The corporate world is about to get a serious AI upgrade

Welcome to the age of the AI employee. Microsoft’s Copilot Studio will be rolling out a new wave of autonomous AI bots called agents, who will soon be handling everything from answering client enquiries to identifying sales leads. All with zero human involvement, the Guardian reports.

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They’re different to traditional automated systems — these agents can learn from feedback and make decisions with minimal human oversight, adapting to unforeseen circumstances. This level of interactivity means they can handle complex tasks, like managing scheduling conflicts or adjusting responses based on real-time data, thus enhancing the overall efficiency of the workflow.

Copilot Studio will allow companies to create their own employees — no coding skills required. If you’re not into DIY, no worries — Microsoft is also launching ten ready-to-use bots for tasks like customer service and supply chain management. International consulting firm McKinsey have already hopped on board by building agents to process new client inquiries and tasks like scheduling followup meetings.

But don’t worry about your job just yet. AI agents are meant to eliminate the menial tasks that plague daily work and boost productivity by automating the boring stuff — giving the average human employee time to focus on the heavy lifting.

The bigger picture. OpenAI’s new Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil is betting big that these AI agents will revolutionize the workplace by 2025, and has even compared the introduction of AI in the workplace to the arrival of personal computers in the 80s — it started slow, but eventually every desk had one.

Proceed with caution. Microsoft’s head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, acknowledges that while the technology is promising, there have been some “ car crash moments ” in its development. Trust and accountability are major concerns, especially with managing sensitive information like customer data. Alongside issues like AI hallucinations, where bots give wrong or misleading answers, the reliability of the tech is called into question, echoing IBM’s warning in 1979 that “a computer can never be held accountable.”