AI agents and copilots will impact everything from how companies organize their people and departments to work styles to metrics used to measure business performance. Those were key conclusions from Microsoft Corporate Vice President Bryan Goode during his keynote fireside chat with Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans at AI Agent & Copilot Summit this morning.
Goode reinforced the Microsoft vision of a copilot operating as a productivity agent for every employee and an agent for every process to reason over them, as he articulated a future where work and organizational models evolve.
As companies move forward with their agent and copilot strategies, Microsoft recommends they take a “very intentional” approach to select their use cases, avoiding a practice of deploying AI technology everywhere in a “spray and pray” approach. Goode recommended carefully picking the pilot set of employees and departments to test with and the functions to automate. It’s with this targeted approach where Microsoft sees the best results, he noted.
As these use cases move more aggressively into practice and production, that will impact the way companies are organized as well as the work styles of its employees, Goode noted.
Companies will be “less human-led, more agent-led, and that will really change the way we work.” In fact, Goode said Microsoft is working on guidelines to help companies understand what the company of the future will look like and how it will operate. He predicted every business leader will be challenged to strike the right balance between humans and agents, as well as to continue to deliver near-term results while also focusing on the strategic transformation of their business on the power of agents.
Those companies that get the organizational and technology considerations correct position themselves to unlock “magic moments” where AI directly addresses business problems that they likely wouldn’t have even attempted to take on otherwise.
For instance, Goode cited an example where he used a Microsoft research agent to gather recommendations from public sources on important fixes to make in one of the company’s products. After a sequence of followups, he was able to get a useful answer in 5 to 10 minutes. “In the past, I wouldn’t have even done it because it was so painful,” he said, underscoring the power and potential of agents. Similarly, a business user who had an interest in getting a targeted group of contacts from a database may not have done that in the past because of a low prospective upside. Now it’s straightforward to gather such data, he noted.
What will all this mean for customers using Microsoft business applications? While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has discussed the future of applications and noted that agents could ultimately supplant them, Goode noted that he fully expects there to be a continuing place for Microsoft business applications amid the AI transformation taking place. While agents will automate a lot of business processes, he noted it’s still vital for companies to have systems of record and places to store data. Dynamics 365 fits into that model nicely, given its strong installed base, the addition of AI technology, and the strategic data it manages.
The move to agents will improve an oft-cited shortcoming with many corporate business applications, namely the proliferation of data silos. In the AI era, data is more important than ever, and agents will help make it less siloed, he said.
Goode and Evans discussed the future and role of those partners who’ve been central to working with customers in selecting and implementing the Dynamics 365 platform. Goode said partners are positioned to become more important, not less as AI deployment accelerates. The race to deploy AI is existential, he said, and customers will be learning on partners to advise and guide them on both horizontal and vertical use cases to enhance their competitive positioning.
In fact, Goode said that the proliferation of agents will make it vital that companies adapt the types of performance and other metrics they measure; he cited an “agent-to-human” ratio as one such example and indicator of success that executives should consider tracking.
