Microsoft 365 gets new agents for building apps, workflows and… more agents – News

Microsoft Corp. is expanding its agentic artificial intelligence offerings with the launch of new agents for building applications and workflows.

The App Builder and Workflows agents, available to Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers in the company’s Frontier Program, can perform tasks autonomously based on simple natural language prompts.

In a blog post, Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s president of business and industry Copilot, said the App Builder agent can create a fully functional application and deploy it in a matter of minutes. It’s a truly no-code experience, he said, because unlike other agentic application development platform, there’s no need to worry about setting up an underlying database. Instead, it just runs in the Azure cloud, with the agent configuring all of the backend.

Users will be able to outline the app they want to build, and then use natural language prompts to instruct the agent to refine elements such as the user interface, dashboard, lists and other aspects. The entire process happens directly within Microsoft 365 Copilot, and it’s grounded in user’s Microsoft 365 content, which means the app will be able to integrate or interact with documents such as Word files and PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets and so on. There are

“You can preview and refine your app over multiple edits and comments, without leaving Copilot,” Lamanna said. Once users are satisfied, they’ll be able to distribute the app by creating a link and sharing it with other team members.

As for the Workflows agent, this is all about automating mundane tasks such as sending emails, managing calendars and sharing team updates. Just as with the App Builder, users simply tell the agent what they want, and their verbal instructions will be converted into automated workflows across platforms such as Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Planner and more. As the agent builds the workflow in real time, users will be able to see each step, so they can follow it and understand it and make edits to its behavior as necessary.

Lamanna said the Workflows agent is optimized for end users but built atop of the same infrastructure as Agent Flows, which is the foundation of the full Copilot Studio experience, meaning it’s backed by enterprise-grade governance and security.

Copilot gets an agentic agent builder

In addition to the new agents, Microsoft  has launched a new lightweight Copilot Experience built directly into the Copilot application that workers can use to create their very own customized AI agents. These are productivity-focused agents, Lamanna said, as they’re designed to automate specific aspects of people’s work, following clear instructions and structured logic.

The lightweight Copilot Studio experience is really just a way to get people started, but Microsoft ultimately wants most customers to step up to the full Copilot Studio when they’re ready. When they do so, they’ll be able to access more advanced workflows and select from various large language models to power their AI agents. It also enables users to build more sophisticated, collaborative multi-agent systems that can perform more advanced work-related tasks.

As with all of its AI offerings, Microsoft says, App Builder, Workflows and Copilot Studio lite are grounded in enterprise-grade security, compliance and reliability. The agents respect user context and enforce individual permissions and role-based access controls, it added.

Administrators will be able to manage the rollout of the new agents in a granular way within the “agent inventory” section of Microsoft 365’s administrative center, so they won’t have to mess around setting up individual guardrails for each employee.

Images: Microsoft