Dive Brief:

• Microsoft is expanding its collection of tools for automating business functions such as the office of the CFO with the launch of new artificial intelligence “agents” capable of learning and executing certain tasks autonomously, the software giant said Monday.
• The company is introducing 10 new autonomous agents, including two designed for finance professionals, in its Microsoft Dynamics 365 enterprise resource planning platform, according to a Monday blog post penned by Bryan Goode, corporate vice president at Microsoft. Pricing and licensing details will be shared once the new agents enter the “public preview” stage later this year, a spokesperson said via email.
• The company sees a “huge opportunity” for using such agents to automate corporate finance workflows, according to Georg Glantschnig, Microsoft vice president of Dynamics 365 ERP Applications. “There are still many manual processes” within the finance function, he said in an interview, adding that areas like accounts payable and receivable are particularly ripe for automation.

Dive Insight:

The move comes as the AI innovation race among enterprise software providers is heating up. It follows Salesforce’s recent introduction of a suite of autonomous AI agents known as “Agentforce.”

Microsoft’s latest rollout builds on a May announcement in which the company described its vision for independent agents that can “automate and orchestrate complex, long-running business processes with more autonomy and less human intervention.” It’s part of a growing trend in which tech vendors are promising the next stage in generative AI applications — beyond tools focused primarily on information retrieval or insights delivery, according to Rowan Curran, a senior analyst at Forrester.

“Buyers are rightly excited about the potential of agentic AI systems but the reality of implementation is going to be just as challenging, if not more so, than the current generation of advanced RAG [retrieval augmented generation] systems,” Curran said in an email. “Having a strong data foundation will be essential for building useful AI agents. Data quality and management aren't problems that can be swept under the rug.”

Next month will mark the two-year anniversary since OpenAI introduced its generative AI-powered ChatGPT tool, which grabbed the world’s attention with its ability to answer all kinds of questions in human-like fashion, draft reports, compose songs and poems, and write software code, among other activities.

Soon after announcing a multi-billion-dollar investment deal with OpenAI in January 2023, Microsoft developed Copilot, its own ChatGPT-like chatbot, which has since been added to a vast array of products and services offered by the software giant.

“Our next big evolution is this agent concept,” Glantschnig said.

As part of its Monday announcement, Microsoft said it’s rolling out a series of new AI agents for sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams. 

A new account reconciliation agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance automates “the matching and clearing of transactions between subledgers and the general ledger, helping them speed up the financial close process,” according to Goode’s blog post. The company also introduced a new financial reconciliation agent designed to help teams prepare and cleanse data sets.