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.

It just revealed a bunch of new hardware and plans for Windows. Copilot PCs were the big announcement, designed to run generative AI processes locally instead of in the cloud. Of course, Microsoft had new Surface devices to showcase these features, but the usual PC suspects also have new laptops that meet the spec requirements -- and include Copilot in their name for added chaos. The company also claims Copilot PCs are 58 percent faster than the M3-powered MacBook Air. We'll drill into some other announcements down below.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced a chatbot designed to help cybersecurity professionals understand critical issues and find ways to fix them. The company has been busy bolstering its software with artificial intelligence models from startup OpenAI after OpenAI's ChatGPT bot captured the public imagination following its November debut. The resulting generative AI software can at times be "usefully wrong," as Microsoft put it earlier this month when talking up new features in Word and other productivity apps. But Microsoft is proceeding nevertheless, as it seeks to keep growing a cybersecurity business that fetched more than $20 billion in 2022 revenue. The Microsoft Security Copilot draws on GPT-4, the latest large language model from OpenAI -- in which Microsoft has invested billions -- and a security-specific model Microsoft built using daily activity data it gathers.

At Microsoft's X019 event in London on Thursday, the company revealed a range of major new titles for the Xbox and PC. But in an industry which has often struggled with representation and diversity of lead characters, one announcement stood out. The latest narrative adventure game from the acclaimed French studio Dontnod will have a transgender man as its lead character – a first for a major game release. Named Tell Me Why, and launching in spring 2020, the game follows identical twins Alyson and Tyler Ronan, who grew up in a small community in Alaska and are reunited after a key event drove them apart 10 years ago. Through the game, the player has to understand what drove the characters from each other, investigating their shared memories while exploring the town and talking to local inhabitants.

This research summary is just one of many that are distributed weekly on the AI scholar newsletter. To start receiving the weekly newsletter, sign up here. Microsoft recently introduced ML.NET, a framework for building custom machine learning library solutions. Although ML.NET is new, it goes back to 2002 when Microsoft Research embarked on a text mining search and navigation(TMSN) project for use within Microsoft products. The project was later renamed The Learning Code (TLC) in 2011.