Today at Microsoft Advertising Accelerate, our flagship event for advertisers, we are announcing several product releases that will help us in the journey of transforming audience engagement. This blog post is longer than usual, and that’s because we have a lot to share, with meaningful announcements. Let’s start with our vision.
The future of customer experiences is conversational.
Today, most people navigate between multiple web pages or apps to do what they want, from playing games, connecting with friends and colleagues, shopping for a new coat, to discovering their next vacation spot. Historically, these digital experiences have been siloed into search bars, social apps, and streaming, to name a few.
Generative AI changes all of that, with conversational interfaces like chatbots and, increasingly, agents enabling a less fragmented discovery and productivity experience. People can now jump from searching to shopping to entertainment at the speed of a few prompts.
This shift opens new possibilities for advertising. The use of natural language can unlock easier exchanges between consumers, brands, publishers and ad platforms, underpinned by secure and privacy-compliant methods. We anticipate that brands will soon have their own AI agents, which are essentially software programs that can quickly perform tasks and make decisions.
For example, in the same way that a travel agent could historically help you find the perfect vacation, a software agent can help you find what you’re seeking to consume or purchase, moving us into the era where brand agents can have conversations with people and even with other companies and their agents.
Thanks to the rapid advancements in technology and falling costs of generative AI, these agents can enable a variety of scenarios. Possibilities include tasks like enhancing customer engagement, supporting lead generation, offering timely and accurate product information, and in the future even offering promotions.
We are committed to helping brands create agents and making it easy to connect them to our audiences. As the first step in this journey, we are launching a pilot product that enables brands to create smart, AI-based agents on their websites.
Imagine if a website could talk? People wouldn’t need to scroll and click through links; they could simply ask what they want to know and have customized information delivered to them. For brands, this can boost engagement and conversion rates as a helpful agent guides their customers through the last mile of the shopping experience. Starting this month, we are inviting select clients to participate in this early stage pilot.
In the future, we envision these intelligent agents will be able to interact with each other, and Microsoft Copilot could invoke specific agents based on the needs of each user. And in the meantime, we are building ad products, productivity capabilities, and creative innovations that help marketers prepare for that future state while also pragmatically driving their current businesses. We have much to share that I’m incredibly proud of and excited about – keep reading to learn more!
