A new tool from Microsoft called Agent 365 is designed to help businesses control their growing collection of robotic assistants.
Agent 365 is not a platform for building business AI tools; it’s a way to manage them, as if they were human employees. Companies using generative AI agents in their digital workplace can use Agent 365 to orchestrate their growing expansion of bots, monitor their performance, and adjust their settings. The tool is rolling out to Microsoft’s Early Access Program today.
Essentially, Microsoft created a trackable workspace for agents. “The tools you use to manage people, devices and applications today, you’ll want to extend them to run agents in the future as well,” says Charles Lamanna, president of business and industry for Microsoft’s Copilot, its AI chatbot.
Lamanna envisions a future where companies have many more agents performing labor than humans. For example, if a company has 100,000 employees, it considers that they employ “between half a million and a million agents,” which range from simply organizing email to running the “entire hiring process” for a company. It claims that Microsoft uses millions of agents internally.
This army of bots, with permission to perform actions within a company’s software and automate aspects of an employee’s workflow, could quickly become difficult to control. A lack of clear oversight could also open companies up to security breaches. Agent 365 is a way to manage all your bots, whether those agents were built with Microsoft tools or through a third-party platform.
Agent 365’s main feature is a record of an organization’s active agents in one place, with unique ID numbers for each and details about how employees are using them. It’s also where you can change agent settings and what aspects of a company’s software they’re allowed to access.
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