IBL News | New York
[Update: November 19, 2024] | [Ignite Conference 2024]
Microsoft announced this week new AI autonomous agents and agentic capabilities in Dynamics 365 that accelerate sales and business results, provide competitive advantage and productivity gains and savings, reduce costs and administrative work, and increase efficiency in work and revenue.
The software giant introduced ten new agents, and in November, Copilot Studio will allow users to create autonomous agents.
“Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous,” wrote Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer for Microsoft’s AI at Work initiatives.
These agents can build capacity for every sales, finance, or supply chain, from accelerating lead generation, processing sales orders, automating the supply chain, or client and employee onboarding.
Agents draw on the context of work data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Dataverse and Fabric,
Microsoft mentioned McKinsey & Company, Thomson Reuters, and Clifford Chance as clients of these autonomous agents.
“New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy lines of business applications to AI-first business processes. AI is today’s ROI and tomorrow’s competitive edge.”
Microsoft presented three examples:
- Sales Qualification Agent. This agent researches leads, helps prioritize opportunities, and guides customer outreach with personalized emails and responses.
- Supplier Communications Agent: This agent tracks supplier performance, detects delays, and responds accordingly, freeing teams from consuming manual monitoring and firefighting time.
- Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management Agents: These agents face high call volumes, talent shortages, and heightened customer expectations. These agents work hand in hand with a customer service representative by learning how to resolve customer issues and autonomously adding knowledge-based articles to scale best practices across the care team.
Microsoft said the agents follow core security, privacy, and responsible AI commitments, including guardrails and controls established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions. “The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls — all managed in Copilot Studio.”
The company said it uses agents for its transformation by empowering employees to scale their impact. One sales team achieved 9.4% higher revenue per seller and closed 20% more deals. Another team resolved customer cases 12% faster. The Marketing team saw a 21.5% increase in conversion rate on Azure.com with a custom agent designed to assist buyers. In human resources, its employee self-service agent helped answer questions with 42% greater accuracy.
• Blog: Autonomous Agents Announcement
• Copilot Studio
• Agents Capabilities
• Autonomous Agents for Dynamics 365
• Microsoft’s Transformation Using Agents
Microsoft introduced an Agent framework this week, and it went completely unnoticed.
The agent team can browse the internet, internal files, execute code, and more.
In this example, the Microsoft team made the agent autonomously order a sandwich.
First, an agent:
A) Plans -… https://t.co/XZgol3rYGf
— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) November 8, 2024
