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If you use Microsoft (MSFT+0.24%) products, AI is about to become more prevalent in your workplace.
The company announced a major expansion of its AI tools on Wednesday, and Microsoft’s 365 Copilot Wave 2 spring release featured AI “agents” designed to function as digital colleagues who can perform complex workplace tasks through deep reasoning capabilities.
Aparna Chennapragada, Microsoft’s chief product officer of experiences and devices, told VentureBeat that the company is building toward a vision where AI serves as more than just a tool — and becomes an integral collaborator in daily work.
According to an announcement by Microsoft, the features of Copilot Wave 2 include:
- AI-powered search to help users find information faster.
- A “create” experience built for business that unlocks design skills for everyone.
- Copilot Notebooks updates that turn content and data into insights and action.
- A new Agent Store where users can easily find and access agents right in the flow of work.
The Agent Store will include “researcher” and “analyst.” Microsoft billed them as: “Two first-of-their-kind reasoning agents for work powered by OpenAI’s deep reasoning models. ... Researcher helps you tackle complex, multi-step research — delivering insights with greater quality and accuracy than previously possible. And Analyst thinks like a skilled data scientist, so you can go from raw data to insights in minutes.”
The arrival of the “AI colleague” was heralded today in a report by Microsoft about the increasing role of AI in the workplace.
“A new organizational blueprint is emerging, one that blends machine intelligence with human judgment, building systems that are AI-operated but human-led,” the report said. “Like the Industrial Revolution and the internet era, this transformation will take decades to reach its full promise and involve broad technological, societal, and economic change.”
The report added, “We are entering a new reality — one in which AI can reason and solve problems in remarkable ways.” Microsoft calls this new workplace the “Firm Frontier.”
Chennapragada wrote on LinkedIn this week that people are still using AI for mundane, simple tasks when they could be using it to do more — the equivalent of having AI make coffee runs when it could be playing a much greater role in the workplace.
“We’re experiencing an ‘intelligence overhang’—today’s advanced AI models possess deep reasoning capabilities, approaching or even surpassing human PhD-level performance in certain domain,” she wrote, “yet, we still assign these AI tools trivial tasks!”
If Microsoft’s tools are a success, you’ll be gathering around the water cooler with your AI colleagues.