• by Laurie Sullivan , November 19, 2024

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opened the company's Ignite conference on Tuesday in Chicago with comments on where the company is taking artificial intelligence (AI) for all types of businesses, including advertising.

AI has been used in advertising to select headlines, copy, music, images, and optimize for a specific audience. Internal Microsoft data along with third-party research estimates more than 85% of the Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft AI, and nearly 70% of those companies use Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Generative AI (GAI) use rose from 55% in 2023 to75% in 2024, according to a global IDC survey of enterprise organizations. For every $1 a company invests in GAI, the return on investment (ROI) is $3.7x. IDC also forecasts worldwide spending on AI will reach $632 billion by 2028.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a blog post has criticized Microsoft's pivot in renaming its AI task managers as Agents. Salesforce's Agentforce service uses AI in sales, marketing and other tasks.

“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’?” Benioff wrote last month in a social media post. This week he compared Microsoft Copilot with Salesforce Agentforce’s Large Action Models (LAMs) leverage both structured and unstructured data.

Benioff posted on X this week, citing Windows Central: "Organizations are reportedly reluctant to integrate Copilot into their workflow because of the tool's capabilities to bypass critical security measures and access private credentials that would ordinarily require high-level clearance.”

Microsoft on Tuesday elaborated in its own blog post on the number of large companies that are integrating agents in their businesses, and how those autonomous agents "can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or go over shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly supply-chain errors.”

Those companies include ad holding company Dentsu and automotive giant Toyota Motor.

Faced with the growing complexities of media metrics, Dentsu adopted the use of Microsoft Azure AI to support clients. The global marketing and advertising agency used Azure AI Studio, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure OpenAI Service to develop a copilot to help employees interpret results via conversational chat, which reduced analysis time by 80%. 

"We can complete media plans faster and with more confidence to help clients optimize their media spend and exceed their goals for customer response," Becca Kline, senior director of analytics, Dentsu, told Microsoft. "Before, our client-facing media planners might have to wait weeks. Once we roll this out, it will take minutes."

Toyota, a nearly 100-year-old car manufacturer, uses GAI to accelerate innovation and retain expert knowledge when senior engineers retire, a major issue encountered in the space industry, especially those who worked on NASA's Space Shuttle that operated between 1981 and 2011.

Toyota used Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Functions and Cosmos DB to build a system of GAI agents to store and share internal expertise with the goal of developing new vehicle models faster. For example, an engineer might ask the system how to make a car run faster. An engine agent might give an answer related to engine output while a regulatory agent provides an answer on limits to emissions, which the system then consolidates into a single reply. 

Kenji Onishi, automotive engineer, Toyota, told Microsoft that when engineers retire, "their knowledge will be gone. The mission here is to prevent it from happening. So we'd like to transfer this knowledge to the next generation."