Microsoft’s 10 new AI agents reinforce its leadership in business automation

Microsoft made waves at Ignite 2024 with its announcement that 10 autonomous AI agents are now available for business use. Microsoft effectively declared that AI agents are ready for prime time, achieving what others have yet to achieve.

Microsoft’s pre-built agents target core business operations, from CRM and supply chain management to financial reconciliation. While competitors like Salesforce and ServiceNow offer AI agent solutions in some limited areas, Microsoft has built a broad agent ecosystem that goes beyond its own platform. The system includes 1,400 third-party plugins and supports customization in more than 1,800 major language models. The scale of adoption is equally significant: 100,000 organizations are already creating or modifying agentsMicrosoft says, with deployment rates doubling in last quarter: adoption numbers dwarfing those of competitors

In my three-part video series with developer and generative AI expert Sam Witteveen, we explore what this move means for businesses, why Microsoft is moving forward as a leader in agent AI, and how these tools can transform the way companies manage workflows. Below, we break down the highlights and invite you to explore the stats for the entire series.

The big ones to take away

Microsoft’s release of these 10 AI agents shows that enterprise AI is moving from theory to practice, but Microsoft’s other statements about agents have other ramifications:

1. Pre-built business value: Microsoft agents are preconfigured to handle specific workflows, unlike traditional toolsets that require extensive customization. Whether it’s qualifying sales leads or optimizing supply chains, these agents are ready to deploy.
2. A decisive leadership: By leveraging its ecosystem of productivity applications and customer reach, Microsoft is ahead of competitors like Salesforce, Google, and AWS by offering enterprise-grade solutions at scale.
3. Redefining the competition: Agent-focused capabilities like CRM lead scoring and time management are challenging the startups that once dominated these niches.
4. The vision of agent AI: From pre-built agents to fully custom solutions, the Microsoft ecosystem enables businesses to seamlessly create, modify and deploy agents, lowering barriers to adoption.
5. LLM models may no longer be the most valuable: Microsoft’s shift from “per-token” to “per-message” pricing and toward “per-result” pricing indicates a move beyond the raw output of language models.

But with competitors like Google, AWS, and open source frameworks at the fore, Microsoft’s lead may not last forever. In the video series, we also discuss these alternative players and how Microsoft differentiates itself from them.

Watch the series

In this three-part series, we dive deeper into what Microsoft’s AI agents mean for business leaders. Watch now to learn:

• Part 1: The four big takeaways from Microsoft Ignite 2024.
• Part 2: How Microsoft’s 10 autonomous agents cover the company’s key workflows (and, incidentally, could kill many startups in the process, which had been launched to cover similar workflows).
• Part 3: How Microsoft stacks up against competitors like Google, OpenAI and AWS in the race for leadership in agent AI.

Browse the full series here: