Okay. So this week Microsoft has been holding their ignite conference. And one of the key things that they're focusing on in a very large way is the whole area of autonomous agents.
So in this video, I want to look at some of the things that they've announced, and show you that how Microsoft is bringing out the big guns. And that with this announcement, they've probably taken on, 20 or 30 different startups that are out there trying to do just individual parts of this. So last month we saw Microsoft basically announced major updates to their Copilot Studio.
And the key takeaway from that was that they're trying to integrate agents into this workflow that they've got there. And part of that integration is trying to get away from this chat user interface. So people are finally starting to wake up that often you want agents to be triggered by things that is not a chat interface.
And you could argue that Copilot Studio really was built around that whole chat interface when GPT-4 came out, et cetera. But Microsoft is making a hard pivot now towards these autonomous agents that will often be triggered by a variety of different triggers that are not just you chatting with it In a window. Now, the announcement that they've come out with this week is a whole bunch of different things, again, around autonomous agents.
But now a lot of it is focused around Dynamics 365. Now I didn't even know what Dynamics 365 was before this. But it seems to be a suite of tools that revolve around things like CRM or customer relationship management, enterprise planning and it's definitely focused at big companies.
From what I can see, this is very similar to like the Salesforce agent system that they rolled out recently. So the big announcement for Dynamics 365 is that they're introducing 10 new autonomous agents. And I want to go through each of these agents.
Because I think you're going to see that each of these agents is almost like a full startup in itself. And the fact that Microsoft is so ambitiously, just rolling this all out, really shows how aggressively they're going after the agent's market in here. So these agents are built for a number of key areas that they talk about they're trying to help in businesses.
Now we'll go through each of the agents in a second, but let's look at the categories that they're going for here. The first one is sales stuff to help people sell stuff. And often that's going to be lead generation that kind of thing.
Second one is servicing people and helping around customer service, having around follow up all this kind of thing. Next one is finance. and the last area that they're focusing on is the supply chain area.
Now they mentioned that this is just the start. So I think this is fascinating looking at what we've been seeing, coming out of Microsoft research with things like Magentic-One where they're going for these more sort of general agents. In some ways you could say these are not that direction.
This is more where they're actually taking those agents and customizing them. And a key element of this is Microsoft having all the enterprise integrations so that they can integrate into various parts of their software. They can integrate to things in the cloud.
They can integrate to third party things as well. So let's jump in and have a look at these 10 agents. All right.
So first up is sales. and the first one that they've got up here is a sales qualification agent. So the idea here is that this is going to automate lead qualification, lead generation, that kind of thing by researching leads.
prioritizing the best opportunities for you. and then drafting a sort of personalized outreach emails to each of these people. So the goal here is that this is going to take a sales team and allow them to really focus on to the high priority prospects.
Now, most of this seems to be focused on inbound leads, as opposed to just going out and spamming the world, which a lot of startups who are doing lead gen seem to be doing at the moment. But you can imagine that this will certainly help sales teams to be able to be more efficient, to prioritize what they actually focus on and to be able to follow up with people. The next agent is a sales order agent.
So the idea here is something that can basically automate your sales order process from taking an order, through the sort of confirmation, through to interacting with the customer, to perhaps work out delivery stuff, that kind of thing. Finding out the preferences of what they actually want, perhaps following up, if something's out of stock, that kind of thing. You can imagine that this again is a whole product that our startup is making and building a whole startup around, to help businesses just get way more efficient with their sales ordering process.
I've actually mentored some startups in the Google for startups program that are doing things very similar to this kind of thing. Alright, third up. We've got the supplier communications agents.
So again, this sort of hits home with me personally, in that recently I got approached about someone who was trying to build an agent to do exactly this. So what does this do? It manages sort of supplier interactions, autonomously to basically confirm sort of delivery orders to work out, when they're going to be delays, being able to try and mitigate those sorts of things.
and the idea here is that a lot of companies have these sort of just in time supply chains or have these supply chains that are really reliant on lots of other people, delivering things to them, to be able to manufacture and do things. So you can imagine this agent being really useful for being able to follow up when it looks like something's going to be late, for being able to find out information when something hasn't shown up, for being able to reach out and try and expedite something when you. You need it urgently.
and being able to have all of this communication with the outside and perhaps bringing it back and putting it on some kind of dashboard again, whole start-up right in one thing. So I'm really trying to show you how aggressive Microsoft is actually going after these kinds of startups . All right.
Fourth one up is financial reconciliation agent. Again, I've heard of startups that are doing this kind of thing where they're helping companies with their financial statements, being able to identify any discrepancies. Being able to provide actionable recommendations and stuff like that.
So this is Microsoft's take on that. This is going to help reduce a lot of manual work that goes on. you could imagine this will help improve accuracy for these kinds of thing.
And also we'll just make the whole process really, a lot faster overall. Next one up, we've got the account reconciliation agents. So this is building on the sort of finance offerings and stuff like that.
To be honest, I don't know a lot about this particular topic, but you can see, again, this is something that Microsoft is obviously hearing from their customers that, Hey, we would like help with this kind of thing. And this brings us to the sixth agent, which is the time and expense agents. So lots of people have, been involved where you've got to file tracking for travel, for expenses, for all this kind of thing.
And there've been lots of startups that have been built around this. It's something that companies are, happy to pay for, if they can get a more efficient process for doing this So they're not wasting money. So they're reducing fraud, that kind of thing.
So this simplifies project, accounting, reduces admin overhead. And ensures Timely billing for people as well. Okay, next one up.
Number seven is the customer intent agent. So I kind of find this funny, this is something that Google brought my startup into consult for one of their customers five years ago to do this. and basically what this is that often customers will approach a company, not knowing where in the company, who to connect with or something like that.
Or in some cases, like the case that I worked on the company will want to have sort of one email where it's like, hello@companyname. com kind of thing. And then they need some way to be able to determine, okay, is this like a sales thing?
And we should route this to the sales team. Is this a marketing thing? We should route it to that.
And you can imagine that this is the exact kind of thing that agents are really good at. And my guess is that, Microsoft has obviously had a lot of queries about how could they do this? I know SAP has built things around this kind of thing in the past.
Again, a reasonably simple task and one that's probably suited for agents, as we know them. All right. Number eight.
customer knowledge management. So the idea here is that this is going to empower your CRM as you going through here. That this is going to update knowledge based articles based on sort of customer interactions, you could imagine that eventually this gets sort of hooked into phone systems where every things get automatically transcribed, CRMs get automatically updated, that kind of thing.
So this is going to help service teams with up-to-date information and allow them to keep up with what's going on with customers when you're speaking to them in a contact center, that kind of thing. All right. Number nine.
here were definitely into customer service territory. So this is the case management agent. and the idea here is that this is going to manage customer service cases from the start right through to the end.
and this will be doing things like categorization, assigning, what kind of issue this is, deciding who should be pinged to follow up with this. Again, this is suited to agents very well. It streamlines the whole case handling, it reduces resolution times, that kind of thing.
And you could imagine that this is definitely on the path to helping, get happier customers anytime something goes wrong for them. And yet again, there are plenty of startups out there trying to do this thing for companies. So there's a definite pattern here that we're seeing.
All right. This brings us to the last one in here, and this is scheduling operations agents. So you have the idea here from what I can see is that this is basically for scheduling, operations by, again, assigning the right person.
doing categorizations, there's very common themes in these particular agents that we're seeing. And you can imagine that this kind of thing allows companies that are sending people out into the field to make sure that they're sending the right person for the problem, rather than wasting time sending one person only to find that's not the person with the expertise that it was needed on site, that someone else was needed to go out there. So yet again, we're seeing, the uses for categorization for basically working out some kind of text input or some kind of ticket that's been submitted.
and then working out the best resources to do this. So, if you look at these 10 agents altogether, you will start to see that there are really common themes that they're using in here. So they're doing a lot of things like categorization, like classification, deciding isn't a lead high priority, low priority based on information that they have around it.
Again, we're also seeing the big themes that I've talked about in the past of things like personalization and customization so that you're getting the right message to the person that you're dealing with. And that all of this is focused on reducing the need for sort of manual interventions or manual labor tasks of people actually needing to read things and decide that, okay, this will go to this place. This will go to this other place in here.
So overall these 10 agents, I kind of feel that pretty much, each one of these agents is a sort of field of startups. and this is one of the things that we're starting to see is that we've got both sort of the horizontal plays with agents where you've got people trying to make agents software that will work for a variety of different use cases, but then we've got also the vertical plays where people are actually going in and saying, we're making agents just for travel agents or we're making agents just for salespeople. It's going to be really interesting to see how all this plays out with Microsoft.
And you can imagine the other big companies coming not far behind this, into this kind of concept, basically giving enterprises what they actually want to reduce their costs, reduce the time it takes to get things done, et cetera. Okay. So after I recorded this video, I caught up with Matt Marshall.
Who's the founder of VentureBeat, and we had a whole long chat about Microsoft's announcements about what they're doing with agents about how this impact startups and stuff like that. If you are interested in this, go into VentureBeat. You'll be able to check this out.
we ended up doing, quite a decent chat and covering a bunch of this in there. So, if you are interested to find out more about what Microsoft is doing, not just with these 10 agents, but with other areas and things that they announced at Ignite check out the chat on VentureBeat. Anyway, as always, I'd love to hear from you, what you think are the biggest agents that they've left out here.
what things do you think that they're going to add in the near future? and how do you feel about Microsoft basically going after startups are so early in this agent's game. And as always, if you liked the video, please click like and subscribe.
and I will talk to you in the next video. Bye for now.
