Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event was quite loaded, but the company reserved most of its attention for the Copilot AI stack. The buzzy event introduced two crucial upgrades – Actions and Deep Research — which firmly push Copilot into the realm of agentic AI.
Agentic AI is essentially a fancy way of describing an AI tool that can perform multi-step web-based tasks autonomously, or semi-autonomously, on your behalf. In Copilot’s case, the fancier one is Actions. So far, AI chatbots have mostly been able to give answers based on a certain input, but haven’t been able to perform autonomous multi-stage actions.
Microsoft says Actions can book “event tickets, grab dinner reservations or send a thoughtful gift to a friend and it will check that task off your list.” The core idea is that instead of having users visit a website and use a combination of clicks and keyboard typing, they can just tell Copilot to do it as a natural language command.
For example, you can ask Copilot to find a list of nearby restaurants that open late into the night, and book a table at the one you like the most, from within the search results. Copilot will do it all by browsing the web, filling in the necessary details, and occasionally asking for input wherever necessary.
Microsoft says it has joined hands with 1-800-Flowers.com, Booking.com, Expedia, Kayak, OpenTable, Priceline, Tripadvisor, Skyscanner, Viator and Vrbo for Copilot actions to get the job done on behalf of users.
Microsoft won’t be the first to launch a browser-based AI agent for handling cores. It’s actually late to the party. OpenAI’s Operator has been available for a while now, and it can accomplish more or less the same chores as Copilot Actions.
Amazon has a similar system in development called Nova Act, built atop its Nova AI model platform, to perform tasks such as ordering food or replenishing supplies. The inherent tech has already been implemented at the heart of its new Alexa+ assistant.
The e-commerce giant has also started public testing of another agent-based AI feature within its mobile app, which can buy items from other retailers’ websites. Even the folks behind Opera browser are working on their AI operator to get basic internet-based tasks done.