Are AI agents ousting the co-pilots of artificial intelligence (AI)?
The world’s software giants appear to be saying so, the Financial Times (FT) reports reported Sunday (September 22).
According to that report Microsoft, Point of sale And Working day have all put agents at the center of their AI plans in the past week, with Oracle And ServiceNow and recently announced this idea at industry conferences.
While copilots (a term popularized by Microsoft to describe AI assistants) have flourished following the popularity of ChatGPT, agents are designed to go further.
“AI agents are advanced software programs “Designed to perform tasks or provide services autonomously for people or businesses,” PYMNTS noted in a report on the topic earlier this year. “They are increasingly important in commerce, handling complex operations from managing supply chains to booking travel arrangements.”
Assuming the industry is right, the FT added, the move from co-pilots to agents could herald “a much more disruptive phase” in the evolution of generative AI, for both workers and tech companies.
However, the software industry is still in “show me” mode when it comes to co-pilots or AI agents, Jim Tierney, a growth equity investor at AllianceBernstein, told the FT.
“It’s still an open question how exactly this is going to be monetized,” he added.
Meanwhile, CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff said in an interview with the FT that there was a lack of traction for copilots.
“Microsoft has cheated customers with their AI strategy, they don’t have to do it themselves,” he said. “We’re building it into our platform, customers shouldn’t be forced to train and retrain their models.”
In related news, PYMNTS wrote last month about Airfirea startup working on solving what it calls a major AI-related challenge: empowering agents to manage financial transactions on their own. The company’s platform enables AI agents to track balances, send and receive payments, and conduct financial transactions with humans and other AI entities.
“The next million customers for many enterprises there will be an AI agent,” Amir SarhangiSkyfire CEO and co-founder, told PYMNTS. “Companies have to figure out very quickly how to sell their services to an AI agent instead of a human.”
Agents, he added, “are starting to take over some of the day-to-day work that you do and do it on your behalf.”
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