If 2024 was the year of artificial intelligence chatbots becoming more useful, 2025 will be the year AI agents begin to take over. You can think of agents as super-powered AI bots that can take actions on your behalf, such as pulling data from incoming emails and importing it into different apps.
You’ve probably heard rumblings of agents already. Companies ranging from Nvidia (NVDA) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) to Microsoft (MSFT) and Salesforce (CRM) are increasingly talking up agentic AI, a fancy way of referring to AI agents, claiming that it will change the way both enterprises and consumers think of AI technologies.
The goal is to cut down on often bothersome, time-consuming tasks like filing expense reports — the bane of my professional existence. Not only will we see more AI agents, we’ll see more major tech companies developing them.
Companies using them say they’re seeing changes based on their own internal metrics. According to Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business and industry Copilot at Microsoft, the Windows maker has already seen improvements in both responsiveness to IT issues and sales outcomes.
According to Lamanna, Microsoft employee IT self-help success increased by 36%, while revenue per seller has increased by 9.4%. The company has also experienced improved HR case resolution times.
As with any new technology, using AI agents will take some getting used to. But if they live up to the lofty expectations tech companies are laying out, they could win over plenty of users as an impressive new use case for generative AI.
“If … you immediately get very rapid and very accurate and very meaningful and helpful responses, then that can start to change people’s habits,” TECHnalysis Research president and chief analyst Bob O’Donnell told Yahoo Finance. “But changing people’s habits takes a while.”
The AI chatbot/AI copilot/AI agent discussion can be a bit confusing. After all, generative AI chatbots still feel like a new technology, and now we’re already being shuffled on to the next big thing. But those three capabilities are all part of the same overall system.
Ray Smith, Microsoft’s vice president of AI agents, says you can think of an AI copilot as your main interface for interacting with your chatbot or assistant. Kind of like a home screen for your different AI needs.
When you ask your chatbot or assistant to complete various tasks for you, it will reach out to the AI agents with the appropriate capabilities.
If that sounds complex, here’s an easy example: Say you want to book a flight. You could tell your chatbot to see what flights are available for you, and it will use different AI agents to check your flight preferences, your calendar and availability, and potentially even your financial apps to make sure you’re getting a flight in your budget range and then come back with a handful of suggested flights.
