Microsoft Launches AI Agents to Rival Salesforce

In an effort to increase competitiveness with competitors like Salesforce, Microsoft is introducing a suite of AI capabilities that will be used to send emails, handle documents, and perform other tasks on behalf of company employees.

The software company, said on Monday that it will deploy ten “autonomous agents” to carry out jobs for humans in customer service, sales, and accounting, among other areas. In “public preview,” the agents will be accessible starting in December and running until the beginning of 2025. Additionally, Microsoft said that Copilot Studio, which enables businesses to create their own agents, would soon have the ability to allow such agents to take independent action. Next month, a preview version of it will be made available.

Jared Spataro, who is in charge of Microsoft’s workplace AI products, compared the agents to smartphone applications for the AI era. Some AI solutions can do duties like researching and sifting through sales leads or updating a customer service ticket following a phone contact; others can operate in tandem with a person.

“We have discovered locations where individuals spend a great deal of time and money,” Spataro stated. individuals usually involve procedures and activities that individuals would prefer not to have to perform yet are required to do again. If we are able to basically automate it, the yield will be great.

Microsoft is leading the computer industry’s push to give software the capacity to produce text and images and exhibit human-like thinking, mostly because of its collaboration with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Microsoft has been concentrating on AI capabilities that need user input since early 2023. One notable example is Copilot, which the corporation has integrated into Word, Outlook, and other applications.

Building agents—tools that can accomplish predetermined tasks without human assistance by fusing generative AI-powered reasoning with pre-existing datasets and software—is the next stage. Software businesses that are focusing on AI agents include ServiceNow Inc., Workday Inc., HubSpot Inc., and SAP SE.

The largest provider of customer management software, Salesforce, dominated most of last month’s annual Dreamforce convention, promoting the new strategy and claiming that its agents are capable of doing customer support and other activities without oversight. According to the business, its tool, Agentforce, will be on sale later this month for an initial price of around $2 per call.

Over the last few weeks, Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff has repeatedly criticized Microsoft’s initiative while simultaneously touting Salesforce’s offerings. “It’s disappointing to see how Copilot has been delivered to customers,” Benioff wrote on X on Wednesday.

The cost of Microsoft’s agents, which will be included in the Dynamics 365 software suite, has not yet been disclosed. The custom agent-building tool, Copilot Studio, is part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, which costs $30 per user per month for commercial clients.