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Microsoft is working on an enterprise-level Copilot feature that would allow companies to build their own custom AI virtual employees.
In practice, this would mean that companies would be able to create their own AI chatbots to interact with customers or in-house employees to handle internal tasks, ensuring the tone and behavior of the agent was in line with company guidelines and preferences.
This project, titled Microsoft Copilot Studio, is the next stage of AI at work, with a closed beta running earlier this year and a public testing phase planned for November, as reported by TechSpot.
The types of tasks that AI employees, dubbed agents by Microsoft, can carry out are generally administrative ones, such as answering customer enquiries via chatbot generating or resolving IT support tickets, and answering emails using prepared templates.
The fact that Microsoft refers to agents and ‘virtual employees’ plays on people’s existing fears around AI: namely, that AI could steal human jobs. The tech giant has also therefore been quick to emphasize that Copilot agents can only automate repetitive and often tedious tasks. The idea is that this frees up human time for more creative, higher-responsibility roles.
How does Copilot Studio work?
Companies won’t need to have extensive technical knowledge to work with Copilot Studio, with the application using a low-code format. The largely graphical interface requires limited programming knowledge and there are pre-built agents provided by Microsoft that clients can use to create their own or hit the ground running with immediately.
Some of the premade agents include an AI sales qualification agent (focused on customer outreach), a supplier communications agent (intended to optimize supply chains), and a customer intent agent (helping human customer service employees with automatically generated articles). That offers an idea of what the intended uses are for companies putting Copilot Studio into action.
Microsoft hasn’t given a firm timeline for when Copilot Studio will be available for the wider public but with the test phases progressing, it could be as early as next year.
Featured image: Microsoft
