Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna: How AI Agents and Copilots Drive Business Transformation
AI agents will work collaboratively under the direction of Copilots to complete tasks on a scalable basis, ultimately driving business transformation on levels that greatly exceed previous generations of disruptive technology.
Those are key conclusions from a Cloud Wars interview with Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president, Business & Industry Copilot at Microsoft, who met last week with Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans.
When customers moved their data from in-house data centers to the cloud, they essentially maintained existing processes while their data relocated. Results were impressive but didn’t fundamentally change how employees worked. Contrast that with AI, which is radically different.
“This is going to completely change how we work, because the business value is so large” in terms of revenue growth, cost reduction, individual employee productivity, Lamanna says. “That is going to be a forcing function for every company to go through this transformation, to stay competitive.”
Copilots Direct Agents
In the wide-ranging discussion, Lamanna positioned Copilots relative to agents: A copilot is a personal AI assistant that understand how a person works, what they need to get done, and how they communicate. Agents automate tasks. In this model, every person should have their own copilot, and that copilot taps into a group of agents to complete work. “This interplay of Copilot helping you [and] agents complete tasks is how you can really become an AI-first company moving forward,” he says.
Because companies could well have thousands or even millions of agents, it’s important that end users not be overwhelmed by volumes of messages or actions performed by agents. “That’s why we think Copilot is a really important part of the agent story, because copilot fronts all of those agents. It helps intermediate when an agent should talk to you, how it should talk to you.”
Lamanna drew an analogy between agents and microservices. Where microservices talk to one another in a back-end system to complete work, agents will interact with each other for the same purpose.
Aggressive Adoption
Companies are seizing on this opportunity to embrace agents to transform the way they work. Lamanna cited previously disclosed Microsoft data indicating that 70% of the Fortune 500 are rolling out Copilot and over 100,000 organizations have used Copilot Studio to create agents.
The agents being put into use fall intro three categories:
- Off-the-shelf agents such as agents for Teams that help run better meetings or perform real-time translations
- Agents created in Copilot Studio; in Microsoft’s case, the company is building hundreds per day. They’re not as sophisticated as pre-built agents, but they solve tangible business problems.
- Highly sophisticated agents created with code.
The resulting number of agents in these three tiers could be quite high, and that’s where Copilots come in. “You just won’t be able to make sense of that many agents if you don’t have your own AI assistant to route and guide and select the right agent for a job you’re trying to get done,” Lamanna notes.
And how about industry-specific agents? “You’re going to have agents which are specific to the domain you are in if you’re in insurance or in banking or in healthcare, you’ll have agents specific to those use cases.”
Future of Business Apps
Asked to describe how agents would impact existing business applications, Lamanna explained how data entry, manual tasks, and workflows required to populate and run business apps would eventually be taken over by AI agents. In fact, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella raised eyebrows in the recent past when we publicly discussed the future of traditional software applications in an agentic AI world, with agents undergoing a meteoric rise that’s simultaneously changing the significance of enterprise apps.
“These business applications, which used to be at the center of the sales department, the finance department, the operations team, they’re going to fade away a little bit,” Lamanna says. “You still need that system of record. You still need that information, but you probably shouldn’t be sending people there anymore, and you probably shouldn’t be thinking about workflows and processes for just people, but instead people powered by Copilot and supported by agents.”
Hence Lamanna’s statement that AI is “completely” changing the way we work.
To achieve the best business outcomes, explains Lamanna, customers need to enhance the things that already work well in their business. “You already know the business outcomes that matter. There’s already metrics that you track. Just go to those metrics and apply AI there,” he says. For instance, if you’re a retailer aiming to reduce costs, apply AI to that goal. If you run a high-end hotel, the focus could be on applying AI to transform guest experience.
Those are indicators of how AI-driven transformation can make every company “a little bit more of what makes them different and unique.” All while changing the way its people work.
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