Hot on the heels of Salesforce's announcement last month of artificial intelligence agents for sales, Microsoft on Monday announced it will make ten agents available in Dynamics 365 for use in sales, customer service, finance, and supply chain operations.

The company is also previewing an addition to its Copilot Studio development tool to let programmers make their own agents with hooks into proprietary corporate data.

Microsoft says the use of agents can save companies as much as $50 million annually, or the equivalent of "adding 187 full-time employees."

"AI is today's ROI and tomorrow's competitive edge," according to Microsoft. 

The announcement comes a year after Microsoft announced multiple Copilot offerings for sales and customer support at Ignite, its annual developer conference. 

The "ten new autonomous agents," functioning inside of Microsoft's Dynamics 365 back-office suite, can do things ranging from qualifying sales prospects to automating time and expense tracking:

• Sales Qualification Agent "frees up time for the seller to spend on higher value activities by researching and prioritizing leads in the pipe and developing personalized sales emails to initiate a sales conversation."
• Sales Order Agent "automates the order intake process from entry to confirmation by interacting with customers, capturing
• their preferences."
• Supplier Communications Agent "autonomously manages collaboration with suppliers to confirm order delivery, while preempting potential delays."
• Financial Reconciliation Agent "helps teams prepare and cleanse data sets to simplify and reduce time spent on the most labor-intensive part of the financial period close process that leads to financial reporting."
• Account Reconciliation Agent "automates the matching and clearing of transactions between subledgers and the general ledger."
• Time and Expense Agent "autonomously manages time entry, expense tracking and approval workflows."
• Customer Intent Agent "continuously discovers new intents from past and current customer conversations across all channels, mapping issues and corresponding resolutions maintained by the agent in a library."
• Customer Knowledge Management Agent "analyzes case notes, transcripts, summaries and other artifacts from human-assisted cases to uncover insights."
• Case Management Agent "automates key tasks throughout the case lifecycle -- creation, resolution, follow up, closure -- to reduce handle time and alleviate the burden on service representatives."
• Scheduling Operations Agent "helps optimize schedules […] accounting for issues such as traffic delays, double bookings, or last-minute cancellations that often result in conflicts or gaps."

The ten agents "will start to become available in public preview later this year and continue into early 2025" in Dynamics 365, said Microsoft, and the company plans to introduce "many more agents in the coming year," it said. 

Microsoft's announcement predicted that "every organization will have a constellation of agents -- ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous."

The agents, working to "execute and orchestrate businesses process" will draw upon data sources that include "the context of your work data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Dataverse and Fabric," said Microsoft. 

Microsoft cited customer examples of Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, and Pets at Home, as those organizations that "are already creating autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact."

The announcement promises "guardrails and controls" and "stringent security measures and controls" for "robust data governance,' to be "managed in Copilot Studio." 

Protections, said Microsoft, include "loss prevention, robust authentication protocols, and more."

Copilot Studio is billed on a usage basis, quoted at $200 per month for 25,000 messages. You can start a free trial in Studio on Microsoft's site.

Microsoft will discuss more about Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 at its virtual event, the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, on October 29th.