MS Copilot. Flying straight into the mountain

Late October, Microsoft announced another breakthrough in its quest to make life as miserable as possible for IT people around the world.

What is it this time?

Starting in November, customers will be able to create autonomous agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

As an added bonus, it is also coming with 10 autonomous agents within Microsoft Dynamics365 to help with sales, services, finance and supply chain management. The purpose of these agents is 'to help you accelerate your time to value...' and '...to scale operational efficiency and elevate customer experiences across roles and functions.' The acceleration will break every imaginable speed limit, and customers will experience elevated euphoria they didn't have since sliced bread was invented.

But that's the usual marketing talk from Microsoft. They’re only rivaled by the marketing team at Mercedes when describing the sound coming from their exhaust pipes — 'Emotion emitter. Four polished trapezoidal tailpipes play a resounding performance symphony beloved by AMG drivers. Selectable modes let you revel in the revs during acceleration and gear changes, or tone it all down to a mellow growl that'll please the neighbours.'

Unlike Copilot, Mercedes works.

This is what Microsoft is promising with the new technology: 'Microsoft Copilot is your AI assistant — it works for you — and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot.'

And this is Microsoft’s vision for your future: 'We envision organizations will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team, or function to execute and orchestrate business processes ranging from lead generation, to sales order processing, to confirming order deliveries. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents.'

Now imagine that anyone in the organization will be able to create, connect, interact with a 'constellation of agents.'

Perhaps you don't see this as a problem.

That only means that you were never responsible for technology within your organization.

Maybe you had a glimpse in the news about all the latest threats from viruses, phishing or other various forms of hacking. Every IT department is trying to stay above water just to safely run what they have now.

These departments are managing networks, firewalls, desktops, laptops, people working remotely, integrating applications, running backups and updates.

The list is longer than you can imagine.

Thanks to Microsoft, you will add to the mix an ability for anyone in the company to automate any task to 'orchestrate business processes ranging from lead generation, to sales order processing, to confirming order deliveries.'

What could possibly go wrong?

Look at the person sitting in the cubicle next to you (or in the next square on your Zoom call).

Would you trust the person with any work automation, or do you still question that person’s ability to differentiate between a left and right mouse click?

The center where the daemons will be born is Microsoft Copilot Studio, where Microsoft expects that '... every employee will have Copilot and will be supported by many agents,' which allows anyone to automate any boring, useless task.

The challenge is that the moment anyone creates an automated task, the output will become an input for someone else’s task, and their output will become...and so on.

A small change, aka crash, in the first task will have unforeseen implications throughout the whole organization.

Once people realize that 'something' is wrong, the constellation of agents will either crash or start generating wrong results or actions.

Of course, the first people who get called into a situation like this will be the IT department.

People there will have no clue what the individual agents are supposed to do. They are not subject matter experts on sales, finance, operations or HR.

Also, consider the very likely scenario that the person who built a small microcosm of highly interconnected agents decides to leave the organization. Who will inherit this treasure trove? Will it be the manager, coworker or IT?

The replacement will have to spend years untangling the secret web of agents. And if you think that the accompanied documentation will be self-explanatory?

As Dante put it, 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'

What on paper sounds like a historic breakthrough and panacea for every company will become another level of purgatory for the IT department. After the initial euphoria, the suffering will be evenly distributed through the whole organization.

The recurrent pattern? Microsoft’s business model.

Take a barely-functional product and create an illusion that it will help you. Provide a simple demo, where everyone can see the huge benefit and how it can be implemented quickly in a few easy steps.

Then create another product, which will help alleviate the mess created by the first product. And you keep creating bigger and bigger messes. Only this time, you will need a much bigger fan.