Microsoft's Agent 365 Wants to Help You Manage Your AI Bot Army Microsoft still sees AI agents as the future of work, and the enterprise software giant wants companies to be able to manage those agents just like human employees. A new tool from Microsoft called Agent 365 is designed to help businesses control their growing collection of robotic helpers. Agent 365 is not a platform for making enterprise AI tools; it's a way to manage them, as if they were human employees . Companies using generative AI agents in their digital workplace can use Agent 365 to organize their growing sprawl of bots, keep tabs on how they're performing, and tweak their settings. The tool is rolling out today in Microsoft's early access program.

Microsoft is introducing autonomous artificial intelligence agents, or virtual employees, that can perform tasks such as handling client queries and identifying sales leads, as the tech sector strives to show investors that the AI boom can produce indispensable products. The US tech company is giving customers the ability to build their own AI agents as well as releasing 10 off-the-shelf bots that can carry out a range of roles including supply chain management and customer service. Early adopters of the Copilot Studio product, which launches next month, include the blue chip consulting firm McKinsey, which is building an agent to process new client inquiries by carrying out tasks such as scheduling follow-up meetings. Other early users include law firm Clifford Chance and retailer Pets at Home. Microsoft is flagging AI agents, which carry out tasks without human intervention, as an example of the technology's ability to increase productivity – a measure of economic efficiency, or the amount of output generated by a worker for each hour worked.

Microsoft today introduced what it's calling the "next generation" of AI product updates across its business apps portfolio. They touch on both Power Platform, Microsoft's set of low-code tools for building apps and workflows, and Dynamics 365, the company's suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. In an interview with TechCrunch, Charles Lamanna, CVP of business apps and platform at Microsoft, described the updates as the logical next step on Microsoft's automation journey. Powered by tech from AI startup OpenAI and built using the Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft's service that provides enterprise-tailored access to OpenAI's API, the new capabilities follow the rollout of OpenAI text-generating AI models in Power Platform four years ago and the more recent debut of generative AI capabilities in Viva Sales, Microsoft's seller experience app. "Over the last four years, we've been on a journey to bring generative AI and foundation models to the workplace," Lamanna said via email, noting that Microsoft has a longstanding partnership with OpenAI to commercialize the vendor's tech in Microsoft's own products and through the Azure OpenAI Service.

Ever since Ada Lovelace, a polymath often considered the first computer programmer, proposed in 1843 using holes punched into cards to solve mathematical equations on a never-built mechanical computer, software developers have been translating their solutions to problems into step-by-step instructions that computers can understand. Today, AI-powered software development tools are allowing people to build software solutions using the same language that they use when they talk to other people. These AI-powered tools translate natural language into the programming languages that computers understand. "That allows you, as a developer, to have an intent to accomplish something in your head that you can express in natural language and this technology translates it into code that achieves the intent you have," Scott said. "That's a fundamentally different way of thinking about development than we've had since the beginning of software."

Microsoft will use OpenAI's GPT-3 language model and "other Microsoft AI technology" to generate Power Platform formulas, known as Power Fx, using natural language input from users. "Now you'll be able to simply tell Power Apps what you'd like to see--for example, 'show me customers from the US whose subscription expired'--and a set of formulas will be presented along with an explanation of how they work," explained Power Apps director of program management Ryan Cunningham. The preview for the new toolset, called Power Apps Ideas, is due in June and will be built into Power Apps Studio. Microsoft introduced Power Fx in March 2021 as a low-code programming language designed to eventually be used across all Power Platform tools. Microsoft invested $1 billion in an AI platform with OpenAI in 2019.

Build Any souls wondering what Microsoft would do with its GPT-3 investment have been given an answer with a Power Fx update lightly seasoned with the AI tech. Microsoft gained exclusive rights to use OpenAI's GPT-3 in September last year, allowing it to embed the text-and-code-generating machine-learning model into its own products. Available in preview from next month, the technology was shown off at Microsoft's Build 2021 shindig today, and represents the latest attempt by the Windows giant to get folks from low code to no code and bring its Power platform closer to the masses. Looking initially like a jumped-up version of IntelliSense, the technology attempts to parse natural language entered by the user and generate the corresponding Excel-like language of Power Fx to perform the requested task. The idea is that you type in something like, "show me the readers who commented at the weekend," and it should generate the formulas to retrieve that information.

Microsoft is using the power of GPT-3's natural language artificial intelligence (AI) to help people who don't know how to code write their own software using Microsoft's PowerApps development platform, unveiled at Microsoft's Build developer conference. Redmond has hoped that PowerApps would become a powerful corollary to its Office suite, but the platform has languished a bit. Microsoft originally set up PowerApps in 2015 around a set of programming templates, pulling data from user-defined sources and then outputting results. Think of it like the next level of a traditional macro in Microsoft Office--it's a way for an average user to write a program to instruct Windows to perform a task, but with minimal or no knowledge of program coding. The problem is that even what Microsoft calls a "low code" or "no code" approach can be time-consuming and complex.

In September 2020, Microsoft purchased an exclusive license to the underlying technology behind GPT-3, an AI language tool built by OpenAI. Now, the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant has announced its first commercial use case for the program: an assistive feature in the company's PowerApps software that turns natural language into readymade code. The feature is limited in its scope and can only produce formulas in Microsoft Power Fx, a simple programming language derived from Microsoft Excel formulas that's used mainly for database queries. But it shows the huge potential for machine learning to help novice programmers by functioning as an autocomplete tool for code. There's a million-developer shortfall in the US alone," Charles Lamanna, CVP of Microsoft's Low Code Application Platform, tells The Verge. "So instead of making the world learn how to code, why don't we make development environments speak the language of a normal human?" Microsoft has been pursuing this vision for a while through Power Platform, its suite of "low code, no code" software aimed at enterprise customers. These programs run as web apps and help companies that can't hire experienced programmers tackle basic digital tasks like analytics, data visualization, and workflow automation. GPT-3's talents have found a home in PowerApps, a program in the suite used to create simple web and mobile apps. Lamanna demonstrates the software by opening up an example app built by Coca-Cola to keep track of its supplies of cola concentrate. Elements in the app like buttons can be dragged and dropped around the app as if the users were arranging a PowerPoint presentation. But creating the menus that let users run specific database queries (like, say, searching for all supplies that were delivered to a specific location at a specific time) requires basic coding in the form of Microsoft Power Fx formulas. "This is when it goes from no code to low code," says Lamanna. "You go from drag and drop, click click click, to writing formulas.

Microsoft is using the power of GPT-3's natural language AI to help people who don't know how to code write their own software using Microsoft's PowerApps development platform. The announcement was made at Microsoft's Build developer conference today. Microsoft has hoped that PowerApps would become a powerful corollary to its Office suite, but the platform has languished a bit. Microsoft originally set up PowerApps in 2015 around a set of programming templates, pulling data from user-defined sources and then outputting results. Think of it like the next level of a traditional macro in Microsoft Office--it's a way for an average user to write a program to instruct Windows to perform a task, but with minimal or no knowledge of program coding.

Power Automate is Microsoft's platform for streamlining repetitive workflows -- you may remember it under its original name: Microsoft Flow. The market for these robotic process automation (RPA) tools is hot right now, so it's no surprise that Microsoft, too, is doubling down on its platform. Only a few months ago, the team launched Power Automate Desktop, based on its acquisition of Softomotive, which helps users automate workflows in legacy desktop-based applications, for example. After a short time in preview, Power Automate Desktop is now generally available. The real news today, though, is that the team is also launching a new tool, the Process Advisor, which is now in preview as part of the Power Automate platform.