By Jeffrey Dastin<\/p>\n
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -In Microsoft<\/a>‘s view, humans are not the only ones to manage in a workplace.\u200b Artificial intelligence<\/a> needs a manager, too.<\/p>\n The software maker on Tuesday announced Microsoft \u200cAgent 365, a program for its customers to track what it expects to be 1.3 billion \u200cagents automating office work by 2028. Agents are AI-powered programs that perform tasks on humans’ behalf.<\/p>\n Microsoft and other companies are actively marketing agent software. While some customers have successfully deployed these systems for code generation, others have struggled with implementation, fueling \u2060concerns about a market bubble.<\/p>\n According \u200cto Microsoft, just like IT staff can see who is on a company’s network and manage what resources they can access,\u200d its latest software aims to extend similar controls to supervising AI agents.<\/p>\n The program lets IT personnel quarantine rogue agents while equipping authorized ones — whether built on Microsoft or other \u200bsoftware like Salesforce — with a range of productivity tools and aiming \u200cto secure them from cyberattacks, said Microsoft.<\/p>\n In an interview, Judson Althoff, the CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, said the product came out of requests from business leaders to get a handle on AI agents at work and measure their return on investment.<\/p>\n “Take supply chain. You might have an inventory agent. \u2060You might have an out-of-stock agent,”\u200b said Althoff. “Without this kind \u200bof a tool, understanding how those things compose in an overall process is really, really hard.”<\/p>\n Microsoft Agent 365 is available to license \u200dholders that sign up \u2060for an early access program.<\/p>\n The company announced the news at the start of Microsoft Ignite, a technology conference in San Francisco.<\/p>\n Other announcements included Work IQ, \u2060which lets companies build agents on top of the same intelligence and business data powering its AI \u200ccalled Microsoft 365 Copilot.<\/p>\n (Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; \u200cEditing by Kenneth Li and Lisa Shumaker)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jeffrey Dastin SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -In Microsoft‘s view, humans are not the only ones to manage in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,1071,18605,83676,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-146747","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-microsoft","14":"tag-microsoft-365","15":"tag-microsoft-agent","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}