Copilot Studio Agents get a major upgrade via Microsoft 365 Copilot [Video]

Microsoft uses Ignite 2024 to set out its vision for agentic AI in business.

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Microsoft Ignite 2024 put an end to Microsoft’s dalliance with chatbots. Not because the company is walking away from natural language interfaces, but because it’s taking what it learned with its first Copilots and refocusing on tangible productivity gains from large language models (LLMs).

This is not surprising. Although LLM-powered chatbots are an amusing novelty with some useful text-generation features, Microsoft is delivering new ways of working with them, first grounding them in enterprise content with its Microsoft 365 Copilot and then adding tools for working with OpenAPI-powered services in its foundational AI orchestration tool, Semantic Kernel.

Much of Microsoft’s work during the past year or so has led to tools focused on what we’re calling “agentic AI.” Building on the 30-plus-year-old concept of autonomous agents, agentic AI mixes several different LLM-based development techniques to deliver self-assembling process automations that convert a natural …