AI Agent & Copilot Summit 2025: Sharpen your agent skills, Microsoft execs advise

MSDW Insight: Microsoft leaders joined this week's event to reinforce core messages for partners and customers around AI's business value, organizational change management implications, and key product achievements thus far. Some product goals may only succeed if customers embrace disruption.

Microsoft expects every business process to be transformed by agents, with employees measured at least in part of their ability to manage, work with, or perhaps work for the agents that increasingly take over key elements of their work.

Speaking at the AI Agent and Copilot Summit 2025, Microsoft VP for AI Agents Ray Smith shared some of his experiences over the last two years to help define the company’s approach to agents and the broad role they are expected to play in both assisting workers and reimagining business processes in pursuit of efficiency gains and increased revenue.

The evolution of agents will focus on “actually looking at new ways to run those processes or new experiences for customers,” Smith said. He said Microsoft sees four stages of agentic transformation. At the earliest, non-AI stage is the human worker. AI’s progress introduces the concept of humans working with agents, then agents working with humans, and finally, agents on their own, operating autonomously and without oversight. 

With agents taking over work that humans do today, Smith foresees a job market where candidates are judged based on their agent-focused portfolio. He stated: