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During Build 2024, Microsoft announced plans for copilots that can act as independent agents, including automating tasks.
These custom copilots won’t just respond to messages or events.
Corporate profits are driven upward by AI but many worry about how automation will affect employees.
They’ll be able to handle business processes on their own.
Microsoft describes this as a copilot working with you rather than working for you.
Copilots can be used to handle tasks in IT, marketing, sales, and finance.
Corporate profits are driven upward by AI but many worry about how automation will affect employees.
The ability to create custom copilots is now available to early access testers.
It will hit public preview within Copilot Studio this year.
Copilot Studio also gained a conversational interface designed to help make copilots.
What about jobs?
Teams being able to automate tasks and workflows raises questions about job security.
Microsoft argues that the new capabilities will automate boring and repetitive tasks that most people don’t like doing.
Microsoft touts the complexity of tasks that its AI agents can handle.
The feature list is impressive.
That may be true, but I also predict it will make teams smaller.
What makes a job, what makes a role?
Its a bunch of different tasks and generally its a very large number of very diverse and heterogeneous tasks.
It seems idealistic to assume Copilot will only handle the boring bits of jobs that no one likes doing.
But even if that were the case, AI is still replacing work done by a person.
But a natural consequence of automation is certain people losing their job or having to change fields.
Experienced professionals understand that sometimes you just need a person to get a job done.
But will companies keep a person on staff for those situations alone?
Or will experts have to split time between a broader range of organizations?
In either case, there would be fewer billable hours to go around.
