Microsoft unleashes autonomous Copilot AI agents in public preview

Ignite Microsoft has fresh tools out designed to help businesses build software agents powered by foundation models – overenthusiastically referred to as artificial intelligence, or AI.

"Our vision is to empower every employee with a personal assistant via Copilot that allows them to tackle work's biggest pain points like meeting overload, overflowing inbox, designing sales decks in less time and with more business impact," comms chief Frank Shaw told media in a briefing.

Copilot, in case you've missed it, is the term Microsoft has adopted to refer to its AI productivity software. Based on OpenAI's GPT-4 series of large language models, it provides a chatbot interface through which users can enter an input prompt (text, audio, or an image, depending on context) and receive some response.

Microsoft 365 Copilot lets users tell Word to draft or edit text on whatever topic the chatbot can satisfactorily reproduce from its ...