Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat: How dangerous is this for Conversational AI vendors?

In the olden days, if you wanted an internal agent assist service, to help your contact centre team manage their interactions with customers, you had to engage a specialist Conversational AI vendor.

Now, today, it's just $30 per user, free as part of Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

That, at least, is the idea behind Microsoft's ongoing approach when it comes to how it's driving Copilot into enterprise.

I think it's fair to say that the Copilot agent capability is highly limited compared to what you might expect out-of-the-box from many of the leading Conversational AI vendors.

But this video featuring Microsoft's Jared Spataro (CMO, AI at Work) shows how they're thinking about things. It's worth a watch just to get that insight.

Jared talks through some fairly basic agent capabilities that will have many in the industry scoffing with incredulity (e.g. "Call that an agent! Hah!").

But, for many, just the ability to use Copilot to get at simple organisational data – essentially "for free" – will really improve the average work day for many.

Although it might look really, really simple in terms of capability today, Microsoft is a juggernaut. And as I've already indicated in my CIO Waiting For Copilot to Mature post, there's a lot of love in the enterprise for anything Microsoft, especially when it comes to simple deployment, pricing and security considerations.

Anecdotally, I'm hearing a lot of colleagues playing about with Copilot Agents and, because they're (essentially) free to mess about with, there's a lot of innovation and lateral thinking going on.

I wonder if we should be thinking of this current time as the Microsoft Access stage?

Remember when 'anyone' could make a pretty fancy Access database to manage stuff? Inventory? Records? That sort of thing? It sometimes feels a bit like that when I hear friends talking about throwing up an agent for their sales teams that does this, or that.

How many of these 'agents' will stick, in the short term? I wonder.

Every week, it feels like Microsoft is unwrapping yet another update or modification to slowly, gently, ever-so-slightly challenge the status quo that I think a lot of vendors have been (or are still) feeling.

What's that Hemingway quote from The Sun Also Rises?

"How did you go bankrupt?"

"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."

What are you doing to prepare?