Microsoft to roll out new autonomous AI agents next month, fending off challenge from Salesforce

LONDON — Microsoft will allow businesses to start making their own autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting next month, taking the fight back to Salesforce, which introduced its own configurable agentic AI tools in September.

At its “AI Tour” event in London on Monday, Microsoft revealed plans to allow organizations to create their own autonomous agents within Copilot Studio, the U.S. tech giant’s platform for customizing and building so-called “copilot” assistants.

These agents had previously been available in private preview after Microsoft announced them initially in May. Starting next month, they’ll move into public preview, meaning more organizations can start building AI agents of their own.

AI agents can act as virtual workers that can carry out a series of tasks without supervision. They are touted as a major evolution of large language model-based AI from chat interfaces, creating an experience that blends more seamlessly into the background.

Beyond adding the ability to create autonomous agents in Copilot Studio, Microsoft said it would also launch 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365, the company’s suite of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management apps.

Microsoft plans to introduce new agents in Dynamics 365 for sales, service, finance and supply chain teams.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of modern work and business applications, on Monday displayed an example of an AI agent developed at consulting firm McKinsey.

The agent was shown as it parsed out an email to find out what the communication is about, checked its history, mapped it to industry-standard terms, and then found the right person in the firm to take the next step before writing and summarizing a response.

It may seem like “magic,” but the firm was able to develop its own AI agent just by using human language, not programming languages, according to Spataro.

“We’re excited about this because of the business value it can drive,” he noted, adding that McKinsey found it could reduce lead time by as much as 90%.

Microsoft is doubling down on AI agents at a time when competition is intensifying up in the red-hot artificial intelligence space.

Last month, at its annual Dreamforce showcase in San Francisco, Salesforce showed off a new platform called Agentforce, which allows enterprise organizations to spin up their own AI agents.

Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce’s CEO of U.K. and Ireland, criticized the copilot model of AI assistants as not serving the needs of enterprises that well.

“All of these copilots activated on the edge, or in email — they’re not connected to or grounded within the context of customer data,” Bahrololoumi told CNBC in an interview earlier this month. “How is it going to represent a company accurately and responsibly? It isn’t.”

“I think we won’t see so many copilots for enterprise AI activity,” she added. “I’m not saying copilots won’t exist for other purposes. But in the context of enterprise, for autonomous enterprises to be able to plan, execute and take action — you’re no longer in Copilot there.”

Microsoft declined to comment on Bahrololoumi’s remarks when contacted by CNBC.

Microsoft and Salesforce have a storied feud. Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff once called on European regulators to investigate Microsoft’s deal to buy LinkedIn, suggesting it was in breach of competition rules.

Separately, Microsoft also on Monday announced it had struck a five-year deal with the U.K. government to offer public sector organizations access to its AI tools.

Through an agreement with the Crown Commercial Service, the procurement agency of the U.K. government, Microsoft said it will allow public sector organizations to access its Microsoft 365 productivity tool suite, the Azure cloud platform and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a service offered by the tech giant that embeds generative AI into its suite of productivity apps.