Introducing Copilot Actions, new agents, and tools to empower IT teams — from microsoft.com by Jared Spataro

[On November 19th] at Microsoft Ignite 2024, we’re accelerating our ambition to empower every employee with Copilot as a personal assistant and to transform every business process with agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Announcements include:

  • Copilot Actions in Microsoft 365 Copilot to help you automate everyday repetitive tasks.
  • New agents in Microsoft 365 to unlock SharePoint knowledge, provide real-time language interpretation in Microsoft Teams meetings, and automate employee self-service.
  • The Copilot Control System to help IT professionals confidently manage Copilot and agents securely.

These announcements build on our wave 2 momentum, including the new autonomous agent capabilities that we announced in October 2024.

Per the Rundown AI:
By integrating AI agents directly into Microsoft’s billion-plus users’ daily workflows, this release could normalize agentic AI faster than any previous rollout. Just as users now reach for specific apps or plugins to solve particular problems, specialized agents could soon become the natural first stop for getting work done.

Along these lines, also see:

AI agents — what they are, and how they’ll change the way we work — from news.microsoft.com by Susanna Ray

An agent takes the power of generative AI a step further, because instead of just assisting you, agents can work alongside you or even on your behalf. Agents can do a range of things, from responding to questions to more complicated or multistep assignments. What sets them apart from a personal assistant is that they can be tailored to have a particular expertise.

For example, you could create an agent to know everything about your company’s product catalog so it can draft detailed responses to customer questions or automatically compile product details for an upcoming presentation.

Microsoft pitches AI ‘agents’ that can perform tasks on their own at Ignite 2024 — from techxplore.com
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told customers at a conference in Chicago on Tuesday that the company is teaching a new set of artificial intelligence tools how to “act on our behalf across our work and life.”

From DSC:
I am not trying to push all things AI. There are serious concerns that I and others have with agents and other AI-based technologies especially:

  • When competitive juices get going and such forces throw people and companies into a sort of an AI arms race, and
  • When many people haven’t yet obtained the wisdom of reflecting on things like “just because we CAN build this doesn’t mean we SHOULD build it”, or
  • When governments seek to be the leader of AI due to military applications (and yes, I’m looking at the U.S. Federal Government especially here)
  • Etc, etc. 

But there are also areas where I’m more hopeful and positive about AI-related technologies — such as providing personalized learning and productivity tools (like those from Microsoft above).