Microsoft To Empower Companies To Build Custom Agents & More

As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platforms, technologies and capabilities continue to dazzle and revolutionize businesses globally, Microsoft found that 60% of the Fortune 500 are using its Microsoft 365 Copilot to accelerate business results and empower their teams.

This resulted in $50 million in savings annually for Lumen Technologies (projected), while Honeywell felt the productivity gains were like adding 187 full-time employees and Finastra reduced its creative production time from seven months to seven weeks, as per a blog post by the company.

At the same time, Microsoft announced that it was bringing new “agentic” capabilities to help businesses further improve productivity, save costs and time and “bring AI-first business process to every organization.”

First among these new powers is the ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio, which will come into public purview in November after being launched privately earlier this year.

This will help businesses speed up client onboarding, handle queries, identify sales leads and manage inventory among other benefits.

Companies such as Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home and Thomson Reuters have already created autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact.

The second ability sees the introduction of 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365, which will help enhance operations across sales, service, finance, supply chain teams and more.

This includes the Sales Qualification Agent that enables sellers to focus their time on the highest priority sales opportunities. The Supplier Communications Agent helps customers optimize their supply chain, minimize costly disruptions, track supplier performance, detect and respond to delays and more. The Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management Agents help resolve customer issues autonomously.

Essentially, both these moves will enable organizations to scale their teams and operations “like never before” by using autonomous agents. In this endeavor, organizations can leverage Copilot Studio to create, manage and connect agents to Copilot, which works for them as their AI assistant.

In addition to numerous companies, even Microsoft has used these capabilities to improve their productivity.

How Has Copilot Impacted Microsoft’s Operations?

As per a blog post published by Microsoft, the company was able to use Copilot to enhance operations across a wide range of verticals.
 

• Its Customer Service witnesses a 12% faster case resolution.

• Sales saw 9.4% higher revenue per seller for one business group.

• Marketing hit a 21.5% increase in conversion rates on Azure.com.

• Human Resources enjoyed 42% greater accuracy in answering questions through employee self-service.

• Finance benefitted from a 60% reduction of case resolution time in cash collections.

• Legal expects a 5% reduction in external spending for regulatory work in 2025.

• IT revealed a 36% increase in the self-help success rate for employees.

What Did Microsoft Leaders Say About Copilot?

A variety of Microsoft leaders spanning these verticals chimed in with how Copilot has boosted productivity and enhanced operations. These include:
 

• Sandeep Bhanot, Corporate Vice President, Engineering and Data at Microsoft, said, “As a sales leader, I’m looking to drive more revenue, so we’re leveraging Copilot across our sales teams to help increase the pipeline and deal velocity, improve conversion rates, and ultimately improve the seller experience.”

• Jessica Daughetee, Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer, said, “We’re continuously creating fresh content for more than 200 campaigns in nearly 250 markets, managing 140,000 creative assets every year. Copilot is helping us with that massive workload, enabling us to get to market faster.”

• Cory Hrncirik, the Modern Finance Lead at Microsoft, said, “Copilot is helping across the finance team by synthesizing enormous amounts of information, such as reviewing contracts and vendor proposals, analyzing complex financial data, and leveraging insights from prior tax returns to help us make strategic decisions with greater precision and speed, ultimately enhancing our ability to remain agile in a competitive market.”

Do you think these moves by Microsoft will help it grow its customer base and become a fan favorite among businesses?

Let us know in the comments below!