From Microsoft to Nvidia, the AI ​​agents are coming in 2025

On By Littum

If 2024 was the year artificial intelligence chatbots became more useful, 2025 will be the year AI agents start to take over. You can think of agents as super-powered AI bots that can perform actions on your behalf, such as pulling data from incoming emails and importing them into various apps.

You’ve probably already heard the rumblings of agents. Companies ranging from Nvidia ( NVDA ) and Google ( GOOG , GOOGL ) to Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Salesforce ( CRM ) are increasingly talking about agent AI, a fancy way of referring to AI agents, claiming it will change the way both businesses and consumers think about AI technologies.

The goal is to cut down on often annoying, time-consuming tasks like submitting expense reports—the bane of my professional existence. Not only will we see more AI agents, we will see more big tech companies developing them.

Companies using them say they see changes based on their own internal metrics. According to Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President for business and industry Copilot at Microsoft, the Windows maker has already seen improvements in both responsiveness to IT issues and sales results.

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 processing times.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, delivers the keynote address at SIGGRAPH 2024, the leading conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, at the Colorado Convention Center, Monday, July 29, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at SIGGRAPH 2024. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski) · ASSOCIATED PRESS

As with any new technology, using AI agents will take some getting used to. But if they live up to the high expectations tech companies set for them, they could win over masses of users as an impressive new use case for generative AI.

“If … you immediately get very fast and very accurate and very meaningful and useful answers, then it can start to change people’s habits,” TECHnalysis Research president and chief analyst Bob O’Donnell told Yahoo Finance. “But it takes a while to change people’s habits.”

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 these three functions 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 primary interface for interacting with your chatbot or assistant. Kind of like a home screen for your various AI needs.

When you ask your chatbot or assistant to perform various tasks for you, it will reach out to the AI ​​agents with the relevant options.

If that sounds complex, here’s an easy example: Let’s say you want to book a flight. You can tell your chatbot to see what flights are available for you, and it will use various AI agents to check your flight preferences, your calendar and availability, and possibly even your financial apps to make sure you get a flight before for your budget range and then come back with a handful of suggested flights.