According to reports, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tells customers at a conference in Chicago that the company is teaching a new set of artificial intelligence tools how to act on our behalf across our work and life.

AI developers are marketing the next generation of generative AI chatbots as AI ‘agents’ capable of performing more beneficial tasks on behalf of humans. However, the hefty expense of developing and maintaining AI technologies is making many investors wonder if the hype surrounding the technology is unfounded.

According to reports by Microsoft, every organization will have a constellation of agents - ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous.

Microsoft explained that these self-governing agents "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 serves its large business clients with its yearly Ignite conference. The shift to "agentic AI" coincides with some users' perceptions of the limitations of the massive language models used by chatbots such as Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. These algorithms do well on some writing-based tasks by guessing the most likely word to appear next in a phrase.

However, to browse the web or control computers and carry out tasks independently on behalf of a user, tech companies have been attempting to develop AI tools that are more adept at longer-range planning and reasoning.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce's CEO, has blasted Microsoft's change in direction. Salesforce also offers a service called Agentforce, which employs AI for marketing, sales, and other tasks.

"Microsoft is rebranding Copilot as agents. That's panic mode. Copilot, Microsoft's premier AI assistant, is ‘a flop’ that leaks company data and is erroneous.” says Marc.