If 2024 was the year that artificial intelligence chatbots became more useful, 2025 will be the year that AI agents start to take over. You can think of agents as super-powered AI bots that can take actions on your behalf, like extracting data from incoming emails and importing it into different applications.
You’ve probably heard the rumors from agents before. Companies ranging from Nvidia (NVDA) and Google (GOOG, GOOGLE) to Microsoft (MSFT) and Salesforce (RCMP) are increasingly talking about agentic AI, a sophisticated way of referring to AI agents, saying it will change the way businesses and consumers perceive AI technologies.
The goal is to reduce often tedious and time-consuming tasks such as filing expense reports, the bane of my professional existence. Not only will we see more AI agents, but we will also see more big tech companies developing them.
Companies using them report seeing changes based on their own internal metrics. According to Charles Lamanna, vice president of Copilot Business and Industry at Microsoft, the Windows maker has already seen improvements in responsiveness to IT issues and business results.
According to Lamanna, Microsoft employee IT self-help success increased 36%, while revenue per seller increased 9.4%. The company also noticed an improvement in the resolution times for HR files.
As with any new technology, using AI agents will take some time to get used to. But if they meet the high expectations of tech companies, they could win over many users and represent an impressive new use case for generative AI.
“If… you get very fast, very accurate, very meaningful and useful answers right away, then that can start to change people’s habits,” Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, told Yahoo Finance. “But changing people’s habits takes time.”
The discussion about AI chatbots/AI co-pilots/AI agents can be a bit confusing. After all, generative AI chatbots still seem like a new technology, and now we’ve already moved on to the next big thing. But these three abilities are all part of the same overall system.
Ray Smith, Microsoft’s vice president of AI agents, says you can think of an AI co-pilot as your primary interface for interacting with your chatbot or assistant. Kind of like a home screen for your various AI needs.
When you ask your chatbot or assistant to perform various tasks for you, it will contact AI agents with the appropriate capabilities.
If this sounds complex, here’s a simple example: Let’s say you want to book a flight. You can ask your chatbot to see what flights are available for you, and it will use different AI agents to check your flight preferences, schedule and availability, and potentially even your financial apps to make sure you get a flight in your budget. scope, then come back with a handful of suggested flights.