Microsoft (MSFT) sees a future in which the world uses AI agents to do everything from coding to navigating its Windows operating system. The company laid out this vision during its annual Build conference in Seattle on Monday, explaining that it expects to see what it calls an “open agentic web” in which AI agents can make decisions and perform tasks for individual users or entire organizations.
One of the biggest trends in tech, AI agents are semi- or fully autonomous pieces of AI software that can perform certain tasks for users. Those can include everything from moving data between different apps to booking concert tickets. Some agents can even communicate with each other, creating a web of agents that can complete more complex tasks.
“What we’re seeing is AI development accelerating, and people going from kind of proof of concepts to working solutions that are really driving business impact,” Scott Guthrie, Microsoft executive vice president of cloud and AI, told Yahoo Finance.
“We expect momentum to continue and accelerate, in particular, as what we call the agentic web emerges. And our key goal at Microsoft is how do we make it easier for organizations and for developers and startups to really keep pace with all the new technologies,” Guthrie added.
According to Microsoft, some 230,000 organizations are already using its Copilot Studio to develop their own custom AI agents. And it expects businesses to roll out 1.3 billion agents by 2028.
During its event Monday, the company showed off a number of AI agent apps, including its Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit to help developers build agents for Microsoft 365, GitHub Copilot coding agent to help developers write code, and the ability for AI agents to connect directly with native Windows apps.
Carl Brisco, CTO and senior vice president at the ODP Corporation (ODP), parent company of Office Depot, told Yahoo Finance that his teams are working on AI agents using Microsoft’s technology to improve customer outreach, including updates on when salespeople should contact customers to make sales based on their purchase history, product pricing, and other relevant data.
“Having [that information] show up in an interface directly every day that says, ‘Hey, we recommend you act on this, takes that sort of … findability out of the equation as much as possible,” Brisco explained.
“And it really almost starts to build somebody’s day that says, ‘Hey, this is your No. 1 priority to call and ensure that they’re happy. This is No. 2, this is No. 3, this is No. 4.”
Microsoft is also working on giving customers the ability to create what it calls multi-agent systems using its Copilot Studio app. Copilot Studio is Microsoft’s low-code app that lets users quickly build their own AI agents. With multi-agent systems, Microsoft customers will be able to program agents to communicate with each other and perform a number of tasks.
“Imagine a Copilot Studio agent pulling sales data from a [customer relationship management app], handing it off to a Microsoft 365 agent to draft a proposal in Word, and then triggering another to schedule follow-ups in Outlook,” Microsoft corporate vice president of business applications and platform Lili Cheng said in a release.
All of this comes as Microsoft continues to pour billions into its AI efforts and as Wall Street watches to ensure the company sees a return on those investments. Microsoft says it will spend roughly $80 billion expanding its AI data centers and training and deploying AI models across its various business segments.
Despite that, the software giant says it continues to deal with resource constraints, meaning more users are trying to access AI features than Microsoft can handle, slowing down potential adoption and sales.
During its most recent earnings report, Microsoft said AI contributed 16 percentage points of growth to its Azure business, a strong sign that its investments are paying off. But it also reported that it anticipates resource constraints to continue past the June quarter.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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