaded file without human interaction. Copilot Studio will now include customizable templates for commonly used agent scenarios such as leave management, sales order and deal acceleration agents.

For developers, a new agent software development kit now in preview helps them develop full-stack, multichannel agents that leverage services from Azure AI, Semantic Kernel and Copilot Studio. Agents can be deployed across multiple channels, including Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilots, websites and third-party messaging platforms. Developers will be able to access the Copilot Trust Layer to build agents grounded in Microsoft 365 data.

Improved integration between Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry, a service that enables developers to build and customize generative AI applications, adds custom search indices as a knowledge source via Azure AI Search and bring-your-own-model capabilities via the Azure AI model catalog. Developers will be able to access the Azure catalog of more than 1,800 AI models, many of them industry-specific, and make Azure AI Search available to large enterprises.

Other enhancements to Copilot Studio include the ability to upload images to Copilot for analysis and questions about the content of the images.

Microsoft also plans to add the capability for developers to voice-enable agents in customer facing scenarios in a feature now in private preview. It will also give developers improved capabilities to resolve unanswered questions by matching specific instructions to the root of an unanswered question. New sources such as documents and databases can be continuously added.

With Microsoft 365 Copilot Actions, a set of customizable prompt templates now in private preview, users can delegate tasks such as obtaining status updates or agenda items from Teams to agents. Templates can be used when needed or triggered by events to gather information and present it in formats such as emails or Word documents. Copilot Actions are now in private preview.

Agents span Microsoft 365 suite

Copilot features are also being expanded across the Microsoft 365 office suite. In PowerPoint, Copilot features will help users create better presentations using Narrative Builder, which create a narrative based on document content, with branded designs, speaker notes and built-in transitions and animations. The feature will be available in January.

Also in January, a Copilot will be able to translate an entire PowerPoint into one of 40 languages without changing the slide design. It will allow users to create presentations with their organization’s images.

By the end of the year, Microsoft Excel’s new start experience will help users create a starter spreadsheet from scratch with headers, formulas and visuals.

Updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook due by the end of November will enable users to ask it automatically to find the best time for two people to meet and draft an agenda based on details supplied about the meeting goals.

Copilot Pages, a dynamic canvas in Copilot chat supporting multiuser AI collaboration that was announced in September, will get new features in early 2025 that support more content types, including code, interactive charts, tables, diagrams and math from enterprise or web data.

Users will be able to create multiple new Pages in a single chat session or add content from multiple chat sessions to a single Page. Copilot chat prompts will be grounded in Page content as the page is updated, making subsequent Copilot responses more relevant.

Microsoft Places, a flexible work schedule application that is now generally available, will leverage a Copilot to recommend when to go into the office based on scheduled in-person meetings, team guidance and collaborators’ planned attendance from the unified calendar’s Places card. It can also manage room booking for a single or recurring meeting through any changes, updates and conflicts, allow employees to update their location and see where coworkers are working. Administrators can analyze intended versus actual occupancy and utilization data to improve workspace efficiency.

Gartner’s Wong said AI agents shake up the workplace as they become common. “They will be embedded into applications, such as Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 applications, as new functions that standardize autonomous or semi-autonomous activities,” he said. “More no-code tools are becoming available that let business users build agents, which will alter the digital workplace in terms of knowledge access and AI skilling.”

Administrators get Copilot help

Microsoft 365 Administration Centers, which are central locations where they can attend to tasks like managing users, getting billing reports, checking activity reports and creating and managing Microsoft 365 groups, will get Copilot support for personalized summaries of trends and insights across an administrator’s assigned areas as well as summarized notifications.

In Teams, Copilot in MAC will summarize meeting reports and help troubleshoot call quality or other issues for specific users. The Copilot Control System will provide data protection, management controls and reporting to enable IT to measure the business value of Copilots and agents. The features will be available available early next year. A new Copilot Analytics dashboard will also help administrators measure the business impact of Copilots.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Ideogram