AI-powered agents in action: How we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft

When we launched Microsoft 365 Copilot in February of 2023, it was a watershed moment in the history of Microsoft. By incorporating next-generation AI into the productivity tools that millions of people depend on every day, a new era of productivity was born.

“Today marks a significant milestone in our journey to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said when he announced the product. “With Copilot, we are bringing the power of next-generation AI to the tools millions of people use every day.”

Fast forward to now and there’s no doubt that Copilot is revolutionizing employee productivity here at Microsoft and elsewhere. It’s also clear that the pace of innovation is only increasing, and AI-powered agents, integrated with Copilot, are poised to help enterprises all over the world fulfill the promise of AI.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft corporate vice president for AI at Work, reflected on this paradigm shift during his keynote address at Microsoft Ignite. “Agents are the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents, ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous.”

“AI-powered agents can automate or assist with time-consuming tasks like document creation, email or meeting summarization, and creating presentations or reports, saving precious time and energy. This will enable our employees to focus on more innovative and engaging work.”

Rajamma Krishnamurthy, principal PM architect manager, Employee Experience

Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, the feeling of excitement that we felt that day was palpable.

“It was exciting to hear about the vision for an ‘agentic world,’ where a rich tapestry of AI agents, including personal agents, business process agents, and cross-organizational agents, work together to enhance productivity and collaboration,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal PM architect manager for Employee Experience at Microsoft.

The opportunity that agents present is massive; they will become our personal assistants.

“AI-powered agents can automate or assist with time-consuming tasks like document creation, email or meeting summarization, and creating presentations or reports, saving precious time and energy,” Krishnamurthy says. “This will enable our employees to focus on more innovative and engaging work.”

The ways that AI agents will impact our daily activities—both personally and professionally—is limitless.

“Agents will be able to do things like tell me what time I should leave for work based on traffic, help me navigate which way to go, help me find parking, and help me set up my day so I know what’s most important to work on,” says Amy Rosenkranz, a principal program manager also working on agents in Microsoft Digital. “I’ve been excited about these scenarios for a long time, anticipating how AI can seamlessly integrate into our daily lives. And now it’s here.”

In Microsoft Digital, we’re embracing our agentic future, where agents will make our employees, as well as the millions of people who rely on Microsoft 365 globally, more productive every day.

Enabling an agent-powered Microsoft

It’s important to acknowledge that adopting AI in the enterprise is a journey. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve adopted a maturity model for AI deployment in the enterprise. Early phases focus on using Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases enable employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows. Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise deployment phases

Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise deployment phases

Use these principles to guide you as you move through the two phases.  

1. Foundational capabilities. The first and most important step is to deploy a secure, enterprise-grade AI solution like Copilot for Microsoft 365 that’s grounded in your enterprise data. At Microsoft, we’ve deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to all of the more than 300,000 employees and vendors at the company, providing everyone with an AI-powered assistant to enhance their daily productivity.
2. Retrieval agents. Employees use low-code solutions like Copilot Studio Agent Builder or ready-made agents in SharePoint to quickly train models and retrieve knowledge for specialized scenarios.
3. Knowledge and actions. Powered by Copilot Studio, agents go beyond simple knowledge retrieval, offering next steps and actions that help employees to defragment their day-to-day employee experience. While these agents take a little more time to build, they offer significantly more utility in the enterprise. Copilot Studio provides a robust library of first- and third-party connectors that make it easy to incorporate actions across enterprise platforms.
4. Workflow reinvention. Employees manage and train a constellation of agents that perform fully autonomous actions. Note that the ability to create fully autonomous agents is currently in public preview. “The best way to think about these agents are just as your teammates,” Nadella said at Microsoft Ignite.

It’s important to note that these steps can take time.

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at global enterprise scale and developing proper governance practices to help our employees maximize the potential of AI has required patience as we create locally relevant change-management campaigns tailored to individual countries, roles, and other factors.

“The better your data, including back-end data, and the better that data is set up to interact with AI, the better the responses are going to be.”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

Later phases require more advanced tools, appropriate tenant governance, and collaboration between departments to ensure appropriate and responsible uses of AI. Additionally, our AI Center of Excellence has been instrumental in helping to build an AI-forward culture through training activities, knowledge sharing, and other activities to accelerate our growth as an organization.

Data quality and tenant governance are also important considerations for unlocking the value of agents in your enterprise.

“The better your data, including back-end data, and the better that data is set up to interact with AI, the better the responses are going to be,” Rosenkranz says.

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve adopted standards and policies that help us ensure that our agents are trained on high quality, accurate AI-ready data. AI-ready data for enterprise agents is data that’s clean, well-governed, and accessible through scalable pipelines. It integrates principles of data standardization, privacy compliance, and federated governance to enable seamless interoperability and actionable insight. With AI-ready data, our data scientists and engineers are better equipped to locate, process, and govern the enterprise data that drives our organization and allows us to develop effective agents.

But we’ve also been deliberate in building tools that make it easy to build and deploy agents in the enterprise. In fact, our design-first mindset, facilitated through architectural reviews, is enabling us to design and deploy agentic architectures that are resilient, secure, cost-effective, high-performance, and operationally sound. This structured approach ensures that AI agents deliver transformative value while aligning with organizational goals and maintaining trust.

{Learn how we’re transforming our data culture with AI-ready data.}

Bringing agents to life at Microsoft

While everyone at Microsoft already has access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, we’ve been cautious in deploying Copilot Studio, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, to all of our employees. Copilot Studio uses the same low-code connector model as the Power Platform to provide over 1,400 first- and third-party services that can drive employee actions. The same principles that we apply to the Power Platform—“employee empowerment with guardrails”—are being used to safely bring agents to life at Microsoft.

“Sometimes we mysticize these agents as things that take a lot of effort to build. Our vision is that it should be as simple as creating a Word doc or a PowerPoint slide.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

“Anyone at Microsoft can build agents to help them through mundane tasks, such as a writing assistant to help write better content, or to strategize with them on important areas like their career. However, these agents are available only to the person who created them,” Krishnamurthy says. “Agents that need to scale enterprise-wide are worked on by the respective engineering teams in collaboration with business partners.”

While the power in these “knowledge-only” or retrieval agents is significant, we in Microsoft Digital must balance employee innovation against some of the risks of agentic AI. Security and privacy controls are important for all applications, and even more so for those that incorporate AI.

“Sometimes we mysticize these agents as things that take a lot of effort to build,” Nadella said at Ignite. “Our vision is that it should be as simple as creating a Word doc or a PowerPoint slide.”

Additionally, understanding and incorporating our responsible AI principles in all aspects of the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is critical.

“A robust governance process and controls should be adhered to when building these AI agents through the entire SDL, starting with designing, building, deploying and monitoring agents after they’re deployed,” Krishnamurthy says.

Some practices we’re using within Microsoft Digital to keep our employees safe include:  

1. Security. We have established standards for data classification, policies on handling confidential information, and other security measures to protect data from unauthorized access, misuse, and disclosures. Microsoft Purview provides these foundational capabilities, including data labeling, rights management, and data loss prevention at Microsoft. 
2. Privacy. At Microsoft, we have established privacy compliance measures to ensure that personal data is protected, including adhering to regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. We also conduct regular privacy assessments for all applications, especially AI-powered agents.
3. Regulatory. It’s important to conduct regulatory compliance assessments to ensure that agents and extensions are meeting legal standards. Our legal and compliance teams are carefully monitoring AI regulations like NY 144 and the EU AI Act. Understanding and incorporating applicable guidelines, regulations, and laws into assessments is critical.

As Peter Parker famously learned, “with great power comes great responsibility.” The same holds true with AI agents in the enterprise space. While agents are an incredibly powerful tool that nearly anyone can take advantage of to improve their productivity, being mindful of security, privacy, and regulatory issues is essential to the responsible deployment of agentic AI in the enterprise.

{Learn how citizen developers at Microsoft are empowered through good governance with the Power Platform.}

Enabling employee self-service

In Microsoft Digital, we’re building AI-powered agents to support common employee scenarios, such as IT support, HR queries, and campus-related needs. The Employee Self-Service Agent seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 Copilot and helps to defragment the employee experience by providing a single place for employees to seek help with their most common pain points. With Copilot Studio, this agentic experience helps employees quickly retrieve relevant information and resolve their issues while also enabling them to take further action, such as opening a support ticket or submitting a request for time off.

Other capabilities include:

• An out-of-the-box experience that facilitates a no-configuration, focused employee self-service lens for optimized responses to common HR and IT questions.
• The minimum configuration delivers answers to employees via official content sources and company-crafted responses where necessary, decreasing search time and lowering frustration levels.
• Additional configuration reduces costs and accelerates time to value for HR functions, IT workflows, and campus needs.

Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

This agent is available for use by all our employees and contingent staff. It’s also being used by some of our partners and customers in a private preview and will become available to all Microsoft customers soon.

The future of IT

While we’re at the very beginning of this agentic journey at Microsoft, the pace of change has been and will continue to be incredibly swift as new capabilities emerge and autonomous agents become more common.

“We are at the tip of the iceberg, and the pace at which the product is developing is unlike anything I’ve seen in my tenure at Microsoft—and I’ve been here awhile. Agents are already incredibly powerful, and they’re only going to get more powerful.”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

In Microsoft Digital, we see a world where agentic AI will unlock productivity and creativity. This new world will empower our employees to train their own agentic teams, which can then handle routine day-to-day operational tasks so that they can focus on the higher-value work only humans can do. Some of the ways we’re exploring applying agents within Microsoft Digital include:

• Autonomous agents that can detect, report, remediate, and monitor network security and connectivity issues
• Autonomous agents that streamline and simplify business and operational processes, enabling our employees to focus on the higher value work that only humans can do
• Autonomous agents that anticipate your needs during travel, clearing your calendar, reconciling schedule conflicts, and even helping with things like reserving a car or mitigating flight delays
• Autonomous agents that help our global workplace services team to manage their facilities more effectively, reducing carbon emissions while maximizing workplace occupancy
• Autonomous agents that anticipate device issues, apply patches, continuously monitor device health and security, and keep our infrastructure and devices secure and reliable

While the advent of generative AI in the enterprise has been a boon to employees and has given organizations like Microsoft a competitive advantage, fully autonomous agents, powered by Copilot Studio, will give our employees an even greater edge in the highly competitive global marketplace for products, ideas, and solutions.

“We are at the tip of the iceberg, and the pace at which the product is developing is unlike anything I’ve seen in my tenure at Microsoft—and I’ve been here awhile,” Rosenkranz says. “Agents are already incredibly powerful, and they’re only going to get more powerful. More ‘Wow’ moments are coming.”

We invite you to seize this generational opportunity that AI agents present to provide more “Wow” moments for your own employees.