CHICAGO (AP) — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is opening an organization convention in Chicago with remarks that would set the stage for the place it’s taking its synthetic intelligence enterprise.
AI builders are more and more pitching the subsequent wave of generative AI chatbots as AI “agents” that may do extra helpful issues on individuals’s behalf. However the price of constructing and working AI instruments is so excessive that extra traders are questioning whether or not the know-how’s promise is overblown.
Microsoft stated final month that it’s getting ready for a world the place “every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous.”
Microsoft elaborated in a weblog put up Tuesday that such autonomous brokers “can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or go over shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly supply-chain errors.”
Microsoft’s annual Ignite convention caters to its large enterprise prospects. The pivot towards so-called “agentic AI” comes as some customers are seeing limits to the big language fashions behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s personal Copilot. These programs work by predicting essentially the most believable subsequent phrase in a sentence and are good at sure writing-based work duties.
However tech firms have been working to construct AI instruments which can be higher at longer-range planning and reasoning to allow them to entry the net or management computer systems and carry out duties on their very own on a person’s behalf.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s pivot. Salesforce additionally has its “Agentforce” service that makes use of AI in gross sales, advertising and marketing and different duties.
“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode,” Benioff stated in a social media put up final month. He went on to say that Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, known as Copilot, is “a flop” that’s inaccurate and spills company information.