CHICAGO– Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opens a corporate conference in Chicago with remarks that could set the stage for the direction of its artificial intelligence business.

AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI chatbots as AI “agents” that can do more useful things on behalf of people. But the cost of creating and operating AI tools is so high that more and more investors are wondering whether the technology’s promises are overblown.

Microsoft said last month that it was preparing for a world in which “every organization has a constellation of agents, ranging from simple quick response to full autonomy.” »

Microsoft explained in a blog post Tuesday that these autonomous agents “can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or review shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly mistakes in the supply chain “.

Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference is aimed at its large enterprise customers. The shift toward so-called “agentic AI” comes as some users see the limits of the big language models behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. These systems work by predicting the most plausible next word in a sentence and are effective in some writing-based work tasks.

But tech companies have been scrambling to create AI tools that are better at long-term planning and reasoning, so they can access the web or control computers and perform tasks on their own, in the name of a user.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff criticized Microsoft’s pivot. Salesforce also has its “Agentforce” service that uses AI in sales, marketing and other tasks.

“Microsoft renames Copilot to “agents”? It’s panic mode,” Benioff said in a social media post last month. He went on to claim that Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, called Copilot, is “a failure” that is inaccurate and leaks corporate data.