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