A new tool from Microsoft called Agent 365 is designed to help businesses control their growing collection of robotic assistants.
Agent 365 is not a platform for building enterprise AI tools; it’s a way of managing them, as if they were human employees. Companies using generative AI agents in their digital workplace can use Agent 365 to organize their growing proliferation of robots, keep tabs on their performance, and modify their settings. The tool is rolling out today to Microsoft’s Early Access program.
Essentially, Microsoft has created a trackable workspace for agents. “The tools you use today to manage people, devices and applications, you would want to extend to run agents in the future as well,” says Charles Lamanna, president of business and industry for Microsoft’s Copilot, its AI chatbot.
Lamanna envisions a future in which companies have many more agents doing work than humans. For example, if a company has 100,000 employees, he considers that they use “half a million to a million agents,” ranging from simply organizing email to managing “the entire procurement process” for a company. He claims that Microsoft uses millions of agents internally.
This army of robots, allowed to take actions within a company’s software and automate aspects of an employee’s workflow, could quickly become difficult to keep up with. A lack of clear oversight could also expose businesses to security breaches. Agent 365 is a way to manage all your bots, whether those agents were created with Microsoft tools or via a third-party platform.
The core functionality of Agent 365 is a registry of an organization’s active agents in one place, with specific ID numbers for each and details of how they are used by employees. This is also where you can change agent settings and which aspects of a company’s software each person is allowed to access.
Courtesy of Microsoft
