Agents for Productivity

Agents for Productivity (A4P) is a M365 Research initiative to enable Microsoft to deliver reliable, highly capable, and scalable agentic solutions that drive measurable productivity impact. The strategy addresses two core challenges: technological gaps (tool integration/selection, memory & context management, advanced reasoning) and operationalization barriers (realistic benchmarks, prod‑like environments, unified evaluation & tech transfer). The approach is composable and platform‑driven, pairing foundational components (orchestration, procedural memory, planning) with a research kit (benchmarks, environments, evaluation/debug pipelines) to accelerate adoption across M365.

Research Areas

• Orchestration Intelligence & Advanced Reasoning: Innovate across the orchestration stack (post‑training for tool‑rich, long‑horizon tasks; planning & multi‑agent workflows; enterprise‑grounded RL environments). Goals include scaling tool/API awareness, improving plan optimization, and establishing realistic evaluation aligned to Office/Windows workflows.
• Agentic Memory and Context Management: Deliver tenant/user‑scoped procedural memory to preserve know‑how across sessions and projects; progressively unify curation with semantic/episodic memory while enforcing contextual integrity in sharing scenarios. Focus areas include capture from prior executions/demonstrations, background curation & retrieval, and human‑in‑the‑loop editing and feedback
• Computer-Using & Hybrid Agents: Expand automation coverage via robust GUI+API execution across M365/Windows, improving grounding for visual actions and progressing toward a multimodal World Model for safer, sample‑efficient learning and model‑based RL.