Already, 60% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft 365 Copilot to accelerate business results and empower their teams. With Copilot supporting sellers, Lumen Technologies projects savings of $50 million per year. Honeywell(1) equates productivity gains to hiring 187 full-time employees and Finastra reduces creative production time from seven months to seven weeks.

Today, we are announcing new agentic capabilities that will accelerate these gains and bring AI-driven business processes to every organization.

• First, the ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio will be in public preview next month.

• Second, we introduce ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build the capabilities of every sales, service, finance and supply chain team.

The co-pilot is your AI Assistant—it works for you—and Copilot Studio let you easily create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot. Think about agents as new applications for an AI-powered world. Each organization will have a constellation of agents, ranging from simple prompt-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate business processes. Copilot is how you will interact with these agents, and they’ll do everything from speeding up lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain.

Enable more customers to create autonomous agents in Copilot Studio

Earlier this year we announcement a multitude of powerful new features in Copilot Studio, including the ability to create autonomous agents. Next month, these features will move from private preview to public preview, enabling more customers to reimagine critical business processes with AI. Agents leverage the context of your business data in Microsoft 365 Graph, Systems of Record, Dataverse, and Fabric, and can take and take action on everything from your IT help desk to employee onboarding. as a personal concierge for sales and service.

Organizations like Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home and Thomson Reuters are already creating autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact. Pets at homethe UK’s leading pet care company, has created an agent for its Profit Protection team to more efficiently compile cases for qualified human review, potentially generating seven-figure annual savings. McKinsey & Company creates an agent that will speed up the customer onboarding process. The pilot project showed that delivery times could be reduced by 90% and administrative work by 30%. Thomson Reuters created a professional-grade agent to speed up the legal due diligence workflow, with initial testing showing some tasks could be completed in half the time. This agent can help Thomson Reuters increase the efficiency of its clients’ work and boost its new business pipeline.

Evolve your teams with 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365

New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy lines of business applications to AI-driven business processes. AI is today’s ROI and tomorrow’s competitive advantage. These new agents are designed to help every sales, service, finance and supply chain team drive business value – and are just the start. We will be adding many more agents in the coming year, giving clients the competitive edge they need to future-proof their organizations. Today we present to you ten of these autonomous agents. Here are some examples:

• Sales Qualification Agent: In a profession where time literally equals money, this agent allows salespeople to focus their time on the highest priority sales opportunities while the agent researches leads, helps prioritize opportunities, and guides customer outreach. customers with personalized emails and responses.

• Supplier communications agent: This agent enables customers to optimize their supply chain and minimize costly disruptions by autonomously tracking supplier performance, detecting delays and responding accordingly, freeing procurement teams from manual monitoring and firefighting, which take a lot of time.

• Customer intent And Customer knowledge management Agents: A business has one chance to make a first impression, and these two agents are game changers for customer service teams facing high call volumes, talent shortages and increased customer expectations. These agents work hand-in-hand with a customer service representative by learning to resolve customer issues and independently adding knowledge-based articles to evolve best practices within the care team.

As agents become more prevalent in the enterprise, customers want to be sure they have robust data governance and security. Agents who join Dynamics 365 meet our core commitments to security, privacy, and responsible AI. Agents integrated into Copilot Studio include guardrails and controls established by instructions, knowledge and actions defined by the manufacturer. Agent-related data sources adhere to strict security measures and controls, all managed in Copilot Studio. These include data loss prevention, robust authentication protocols and much more. Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use.

Microsoft’s own transformation

At Microsoft, we use Copilot and agents reinvent business processes in every function while empowering employees to increase their impact. Using Copilot, a sales team achieved 9.4% more revenue per seller and closed 20% more deals(2). And thanks to Copilot, a team resolves customer cases nearly 12% faster(3). Our marketing team sees a 21.5% increase in conversion rate on Azure.com with a custom agent designed to assist buyers(4). And in HR, our employee self-service agent helps answer questions with 42% greater accuracy(5).

With Copilot and Agents, the possibilities are endless – we can’t wait to see what you create. Start building agents in Copilot Studio today. Learn more about the capabilities of autonomous agents on the Copilot Studio And Dynamic 365 blogs. Head to Working laboratory for more information on Microsoft’s own AI transformation.

REMARKS

1. The statistics come from an internal Honeywell survey of 5,000 employees to which 611 employees responded.
2. Internal Microsoft Sales team data based on 687 Microsoft 365 Copilot sellers, January through June 2024, compared to sellers with low Copilot usage. Regular use of Copilot refers to sellers who use Copilot daily at least 50% of the time during the testing period.
3. Internal financial analysis of costs, comparing actual figures for FY24 and projections for FY25.
4. Internal CSS experiment conducted by Microsoft, 600 participants using the Copilot Q&A feature, Azure Core team, November – December 2023. These results are statistically significant at 95^th% confidence interval.
5. Internal data from Microsoft marketing team, June – September 2024. Conversion means starting the free account registration process on Azure.com.

Keywords: AI, Copilot, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Graph, Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft Fabric