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The line between machines and employees is becoming blurred. While there’s a big difference between a human and a machine, recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to the creation of virtual agents, which in turn is leading to a new idea… Virtual employees.
Just this week, Microsoft announced that users will be able to create autonomous agents with Copilot? Studio, which can automate ‘mundane’ workplace tasks.
At the moment, it’s unclear exactly what the ceiling is for these types of agents, which many commentators are dubbing “AI employees”.
What is clear is that the nature of human white-collar jobs is changing.
Key Takeaways
- Microsoft introduces Copilot Studio for creating virtual employees — AI bots that can automate mundane tasks and “boost efficiency”.
- Microsoft says early adopters like McKinsey & Pets at Home are already using virtual employees and seeing positive results.
- Microsoft’s virtual employees could reshape the future of white-collar work — should we be worried?
Why Microsoft’s Virtual Employees Matter
Microsoft is one of the biggest enterprise technology brands in the world.
As the saying goes, “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft,” and the tech giant’s decision to embrace virtual agents as part of its product portfolio and internal operations suggests that AI will play a greater role in shaping our working lives.
Jared Spataro, CMO of Microsoft AI at Work, said in the announcement blog post:
“Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous.
“They will work on behalf of an individual, team, or function to execute and orchestrate business processes.
“Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents, and they’d do everything from accelerating lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain.”
Cynically, you might say Microsoft spent the ’80s and ’90s turning us all into office workers, and now it is working to revoke all those roles.
For an employer, the virtue of a virtual employee is obvious: processes can be streamlined and upscaled to make them more cost-effective than human-led manual workflows. No HR, no paid overtime, 24/7 operation, performing many tasks instantly.
So far, Microsoft’s autonomous agents include a sales qualification agent, who researches and guides customer outreach with personalized emails and responses, and a customer knowledge agent, who enables customer service reps to better resolve address issues by providing them with information from knowledge-based articles.
Early Adopters of Virtual Employees
Microsoft said organizations like Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home, and Thomson Reuters are already creating autonomous agents “to increase revenue, reduce costs, and scale impact”.
McKinsey & Company is creating an agent that will “speed up the client onboarding process” and Pets at Home, a giant UK pet care business, is working on an agent “for its profit protection team” to “more efficiently compile cases for skilled human review”.
Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters is building a “professional-grade agent” to speed up legal due diligence workflow, aiming to save 50% of time.
Microsoft has also begun using Copilot and virtual agents as part of its own operations “with some success”.
More specifically, the tech giant claims that one sales team has achieved 9.4% higher revenue per seller and closed 20% more deals through using the agents, while its marketing team has increased conversion rates on Azure.com by 21.5%.
Ethical Concerns of Virtual Agents
These early pilot projects demonstrate that AI can be used in the enterprise to automate basic tasks and deliver tangible results.
At the moment, this appears to enable human employees to perform their roles better, but it is questionable whether these types of agents will advance to the point of automating certain roles completely.
Although virtual agents undoubtedly have a lot to offer in terms of increasing efficiency, they also introduced serious concerns. Not least is the fact that the widespread adoption of virtual agents in the enterprise will almost certainly result in job losses.
Mckinsey’s research estimates that between 400 million and 800 million individuals could be displaced by automation and need to find new jobs by 2030.
It seems like a reasonable estimation to suggest that virtual agents could eventually contribute to the loss of white-collar jobs.
On a more practical note, there is also the concern of whether these agents could make errors and what level of human oversight they require.
Dan Parsons, COO/CPO at Thoughtful, told Techopedia:
“There’s considerable potential to build a more productive and efficient workforce by integrating these technologies, but it’s crucial to address key considerations such as data security’s privacy, and ensuring the AI systems are designed to handle critical, high-impact workflows responsibly.”
Parsons notes that poor implementations could lead to everything from workflow disruptions to data breaches, so it’s important for organizations to plan and execute adoption carefully.
The Bottom Line
AI agents are coming to the enterprise. Microsoft’s launch of virtual agents shows that these virtual employee-like tools are not going to be restricted to niche applications but experimented with across white-collar industries.
What this means for employees’ long-term employment prospects is unclear, but for now, it appears these tools are primarily designed to support human employees rather than attempt to replace them. But revolutions always start small.
