Microsoft’s AI ‘Agents’ Aim to Take over Many Human Duties

Microsoft is expanding its artificial intelligence (AI) tool offerings to include “personal agents” which are designed to take over different human processes.

The American software company said the new offerings are designed to help users complete certain business activities with little or no human involvement. The agents are expected to be offered to some users starting in the coming weeks. A full release is expected sometime next year.

Microsoft has said its agents are designed to expand on so-called chatbots. A chatbot is an AI tool that can work by itself to produce human-level writing or discussion. Such systems – also known as generative AI – can also produce images and videos based on short text descriptions.

While chatbots perform some functions on their own, they also depend heavily on humans to operate and guide them. The idea behind AI agents is to give them the ability to take over whole business processes with little or no guidance from people.

In a statement last month, Microsoft said it was preparing for a world where every organization would have a collection of AI agents to perform different business activities.

In another statement issued last week, the company said the agents being developed are designed to “operate around the clock” to ease the workload of human workers. Examples of agent duties include processing customer orders or returns and examining shipping records to prevent errors.

Microsoft has moved quickly to offer AI technologies to everyday users of its business software products. The methods are largely based on models built by AI developer OpenAI, creator of the ChatGPT chatbot. Microsoft has invested about $13 billion in OpenAI.

Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer, Jared Spataro, said the public should “think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world.”

The company added that its customers will be able to use its Copilot Studio service to create their own AI agents to meet specific needs. Copilot is Microsoft's existing AI chatbot tool. In addition, the company said it has introduced 10 ready-to-use agents to carry out routine business activities.

Charles Lamanna is the corporate vice president of business and industry for Copilot. He told Reuters news agency, "The idea is that Copilot is the user interface for AI." He added, "Every employee will have a Copilot, their personalized AI agent. And then they will use that Copilot to interface and interact with the sea of AI agents that will be out there."

In an online explanation of the AI tools, Microsoft said “instead of just assisting you, agents can work alongside you or even on your behalf.” This could include “a range of things, from responding to customer questions to more (complex) or multistep assignments,” the company added.

The abilities of AI agents remain limited for now. But ongoing development of the tools has raised concerns about certain risks linked to the technology. Microsoft officials have said the company had developed responsible AI guidelines to protect users from possible security or privacy problems.

Other big technology companies also aim to develop such agents. These include Salesforce, Nvidia, Google and Oracle. Industry experts have said the tools could provide companies with an easier path to earn money from the billions of dollars they are investing in AI systems.

I'm Bryan Lynn.

The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse and Microsoft reported this story. Bryan Lynn adapted the reports for VOA Learning English.

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agent – n. a person or system whose job it is to deal with business for someone else

customer – n. a person or organization that buys goods or services from a shop or business

routine – adj. a regular task that gets repeated over and over again

interface – n. a connection between a person and a computer system

on behalf (of someone) – phrase acting for someone else