The beat rolls on for AI agents in process automation. With a near-simultaneous announcement from UiPath following another major announcement a month ago from Salesforce, Microsoft has joined the fray with an announcement of its own.
The company said on Monday at a London conference that it will release 10 AI agents built to automate processes specifically for sales, customer service, finance and supply chain use cases. It also launching—as part of its Copilot Studio—a review version of a tool for developers that will enable them to build their own agents.
The company had unveiled “Copilot Assistants” in a private preview in May. But the announcement at this week’s “AI Tour” said the tool will be available in a public preview starting next month. The company did not indicate when the feature would be fully rolled out.
AI agents use generative AI technology to understand prompts in natural language and translate those directives to retrieve data, create plans, and take action to execute those plans autonomously for a given task.