Microsoft expects 1.3 billion AI agents to be in operation by 2028 – here’s how it plans to get them working together

The tech giant wants to make copilots more agile with a new low-code service to help businesses fine-tune copilots with their own data

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pictured speaking on stage during the opening keynote of Microsoft Build 2025, the company's annual conference hosted in Seattle, Washington, US.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft wants to improve Copilot agility with a new low-code fine-tuning service and more intuitive agent orchestration tools – and it comes at a critical juncture in the evolution of the technology.

Copilot Tuning was one of a flurry of announcements to come from the opening day of Microsoft’s Build 2025 conference.

The new low-code feature inside Copilot Studio lets businesses train specialized AI agents with their own documents, workflows, and domain knowledge - all without needing machine learning expertise or any third-party help.

“Every day, more customers are using Copilot and agents to expand the capacity of their teams,” Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of Microsoft AI at Work, said in a blog post.

“Last quarter alone, customers created over one million custom agents across SharePoint and Copilot Studio, up 130% quarter-over-quarter.”

The idea is to not only simplify the use of Copilot, but also tailor it to your unique business needs. By feeding the system a small set of labeled documents the Copilot can learn more about the company, its tone and vocabulary, and therefore produce more authentic outputs.

With this information, it can churn out tailored agents for specific drafting or other types of documentation and workflows, the company said. What’s more, this all happens within your Microsoft 365 suite – your data isn’t used to train any other Microsoft service, it stays within your organization's secure network.

Microsoft wants agents working together

Microsoft also introduced new capabilities for multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio. This, the company said, aims to enable agents to exchange data, collaborate on tasks, and share workloads based on the expertise of the agents.

The move makes sense from a simplicity perspective, especially given the huge surge in AI agent deployments globally.

More than 230,000 organizations already use Copilot Studio to create and customize agents, according to Microsoft. In the last quarter alone, customers created over 1 million custom agents across SharePoint and Copilot studio, the tech giant said.

By 2028, it expects more than 1.3 billion AI agents to be working away in the background. With this in mind, having agents operating in siloed environments won’t enable enterprises to maximize their potential.

An example Microsoft gave included multiple agents collaborating across HR, IT, and marketing departments to help onboard new employees.

The new services will be available in June as part of an early adopter program. They follow other Copilot Studio capabilities Microsoft has recently added, such as ‘Model Context Protocol’, ‘Agent flows’, and ‘Deep reasoning’.

“Today’s announcements further our ambition to give developers the tools they need to empower every employee with a Copilot and transform every business process with agents in Copilot Studio,” Spataro said.

MORE FROM ITPRO

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognize him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.