Diving brief:
- Microsoft is expanding its collection of tools to automate business functions like the CFO’s office with the launch of new artificial intelligence “agents” capable of learning and performing certain tasks autonomously, the software giant announced Monday. software.
- The company is introducing 10 new autonomous agents, including two aimed at financial professionals, into its Microsoft Dynamics 365 enterprise resource planning platform, according to a Monday blog post written by Bryan Goode, corporate vice president at Microsoft. Pricing and licensing details will be shared once the new agents enter the “public preview” phase later this year, a spokesperson said by email.
- The company sees a “huge opportunity” to use such agents to automate enterprise finance workflow, according to Georg Glantschnig, Microsoft vice president of Dynamics 365 ERP applications. “There There are still a lot of manual processes” within the finance function, he said in an interview, adding that areas such as accounts payable and receivable are particularly ripe for automation.
Dive overview:
The move comes as the race for AI innovation among enterprise software vendors intensifies. This follows Salesforce’s recent introduction of a suite of autonomous AI agents known as “Agentforce”.
Microsoft’s latest deployment is based on a May announcement in which the company describes its vision of independent agents who can “automate and orchestrate complex, long-running business processes with more autonomy and less human intervention.” This is part of a growing trend in which technology providers are promising the next step in generative AI applications – beyond tools focused primarily on information retrieval or insight delivery, according to Rowan Curran, principal analyst at Forrester.
“Buyers are rightly excited about the potential of agentic AI systems, but the reality of implementing them will be just as challenging, if not more so, than the current generation of advanced RAG (recovery augmented generation) systems,” Curran said in an email. . “Having a solid database will be essential to creating useful AI agents. Data quality and management are not issues that can be ignored.
Next month will mark the second anniversary of OpenAI’s launch of its AI-powered generative tool ChatGPT, which has attracted global attention with its ability to answer all kinds of questions in a human way, write reports, composing songs and poems and writing. software code, among other activities.
Shortly after announcing a multi-billion dollar investment deal with OpenAI in January 2023, Microsoft developed Copilot, its own ChatGPT-style chatbot, which has since been added to a wide range of products and services offered by the software giant.
“Our next big evolution is this agent concept.” Glantschnig said.
As part of its announcement on Monday, Microsoft announced the deployment of a series of new AI agents for sales, service, finance and supply chain teams.
A new account reconciliation agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance automates “the reconciliation and clearing of transactions between subsidiary ledgers and the general ledger, helping them accelerate the financial close process,” according to Goode’s blog post. The company also introduced a new financial reconciliation agent designed to help teams prepare and clean data sets.