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Thinking about turning that intranet FAQ into a frequently asked chatbot? Microsoft wants to make the process easier.
On January 15, the company announced its Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which offers access to “pay-as-you-go” agents—a feature that Gartner analyst Larry Cannell sees bringing some respectability to those task-specific automation bots we’ve been hearing about lately.
“When Microsoft says something, it legitimizes an approach or a market segment, without question,” Cannell, research director in the Gartner for Technical Professionals Collaboration and Content Strategies service, told IT Brew.
What is an agent? Microsoft defines AI agents as chatbots, copilots, or digital AI assistants that “perform specific tasks, answer questions, and automate processes for users.” With Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, consumers can use natural language to create a task-automating agent.
When Cannell thinks about agents, his mind goes to Microsoft’s content-sharing platform SharePoint, and ways to provide up-to-date fix descriptions for field-service engineers or turn FAQ documents into chatbots.
“Now the chatbot is going to answer its questions from those documents, and it’s likely to be pretty good, and it’s likely going to be a faster access to the information,” Cannell said, while cautioning clients to be conservative with its use until governance capabilities are more clear.
Pricing: While agents are available through the full Microsoft 365 Copilot experience at $30 per person, per month, the pricing is now also offered on a “metered,” “per-message” basis. “You can purchase messages though the Copilot Studio meter in Microsoft Azure, a pay-as-you-go option, for $0.01/message, or via prepaid message packs priced at $200 for 25,000 messages/month,” according to a Jan. 15 blog post from the company.
“Microsoft is certainly flexing its muscles by doing the consumption-based licensing, because it’s a low-cost entry point,” he said.
What else is out there? Cloud-based content-management platform Box last week announced agent-deployment capabilities via its Box AI Studio. Enterprise GenAI assistants like Agentspace from Google and Amazon Q Business connect to SharePoint.
The advantage for Microsoft with its January announcement, Cannell said, is it’s part of the SharePoint experience—one that doesn’t require connectors to SharePoint.
Cannell sees digital workplace applications evolving to include the task-specific automaters.
“You’re going to see them come out as either features of digital workplace apps or as increasingly simple but more powerful tool kits for creating them,” he said.