At the Microsoft AI Tour event in London this week (22 October), Microsoft announced that Copilot customers will be able to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio, out in public preview next month. The tech giant also announced that it is introducing ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365. The agents can draw on data from Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Microsoft Dataverse and Fabric to support various tasks, including IT help desk support and employee onboarding.
Microsoft’s world view is that every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate business processes. Opening the conference, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella said that computing power is now doubling every six months, as the Scaling Laws paradigm takes over from Moore’s Law, and the new currency is tokens per dollar per watt. Computer interfaces are changing along with increased reasoning capabilities and bigger memory. “Put that all together and you’re building a very rich agentic world,” said Nadella. “Some will be personal AI agents, some will work in the context of a team, or some across the organisation. But there will be a rich tapestry of AI agents that augment everything else we’ve built.”
In a day that celebrated cross sector agentic use cases, magic circle law firm Clifford Chance flew the flag for the legal sector, singled out as already using autonomous agents to increase revenue and reduce costs. One way it is doing that is by using agentic technology to process and triage incoming emails.
Microsoft wrote about Clifford Chance (among others) this week and if you want to find out the back story around its selection of Copilot read Legal IT Insider’s interview with chief information officer Paul Greenwood, chief risk and compliance officer Bahare Heywood, and director of legal technology and innovation Anthony Vigneron click HERE.
Law firms are celebrating the visibility that Clifford Chance gave the legal sector, and for those who have already decided that Copilot is the way forward, the AI Tour felt like a major validation of that decision.
Pinsent Masons declared along with its financial results in the summer that it has rolled out Copilot across the firm – it had been trialing Copilot earlier in the year and we spoke to CTO Tracey McDermott about that here in February. Pinsents’ global COO Matt Peers, who was at the Microsoft AI Tour in London, at the Hilton on Park Lane, told Legal IT Insider in an online exchange: “My key take aways were:
(1) It feels like Copilot is now moving into mainstream with lots of energy and focus going into deploying it;
(2) it was great to see Legal taking centre stage and getting lots of airtime in a cross sector setting;
(3) the next wave of advancements are likely to be where people create competitive advantage in stitching together lots of different solutions like autonomous agents;
(4) it’s a shame that amongst all the benefits cases that were shared that the one for legal showed that AI can reduce legal fees by 5%;
(5) I really liked the quote ‘it’s never been cheaper to innovate and never been cheaper to fail’, which matches what we’re feeling here at Pinsent Masons where we are feeling a real pull from our client facing teams to do things differently.”
The possibility of doing things differently was a key takeaway for Wesley Budd, strategic partner manager for Microsoft at Symity, which this year won Microsoft’s Global Partner of the Year award for Converged Communications (they are Teams experts). Budd told us that what jumped out from the AI Tour is both the sheer pace of change and that agent technology will mean that individuals, not just organisations, can make technology work for them in the way they want it to, ushering in a completely different approach.
“You can use an agent to support your learning, and it will devise you a learning plan around that. Or it will help you write your documentation much like Copilot is doing,” said Budd. “The point is that because there is no one broad brush copilot, it’s all about you as an individual and how you can make it work for yourself. That is really where they are leaning in at Microsoft. Technology in the past has been about changing your business processes but at the end of the day, adoption is led by people.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com
Clifford Chance’s early Generative AI and Copilot journey – The inside view