Agents + Apps + Chat with Richard Riley of Microsoft & Dion Hinchcliffe

Hey everyone, it's Alan Sch Techstrong again. Hey, for this next session, you know, we call it Agents plus Apps, plus Chat. It's features Richard Riley, who's GM of the Power Platform marketing at Microsoft, as well as our own FU analyst.

Dion, Hinchcliffe, Dion, and Richard will build upon the foundational vision of Agents plus Apps, plus chat, creating a solution orientated view into the heart of ag agentic business transformation. In this session, you're gonna learn how agents are enhancing workflows and redefining the architecture of business value. Today you're gonna hear about practical applications for agents in terms of UI logic layer and decision engines across business functions.

Everything from finance to HR to sales, and even customer service. I think you're gonna enjoy it. Here's Richard and Diane.

Thanks, Alan. This is Diane Hinchcliffe, PP and, uh, practice Lead for our Chief Information Officer, uh, research group. And I'm with the Futurum Group.

I'm here with Richard. Richard, can you give us the introduction? My name's Richard Riley.

I, uh, lead the low-code go to market team at Microsoft. So that covers all of our low code portfolio power apps, power Automate, and Includes co-pilot Studio, our, our agent building platform. Well, it's great to have you, Richard.

And what's interesting, uh, the CIOs I talk with, they're undergoing all these changes with, uh, with ai and now AgTech has arrived and they, they're under this realization that they are going to have to transform their organizations using AI agents. And so I was wondering, you know, to help them understand this, how do you define Agentic business transformation that, uh, goes, uh, beyond just mere automation and is really explains kind of why it's a new paradigm? Well, I mean, I think agents can do lots of things.

We, we tend to think of, um, existing on this kind of, uh, spectrum. So you can have very simple agents on one side of the spectrum and very complex agents on the other. So to give you a bit of an example that I would say on, on the left side, on the simple side, we kind of say agents that just do, you know, regular q and a, they grounded it on a few documents.

You ask 'em a few questions and they can give you answers. They're super useful in certain situations. And then on the right hand side, uh, you've kind of got things like autonomous agents that they can work off triggers, they can run business processes.

They can, they can literally work autonomously and have very complex logic, complex instructions, um, and run very complex business business processes. So, and then you've got everything in between. So we kind of think it, it, it really depends, um, on what the, who's asking the question and what they're asking, the context they're asking the question in.

But it's helpful to think about these as a, as a spectrum of things versus, um, an agent. It's just a, it's just the same agent. We appear to be on the cusp of a massive wave of agentic solutions.

Uh, some are narrow, some are broad, and, uh, some are open source. What makes Microsoft's approach defensible and distinctive in the flood of agent frameworks and offerings that we're seeing show up? Yeah, that's a good question.

So I'd probably start with the breadth of tooling that we've got. We kinda span from the very easy to use experiences that are built into M 365 copilot. With copilot light, you can literally describe an agent that you want.

You can give it some grounding content, you can tell it to go talk to, um, to SharePoint and a bunch of other kind of content sources. Super easy to do, super easy to share, very valuable. We then have copilot studio, which kind of takes that a step further.

You get access to a lot more capability, including things like triggers. And then we take that an even step further. When you think of, uh, Azure, AI Foundry, all of these things are kind of tied together in a, in a very integrated way.

Um, so it's very easy, very easy to move from one to the other and incorporate one to the other in, in your solution. So I'd say our, our breadth of tool set is probably number one. Uh, number two, I would probably talk about access to data.

Any customer that's an M 365 customer of Microsoft, um, has an enormous amount of kind of that tacit knowledge. That data in Microsoft Graph, we make it very easy for you to get at that to make your agents, uh, more intelligent. You know, uh, it's one thing to be able to run off a, you know, os and columns in a CRM, um, database or a, in our ELP or f and o kind of, uh, service is something else.

When you can marry that with, uh, that tacit knowledge that you've got in your enterprise to bring intelligence, much more intelligence to what the agent can do. And then thirdly, I'd say, um, our kind of core strength in security governance and compliance. You know, we, um, we've, we've invested heavily for a long time to help customers, uh, secure and manage their, their enterprise data.

All of that investment flows through to, to your investment on the Microsoft stack for agents, agents, respect, all of the policy, the labeling, all that kind of stuff that you've already deployed to manage your data. If you're building your agents on the Microsoft stack, that stuff just flows through. So I say those, these three things are probably the three primary.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so, so let's zoom in for just a moment. You know, help people understand how do agent powered interfaces change the way that workers interact with business systems?

You know, compared to traditional user interfaces, There is a lot going on in the indu industry with how kind of apps and agents are coming together in, in super interesting ways. Um, I think over time we'll see agents starting to adopt some of the app modalities that we expect from apps today. So think of a time when, um, when an agent can actually start to build an app, or even just a ui, like a, a form on the fly for it to solve a business process or to, to, to help you, you know, move forward with whatever the thing is that you're working with the agent on.

I think we're gonna start to see that show up. It's not today, but, um, over, over the, over the, over the course of time, I do think the app modality and the agent modality will start to mix. And ultimately, if you think about it, there's a, there's a, there's a very good reason for bringing those two things together.

The, the example that I like to use is around, uh, you know, a, a procurement process. Like every company has to buy stuff today at Microsoft, you know, you have to know three people. There's three different tools, a bunch of approval stuff happens that could be, uh, the couple of apps you have to go use that could be built into a series of agents and co-pilot kind of marshaling the whole process.

You could just literally ask copilot, like, I need to open a PO for fu copilot could know the agents that it needs to go talk to, to be able to do that. They could be a, like a, a legal agent to check the, the, the statement of work that you're trying to, trying to kind of, uh, work through. Um, there could be a procurement agent that could go make sure you've got access to the right, um, and you're hiring the right vendors like every step of the way.

Copilot could run that whole process. You don't necessarily need to go through three different tools. If copilot needs some data from you.

It could create a form if needed, if it's not a conversational type of, uh, thing that it's, it's asking for. So you can see how these things start to really blend together when you start to think about agents working with other agents and then having something like copilot kind of manage that interaction for you. So I'm glad you brought up talking about different agents, uh, working across the business and, and that's something we call orchestration.

And one, uh, challenge Enterprises face is orchestrating multiple agents across different domains. Finance, hr, customer service, without chaos, uh, integration or security issues. How does Microsoft envision enabling agent orchestration across the enterprise?

And what governance mechanisms will make it all work and save? Uh, that's a good question. So there are a couple of things that, um, I don't think particularly unique in the industry with, um, you know, like supporting MCP for agents to be able to use tooling and, uh, supporting a to a for agents to talk to other agents.

That's kind of table stakes these days. The things, the thing where it starts to get interesting with Microsoft is our ability to use capabilities like Agent 365 to provide kind of end-to-end observability across all of the agents that you've got running, um, in your, in your organization. Um, to the extent that you can even give an agent, you know, uh, an agent ID and treat it like a, like a user.

Things like conditional access, all that kind of stuff. Um, just work. And then I also think like once you give, uh, organizations the ability to kind of observe and manage and govern agents, it starts to open up new kind of frontiers of where they can use agents.

It allows them to think about business problems that they've had in the past that have historically been kind of automateable. Maybe they're too determined, uh, non-deterministic or, um, too complicated to, um, to do with traditional automation tools and apply agents to those problems. And we've seen a ton of customers kind of look at existing business pro processes and decompose them and figure out where they can replace certain parts of them with an agent.

They don't replace the whole process, but they start to replace parts of that process. And over time, as the technology matures, as their understanding and confidence with the technology, um, matures, they start to build out more, but also look at brand new problems that they've faced for a long time that have just been very difficult to address with technology. And that's when, if you kind of bring all the, all of the, all of the assets together, the things like HOA and MCP, things like Agent 365, things like the security and governance and compliance capabilities that the Microsoft stack offers you, it really does let you start to look at these problems in a very different light and start to apply technology to, to things that you just previously wouldn't have tried to 'cause it was too hard.

So let's talk about really getting started with agents. You've talked about agents being on a spectrum. How should organizations assess where they are and what kind of agents do they need?

Uh, you talk to a lot of different customers and you have a good sense of that. Can you share that with us? Yeah, totally.

And there's no single answer to this 'cause everybody's different, but I think it's important for people to start in a place they feel comfortable with. It's very easy to run into this too fast, not be super successful, and then, and then feel, you know, a little bit terrified for, for trying to scale it. So, um, it's actually very similar as well to the way that people in the past, over the past 6, 7, 8 years have deployed low-code.

The deployment patterns that we see with things like power apps are very similar to the customers that we see deploy in, you know, agents in any meaningful way. I mean, actually the comp customers that have already deployed low-code at scale seem to have a very familiar pattern to follow with, with how they deploy agents. So it really does fall into that pick a business process.

Maybe it's the, maybe just pick one, find the one that's the most inefficient, the most expensive, the most painful, you know, it's, it's creating the most work and then break it down into, into its com, decompose it into its component parts, and start to figure out where you could apply agent technology to those component parts. Don't try and replace the whole thing or they, I've had many conversations with customers where they, you know, they think I'm just gonna replace my whole procurement process or my whole, you know, hiring recruitment process with an agent. Now that may be possible, but it's really difficult.

So basically figure out what that recruitment process looks like and break it down and then attack it in chunks, and then you'll learn what the product, the, the technology is capable of. You'll learn what your, you know, your teams are capable of. And as both mature, you'll be able to expand and expand it within that process and expand it outside of those two other processes as well.

So it really is a, it really is a journey and, and most people will find their own way through it. We have a ton of best practices, guidance patterns and practices, that kind of thing, uh, thing and templates that we, that we can share. But, but ultimately every customer's different and everyone's gonna look at this differently and figure out which, which is the best place to start.

So when we talk about ag agentic business transformation, um, we see a lot of organizations are trying to figure out, well, how does this fit into my legacy, uh, systems, the architecture I have today? Uh, what thoughts do you have about how do we, how do we bridge that gap between, you know, the modern agent stack and, uh, legacy it? Yeah, there's a couple of things there.

The first one would be find ways to integrate, like MCP is a perfect way. The, the, the rate of adoption, uh, for MCP has been phenomenal. So go learn about that.

Go figure out like how you could stick an MCP server in front of the services that you aren't exposed to, to your agents. That's step one. And then step two is, um, if you already have, you know, deterministic workflows, which I'm certain everybody does, there are ways you can start to pull those into things like copilot studio, keep them deterministic, but build them as agents.

And that's one of the, kind of the great value props of Copilot Studio is you can blend this kind of non-deterministic AI agent driven approach to workflow with very deterministic, with things like agent flows. So you can actually replicate what you've got in an agent, and then over time you can start to create, you know, replace per parts of it. So it's more agent driven, like AI agent driven than deterministic.

So there's lots of ways you can start to bring these two worlds together without kind of diving in or, or not. Agents will become the core logic and decision making layer in businesses, uh, business processes soon enough. How does agents, as the new logic layer, uh, change the way that, uh, enterprises think about their core systems?

What are the implications there? Yeah, I think, um, there there's gonna be a, a meaningful change with how people interact with core line of business systems like ERP, like, like CRM, um, traditionally today there's a, this is kind of a forms over data type web experience. You have to go somewhere, fill a bunch of forms in and put a bunch of data and, you know, press submit.

I think fairly soon that, that there'll be kind of an inversion of where the IP and the logic sits. It'll be less on the database and forms there. It'll be much more on the agent there.

And what that means for users is they're gonna get faster access to data, they're gonna get smarter answers, they're gonna be able to use multiple data sources to, to assess a situation. You know, if you're a seller, why am I sending you to the, to our server customer, you know, our customer service a solution plus your CRM to go figure out with the customer you're about to meet, whether they've got any open support tickets and they're angry at with you like that, that it should just be able to ask an agent to be able to do that. That, um, if you're a sales person and you just got off the phone with a customer, maybe the call's transcribed, maybe there's a bunch of email traffic between you, why am I making you go repeat that, cut and paste it, make it up again, and submit it into a, into a CRM system Somewhere an agent should just be able to do that.

So I think, I think there's gonna be that switch from people laboring away in, you know, web forms and web services to, to an agent proactively in many cases, uh, working with these systems, um, and helping the, the sales person or the service person or whoever else it is to get more done, um, and be way more productive. So how are agents enabling organizations to leapfrog, uh, traditional low-code development and go straight to intelligent orchestration? So I'll give you a few examples.

The first one is, I wouldn't exactly say leapfrog in, I would say we're using agents to make that kind of low-code paradigm even stronger. Uh, so things like the ability to use plans in power apps where gone are the days where you're trying to describe an app and build an app, what you do is describe a business process and then power apps plans can use, uh, several agents. There's an architecture agent, there's a data agent, and it can actually go build a business solution for you.

So, and that business solution could be two or three apps, some workflows, a couple of agents, they'll actually do the end-to-end thinking, like, if you were a business architect, what would you build? Versus just building an app. So that's number one.

We're we're leveraging agents to help you build kind of battle, low code or solutions. And then number two, uh, you know, we have new capabilities in M 365 copilot, like Workflow builder and an app builder where someone with absolutely zero coding experience can come and literally describe an agent or a workflow. An app builder and workflow builder will go build it for you and run it.

Uh, and then you can, it, it, it can store persistent data and SharePoint it, you can share that with other people. Uh, you can even start to modify it. So if it's not exactly what you want the first time you kind of describe the app, you can modify and change it as much as you want conversationally.

And that really does open the door to many more people being able to kind of use this technology. These aren't gonna be apps that you end up running your business on. They can help a team, an individual achieve more, be more productive, uh, using ai, uh, to build apps.

Things like apps and apps and workflows. So what we're seeing as companies, uh, plan for the role of the maker evolving when that maker has really been that low code developer who's been using things like power apps, uh, to build point solutions in their corner of the organization, what we're seeing is that role is growing up and it's becoming, uh, one that that's gonna take advantage of this, uh, of these all these intelligent agents that are, uh, being built inside the organization, and now they can build new solutions that span departments and, and cross, uh, silos, uh, in terms of the business processes that they can integrate. And so creating higher order more strategic solutions out of that agent landscape that's, that's forming, and these are things that, that, you know, now will automate and run on their own.

But is that, that with you c, that that maker still has a role and in fact an even more important one? I was wondering what you thought about that. Yeah, it's a really important point.

I also think it are gonna play a very important role in this as well. You know, they're, they'll be the ones building the MCP servers, um, so they can provide access to, you know, data and, and, and logic to, to business users, units that, that want to go build their own agents. They, they, they'll be the ones that are building the kind of high order bit agents so that, uh, business users can take advantage of those.

So I think when you bring those two things together, you know, you create a, definitely create a, uh, total is great in some of the parts type math for, for customers. So in this new world of agents where it, it's, you know, the code, uh, the, the AI is touching your business and your data, the, the concern is around compliance, uh, and security. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to, uh, how does Microsoft ensure that these very powerful agents that are working with your business, uh, are following the rules and are secure?

Yeah, it comes up a lot, uh, in conversations that I have. The thing to remember though is, um, agents only have access to the data that you give them access to. They also respect all of the policy, all of the governance controls that you've got over the data.

They only get access to it if they are granted access to it. And I think that's fairly, uh, unique to the Microsoft stack in the sense that all of the investments that you've made on things like purview and, and managing SharePoint, that kind of stuff, that all just flows through to agents. Uh, when you, when you go outside of the Microsoft stack, you essentially have to kind of copy paste that data somewhere, and at that point you lose all of that governance control that you once had when it was in the kind of, um, 365 security boundary.

So it's a super important point and one where I think, um, we have a, we have a fairly meaningful differentiator for, for customers. Everything just works. I think it's, it's fairly just pretty much as simple as that.

And so thanks so much for, for being here, Richard. It was, uh, uh, great to talk with you. Thanks Deana.

Yeah, it was a really for conversation. I appreciate your time. So what was really interesting to me is, is seeing how far Microsoft has come so quickly with agents is, uh, we see this as, uh, you know, a whole new stack that's forming inside the organization.

It was really fascinating to hear that, that, that, uh, you're spending so much time, uh, looking at how do I make agents work across the business. Uh, I think we've looked at a lot of, uh, individual automation, uh, in, in the past and low code. Uh, but I think it's a, it's an understanding that Microsoft has that big picture view, uh, and it's the breadth of the tooling.

Um, it's the, the scope of, uh, of understanding. It's, you know, not just departmental, of course it's departmental, but it's also how do we make this enterprise wide and how do we elevate the thinking so that, uh, we're preparing those inside of our organization, uh, to, to take advantage of the big shift that's happening, going, you know, from building maybe those point low code applications to orchestrating across the business. Um, and a lot of the pieces around making, you know, agents work together, providing that security and compliance that ensures that you can do all of this safely and not constantly sweating, am I going to go outside the security boundaries?

Am I going to go against corporate policy? And knowing that all your agents can do that, it really is gratifying to see how far Microsoft has come and, and assembling this vision, uh, and then offering it. And, you know, it's not, none, no one can say this is mature, uh, yet, but, you know, hearing about, um, how the, the stories we see at your events about how far the customers are coming and already getting a lot of these things out there.

So, uh, that was the takeaway I had, uh, is just, you know, uh, uh, getting a sense of Microsoft is really trying to make sure that they're leading this, uh, this agentic transformation.