This week is particularly full of news for the world Microsoft and, consequently, the users who use its products and services. A few hours after the rich Surface event, the Redmond giant revealed other news at the conference Build 2024such as the possibility for companies and developers to create versions of Copilot capable of performing precise tasks completely automatically. Just as if they were employees (but in reality they are AI).
Instead of waiting for questions and requests, the AI-powered assistant will be able to perform actions such as monitor your email inbox or enter data. In short, things that employees have to do manually. Obviously everything depends on the characteristics assigned to theAI agent during its creation, so the list of automations is much longer.
Interviewed by The Verge, Charles Lamanna of Microsoft commented on this important news: «CWe quickly realized that Copilot couldn’t be limited to just conversation. Rather than having a Copilot waiting there until someone chats with it, what if you could make this AI assistant more proactive by allowing it to work on automated tasks in the background?».
Copilot Studio and fears for jobs
The ability to create custom versions of the AI assistant is currently limited to a small number of testers. The public preview of Copilot Studio (this is the name of the tool for creating the agents) will instead be available by the end of 2024.
Thanks to this platform, companies will be able to create a Copilot agent capable of manage IT help desk activities, employee onboarding and so on. As Microsoft explains, we are spectators of a sort of transformation of the AI assistant, which goes from “working with you” to “working for you”.
It is obvious however that this type of automation will lead to doubts about job stability and to fears about the weight that artificial intelligence is taking on. In this regard, Charles Lamanna claims that Copilot agents will not “steal” any jobsbut they will lighten the load by carrying out repetitive and mundane tasks such as data entry.
«We think that with Copilot and Copilot Studio some tasks will be completely automated… but the good news is that most of the things that are automated are things that no one really wants to do», concludes the Microsoft executive.