Microsoft will soon allow businesses and developers to build AI-powered Copilots that can work like virtual employees and perform tasks automatically. Instead of Copilot sitting idle waiting for queries, it will be able to do things like monitor email inboxes and automate a series of tasks or data entry that employees normally have to do manually.
It’s a big change in the behavior of Copilot in what the industry commonly calls AI agents, or the ability for chatbots to intelligently perform complex tasks autonomously.
“We very quickly realized that constraining Copilot to just being conversational was extremely limiting in what Copilot can do today,” explains Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business apps and platforms at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. “Instead of having a Copilot that waits there until someone chats with it, what if you could make your Copilot more proactive and for it to be able to work in the background on automated tasks.”
Microsoft is previewing this new capability today to a very small group of early access testers ahead of a public preview inside Copilot Studiolater this year. Businesses will be able to create a Copilot agent that could handle IT help desk service tasks, employee onboarding, and much more. “Copilots are evolving from copilots that work with you, to copilots that work for you,” says Microsoft in a blog post.
Imagine you’re a new hire. A proactive copilot greets you, reasoning over HR data and answers your questions, introduces you to your buddy, gives you the training and deadlines, helps you with the forms and sets up your first week of meetings. Now, HR and the employees can work on their regular tasks, without the hassle of administration.
This type of automation will naturally lead to questions about job losses and fears about where AI heads next. Lamanna argues that Copilot agents can remove the repetitive and mundane tasks of jobs, like data entry, instead of replacing jobs entirely.
“What makes a job, what makes a role? It’s a bunch of different tasks and generally it’s a very large number of very diverse and heterogeneous tasks. If someone did one thing over and over again, it probably would have already been automated by current technology,” says Lamanna. “We think with Copilot and Copilot Studio, some tasks will be automated completely… but the good news is most of the things that are automated are things that nobody really wants to do.”
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