Microsoft’s AI agents are at the forefront of a significant transformation in modern business operations. These intelligent agents automate routine tasks, helping employees by freeing up valuable time to be more efficient, productive, and empowered to drive business—and industries are discovering their value. Across sectors such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, AI agents handle tasks like data entry, customer service, and predictive maintenance. The upward trend in adoption is evident as nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies already use Microsoft 365 Copilot to tackle plenty of repetitive and mundane tasks, such as sifting through email and taking notes during Teams meetings. In 2025, a new generation of AI-powered agents will do more—even handling certain tasks on your behalf.
The opportunity presented here is massive. Agents are the new apps for an AI-powered world where personal agents, business-process agents, and cross-organizational agents work together to enhance productivity and collaboration. With their evolution, real innovation and results are coming to fruition, and businesses are seeing real benefits.
What are AI agents?
AI agents are AI-powered applications designed to perform tasks autonomously or assist users in completing them. Unlike traditional applications, AI agents leverage the power of generative AI to understand context, learn from interactions, and make decisions. They can range from simple prompt-and-response systems to sophisticated, fully autonomous entities capable of executing complex workflows from start to finish. An agent can tackle certain tasks with you or for you, from acting as a virtual project manager to handling more complex assignments like reconciling financial statements or closing the books.
How do AI agents work?
Think of AI agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. By combining multiple AI capabilities, including natural language processing, reasoning, planning, and automation, they’re able to perform certain tasks efficiently and intelligently. At their core, these agents rely on large language models (LLMs) and other AI components to process user inputs, retrieve relevant information, and generate responses or actions. They can integrate with enterprise systems, APIs, and databases to access and analyze data, enabling them to provide contextual recommendations or automate workflows.
Beyond single-agent interactions, AI agents can also collaborate in multi-agent environments, where multiple specialized agents work together to complete complex tasks. For example, in a business workflow, one agent might extract insights from financial reports while another validates compliance requirements, and a third generates executive summaries. This multi-agent approach enhances efficiency by distributing workloads and enabling seamless communication between AI-driven entities.
One example is Microsoft 365 Copilot, a powerful solution that can be used as an out-of-the-box agent for your daily work. You can also build your own agents or enhance Microsoft 365 Copilot with Microsoft Copilot Studio using an intuitive natural language interface that doesn’t require coding expertise.
Developers can further extend with Microsoft 365 Agents SDK to publish agents across multiple channels including Microsoft Teams, the web, and more. Additionally, developers can craft scenarios that leverage code-first experiences in Azure AI Foundry, a trusted, integrated platform to design, customize, and manage AI applications and agents. It offers a rich set of AI capabilities and tools through a simple portal, unified SDK, and APIs, facilitating secure data integration, model customization, and enterprise-grade governance to accelerate the path to production.
Simplifying work and saving time
One notable example of the use of AI agents is the area of customer support. Companies can deploy agents to handle routine inquiries, schedule meetings, and even monitor market trends. This not only improves response times but also ensures that human agents can focus on more complex customer issues, leading to better service quality and customer satisfaction.
For example, Cineplex, a leading media and entertainment company with over 10,000 employees, welcomes millions of guests annually through its circuit of over 170 movie theatres and location-based entertainment venues. To help improve their customer service, their developers created an advanced copilot agent that has helped reduce handling time for agents from up to 15 minutes per request, down to around just 30 seconds.
“Our Guest Services agents are thrilled with the simplicity and functionality of the Microsoft Copilot Studio. Our copilot has processed over 5,000 refund requests in just 5 months—while reducing our handling time, back-office work and increasing both guest experience and our agent CSAT.”—Monique Binder, Vice President of Guest Services at Cineplex.
Azure AI Agent Service empowers developers with a world-class enterprise-grade solution
To fully realize the potential of autonomous AI agents, organizations need flexible, secure platforms for agent creation, deployment, and monitoring. Azure AI Agent Service is the ideal platform, purpose-built for designing, customizing, and deploying AI agents with full control over their data, integrations, and security. It empowers developers to build secure, stateful, autonomous AI agents in code-first environments, like GitHub and Visual Studio Code, that automate every business process with a set of feature-rich, managed capabilities. What originally took hundreds of lines of code to support client side function calling can now be done in just a few lines of code with Azure AI Agent Service. These agents can then seamlessly connect with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem to automate workflows and enhance productivity.
Watch how Azure AI Agent Service helps people work smarter:
One customer use case demonstrating the power of Azure AI Agent Service comes from Fujitsu, a global leader in information and communication technology (ICT) solutions. Faced with inefficiencies in sales proposal generation, Fujitsu leveraged Azure AI Agent Service and Semantic Kernel to build an AI-powered automation solution to streamline proposal creation, enabling sales teams to focus on high-value customer engagement. The AI agent dynamically retrieves and synthesizes data from dispersed sources, ensuring accuracy and relevance while integrating seamlessly into Fujitsu’s existing Microsoft ecosystem. This transformation led to a 67% increase in productivity, reducing manual workload and enhancing sales efficiency for over 35,000 employees.
Fujitsu’s success with Azure AI Agent Service not only improves internal operations but also lays the groundwork for broader AI-driven innovation, including future expansion into multi-agent orchestration and enterprise-wide automation.
Watch this video to see how Fujitsu is using AI agent-driven proposal generation to drive sales efficiency:
As AI agents revolutionize various sectors and open up new possibilities, we’re dedicated to offering practical solutions and groundbreaking innovations to help you excel in this dynamic environment. With advanced tools from Azure AI Agent Service and Azure AI Foundry addressing the real-world requirements of developers and business leaders alike, we’re eager to see how organizations leverage the transformative potential of AI agents to drive their futures forward.
Our commitment to trustworthy AI
Organizations across industries are leveraging Azure AI Foundry and Copilot capabilities to drive growth, increase productivity, and create value-added experiences.
We’re committed to helping organizations use and build AI that is trustworthy, meaning it is secure, private, and safe. We bring best practices and learnings from decades of researching and building AI products at scale to provide industry-leading commitments and capabilities that span our three pillars of security, privacy, and safety. Trustworthy AI is only possible when you combine our commitments, such as our Secure Future Initiative and our Responsible AI principles, with our product capabilities to unlock AI transformation with confidence.
Get started with Azure AI Agent Service
- Learn how to design, customize and manage AI applications with Azure AI Foundry.
- Join our webinar on February 27th, 2025 to gain knowledge on best practices for implementing multi-agent systems with Azure AI Agent Service.
- Explore the documentation to learn more about Azure AI Agent Service.
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