The next evolution of AI has arrived, and it’s agentic. AI agents are powered by the same AI systems as chatbots, but can take independent action, collaborate to achieve bigger objectives, and take over entire business workflows. The technology is relatively new, but all the major players are already on board.
In October, Microsoft announced that 100,000 organizations including Standard Bank, Thomson Reuters, Virgin Money, and Zurich Insurance are using Copilot Studio, double the number just months earlier. Copilot Studio allows enterprises to build autonomous agents, as well as other agents that connect CRM systems, HR systems, and other enterprise platforms to Copilot.
Throughout late 2024, Microsoft continued to expand its agentic offerings with purpose-built agents for specific use cases. Then in November, the company revealed its Azure AI Agent Service, a fully-managed service that lets enterprises build, deploy and scale agents quickly. And on AWS, Amazon Bedrock Agents have been available since 2023, but in December, Amazon added multi-agent collaboration capabilities.
