Digital agents powered by artificial intelligence have become the latest battleground for big tech companies.

As the number of companies looking to streamline their business operations with cutting-edge technologies increases, competition between Microsoft (MSFT) and Salesforce (CRM) is particularly pronounced.

On Monday, Microsoft became the latest company to jump into the agent race, launching 10 autonomous agents as part of a suite of enterprise tools unveiled at its AI Tour event. Billing the feature as “the new apps,” Microsoft praised its ability to simplify business tasks, saying early pilots showed a 90% reduction in timelines and a 30% reduction in administrative work.

“The impact of this is enormous,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, speaking in London. He added: “We now have large-scale evidence of how these tools are fundamentally changing,… increasing value and reducing waste. »

This announcement comes just weeks after Salesforce announced the creation of its own autonomous agents through the Agentforce platform, highlighting the opportunities companies see in the enterprise with AI.

Hailed by Salesforce as the third wave of the AI ​​revolution, personalized agents enable businesses to move beyond traditional chatbots that respond with pre-programmed responses to digital assistants capable of reasoning, multitasking at the same time and make judgments based on a broader vision. dataset.

Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, said use cases are particularly abundant in customer relationship management, where agents can handle everything from product returns to crafting sales pitches.

“It’s a simple step of prescribing, almost micromanaging what the AI ​​should do, rather than asking the agent to understand what it should do,” said Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, in an interview with Yahoo Finance (video above). .

Microsoft and Salesforce present digital assistants as the future

Other companies have touted their own specialized use cases for AI agents.

Cloud software provider ServiceNow (NOW) has announced plans to integrate AI agents into its HR and IT platform. Dating app Grindr is working on an AI agent wingman that would scout for relationship prospects and help set up dates. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) helps customers develop their own agents for internal use, including for legal work.

And in a recent podcast interview, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang envisioned a future in which 100 million AI agents are deployed within the company.

“Our inbox will be filled with AI directories that we work with,” he said. “AIs will recruit other AIs to solve problems. AIs will be present in Slack channels with each other and with humans.

However, the battle for autonomous agents has been particularly between Salesforce and Microsoft, in part because the companies have clashed publicly, but also because of the wealth of corporate data that both have access to. CEO Marc Benioff has repeatedly compared Microsoft’s Copilot to Clippy, its doomed Office assistant from the 1990s, once listed as one of Time’s 50 worst inventions.

At his Dreamforce event last month, Shih doubled down on his criticism, without directly naming Microsoft, while touting the Agentforce platform.

“It’s the difference between a DIY science project and a true enterprise-grade agent that you can confidently deploy into production,” Shih said. She added that Salesforce agents demonstrated 33% greater accuracy and “twice the relevance” of their competitors, based on customer benchmarks.

Earlier this week, Microsoft said deployment of agents at companies like McKinsey & Company and UK-based Pets at Home has already been shown to reduce time spent handling tedious tasks, including data entry .

With the wider release of Agentforce scheduled for October 29, Shih emphasized that these agents are not intended to replace human workers but to assist them so that “humans can start at a higher level.”

Shih expects Salesforce’s advantage to also increase as the battle for digital assistants heats up due to its ability to connect individual customer data through Data Cloud and the security layers in place for Agentforce .

She said human interaction with digital assistants will “increase exponentially.”

“I think it comes down to asking the question, maybe in 1998, of, in the future, how many more interactions are going to be through the Internet or some sort of digital medium,” Shih said. “I truly believe that officers will play this role in the future. Agents will become the applications we all interact with.

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