Agentic (Premium)

With Copilot, Microsoft promises a "side-by-side" experience in which AI improves the work you're doing in traditional apps and experiences. But wave two of the AI revolution adds not just automation but new agentic capabilities in which AI services--called agents--work independently on your behalf and then only bother you when they're done. If you're a developer, you may think of this shift as the "async of AI," where you no longer have to wait on AI to come back with results. It will catch up with you when it can.

Here's how Microsoft describes it.

"Agents ... can now operate independently, dynamically planning and learning from processes, adapting to changing conditions, and making decisions without the need for constant human intervention. These autonomous agents can be triggered by data changes, events, and other background tasks—and not just through chat!"

I love the exclamation mark and the implicit implication there that "triggering" AI through a chat interface was somehow an ideal way to get work done. It recalls the early days of text-based adventure games in which the player faced two challenges: Winning the game, of course, but also figuring out which terms the limited game parser would accept. AI, like those games did, is improving, and rapidly, and just as text adventures evolved into graphical adventure games like King's Quest, with ever more impressive graphics and parsers, AI, and the ways in which we interact with it, are likewise changing.

To me, these new agentic capabilities are likewise reminiscent of Microsoft's initial push for .NET almost 25 years ago. As originally conceived, .NET was a way to make the Internet proprietary, more powerful, and more centralized. The key consumer services Microsoft envisioned at the time were .NET My Services, originally code-named Hailstorm, though only one major service, Passport, made it from vision to final product. (That it still survives today as the ubiquitous Microsoft account is rather incredible, given how central it is to the Microsoft consumer experience.) Hailstorm was a lot of things, but I think of it as the connective tissue of a proprietary Internet that never materialized. But the closest it ever came to what we're seeing today was a component called .NET Alerts, which was designed as a system for managing and customizing alerts.

It's possible that .NET My Services was ahead of its time. It's also possible that it was simply too proprietary and Microsoft-focused, at a time when Microsoft was being torn down by antitrust regulators and the world was becoming more heterogeneous and open. Whatever your take, it didn't happen, and as we shift forward 20+ years, there are similar uncertainties around AI and the impact it will have on our lives. But Microsoft, for now, is all-in. And in its AI/Copilot-centric view, agents are the next step.

I appreciate Microsoft admitting that agents aren't new: It has offered developer and IT tools for creating agents...