Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) will reportedly allow businesses to start making their own autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting next month, taking the fight back to Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), which introduced its own configurable agentic AI tools in September.
At its “AI Tour” event in London on Monday, Microsoft revealed plans to allow organizations to create their own autonomous agents within Copilot Studio, the U.S. tech giant’s platform for customizing and building so-called “copilot” assistants.
These agents had previously been available in private preview after Microsoft announced them initially in May. Starting next month, they’ll move into public preview, meaning more organizations can start building AI agents of their own.
AI agents can act as virtual workers that can carry out a series of tasks without supervision. They are touted as a major evolution of large language model-based AI from chat interfaces, creating an experience that blends more seamlessly into the background.
Beyond adding the ability to create autonomous agents in Copilot Studio, Microsoft said it would also launch 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365, the company’s suite of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management apps.
MSFT shares started the week down $1.40 to $416,76, while those for CRM lost eight cents to $292.26