Introduction

Today we live in an era of constant change. Technology changes, mindset changes and vision changes. It started out with a bunch of Generative AI tools fueled by LLMs. These AI Tools now do not only offer the access to LLMs itself, but also give you the chance of creating and using agents. These agents give you two extra-assets:

• Consistency
• Scope

My friend Thomy wrote about the topic of AI Agents at Process Handovers: Where Consistency Matters More Than Intelligence , so if you want to know about why consistency matters, please read that first.

But with the introduction of agents, we also started shifting into an “Agent-Centric Workplace”. And I started to feel this myself rather quick: For every platform, for every service and for every use case, an agent could be built to assist me throughout my workday. To me, using agents goes beyond using Copilot. It’s more a concept of delegating work to my digital teammates = agents. And with all the recent announcements and udpates published by Microsoft around topics like autonomous agents, I do not think that this concept is going to vanish in the future. More likely, we will see the transition going from prompt-based assistants to goal/task-oriented, multi-step reasoning systems more and more over the course of the next weeks, months and years.

Ecosystem

The Microsoft platforms offers a sophisticated ecosystem when it comes to building (and yes you may think why is he not writing “developing” instead of building, but we’ll come to that in a second) agents of many kinds. You can build agents in a variety of places with a variety of tools like:

• SharePoint
• Copilot Studio lite
• Copilot Studio full
• Microsoft Fabric
• M365 Agents Toolkit & SDK
• Azure AI Foundry
• Agent Framework
• …

And all of these platforms and frameworks target a specific agent builder audience, from low-code to pro-code. Eventually I will write another blog post, or even a series, about which platforms should be leveraged by which audience. But the good news here is, that there is at least one tool or platform for everyone, no matter which skills you have when it comes to building or developing an agent. And many of the agents built with these platforms can then be again consumed from one central place: Microsoft 365 Copilot. Therefore, the platform will likely evolve and governance aspects will also be covered more and more as more and more people will not only be using agents, but will also be building agents, either for their personal use, for their team or for the whole organization.

Multi-Agent Collaboration

With the variety of tools and frameworks, the necessacity of introducing a concept called “Multi-Agent Collaboration” grew. Satya Nadella once said in a keynote of a big conference that “Copilot is the UI for AI”. Thinking about this message, I thought that this is the beginning of the Multi-Agent Collaboration era, where Microsoft 365 Copilot itself is also an agent, having the skills of orchestrating and collaborating with other agents.

But for me personally, hearing this message was not the first time for me personally to think of multi-agent scenarios. Looking back at my blog post on Microsoft Build 2019 updates on Conversational AI , the concept of Skills was introduced. And this to me was the first step towards a multi-agent collaboration era, because skills in the realm of the Microsoft Bot Framework where chatbots itself, which other chatbots would call to solve specific tasks.

Human-Agent Collaboration Patterns

In the future, we might see a shift from “Copilot in apps” to “Copilot across work” as this may be something that people need more urgent. In my idea, I think an agent like a “Project Planning Agent” might be more helpful when integrated in all of my work apps, than an agent like the Copilot in Word. Because I want to perfectly do my project planning, which involves multiple platforms and services, so this agent should be accessible and integrated in all of the places where I do my work and is still specifically tailored to one specific goal (here we are again at consistency and scope).

This shit may also require us to rethink productivity rituals, like how do we manage meetings or how do we do reporting or how do we share knowledge when agents are our digital teammates, as they also need to be integrated into these rituals.

Future look

With things like MCP, multimodal models and agents and the convergence of local and cloud intelligence, I do think that agents will play an important role in our future workplace. In the future we might not be talking “Copilot Adoption” but “Agent lifecycle management”, as I strongly believe that the introduction of “goal-oriented agents” will be a huge boost in the enterprise, to increas both our productivity as well as the quality we deliver our work with. Therefore I encourage everyone reading this, to experiment with agents and especially with multi-agent scenarios as this will likely hit us sooner or later and furthermore, think about this: “What’s your vision for the agentic workplace?” and let me know what’s your opinion!