A new tool<\/span> from Microsoft called Agent 365 is designed to help businesses control their growing collection of robotic helpers.<\/p>\n Agent 365 is not a platform for making enterprise AI tools; it\u2019s a way to manage them, as if they were human employees<\/a>. Companies using generative AI<\/a> agents in their digital workplace can use Agent 365 to organize their growing sprawl of bots, keep tabs on how they\u2019re performing, and tweak their settings. The tool is rolling out today in Microsoft\u2019s early access<\/a> program.<\/p>\n Essentially, Microsoft<\/a> created a trackable workspace for agents<\/a>. \u201cTools that you use to manage people, devices, and applications today, you’d want to extend them to run agents as well in the future,\u201d says Charles Lamanna, a president of business and industry for Microsoft\u2019s Copilot<\/a>, its AI chatbot.<\/p>\n Lamanna envisions a future where companies have many more agents performing labor than humans. For example, if a company has 100,000 employees, he sees them as using \u201chalf a million to a million agents,\u201d ranging in tasks from simple email organization<\/a> to running the \u201cwhole procurement process\u201d for a business. He claims Microsoft internally uses millions of agents.<\/p>\n This army of bots, with permission to take actions inside a company\u2019s software<\/a> and automate aspects of an employee\u2019s workflow, could quickly grow unwieldy to track. A lack of clear oversight could also open businesses up to security breaches<\/a>. Agent 365 is a way to manage all your bots, whether those agents were built with Microsoft\u2019s tools or through a third-party platform.<\/p>\n Agent 365\u2019s core feature is a registry of an organization\u2019s active agents all in one place, featuring specific identification numbers for each and details about how they are being used by employees. It\u2019s also where you can change the settings for agents and what aspects of a business\u2019s software each one has permission to access.<\/p>\n
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