By Jeffrey Dastin
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -In Microsoft’s view, humans are not the only ones to manage in a workplace. Artificial intelligence needs a manager, too.
The software maker on Tuesday announced Microsoft Agent 365, a program for its customers to track what it expects to be 1.3 billion agents automating office work by 2028. Agents are AI-powered programs that perform tasks on humans’ behalf.
Microsoft and other companies are actively marketing agent software. While some customers have successfully deployed these systems for code generation, others have struggled with implementation, fueling concerns about a market bubble.
According to Microsoft, just like IT staff can see who is on a company’s network and manage what resources they can access, its latest software aims to extend similar controls to supervising AI agents.
The program lets IT personnel quarantine rogue agents while equipping authorized ones – whether built on Microsoft or other software like Salesforce – with a range of productivity tools and aiming to secure them from cyberattacks, said Microsoft.
In an interview, Judson Althoff, the CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, said the product came out of requests from business leaders to get a handle on AI agents at work and measure their return on investment.
“Take supply chain. You might have an inventory agent. You might have an out-of-stock agent,” said Althoff. “Without this kind of a tool, understanding how those things compose in an overall process is really, really hard.”
Microsoft Agent 365 is available to license holders that sign up for an early access program.
The company announced the news at the start of Microsoft Ignite, a technology conference in San Francisco.
Other announcements included Work IQ, which lets companies build agents on top of the same intelligence and business data powering its AI called Microsoft 365 Copilot.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Kenneth Li and Lisa Shumaker)
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