Ten years ago today, Microsoft was quietly testing something called “The.” Bing Concierge Botand looking back now, I can’t help but laugh at how familiar it sounds. All the pitch was an AI agent that lives in your conversations, understands natural language, performs tasks and retrieves information for you – basically the same thing Google announced today with new AI data agents.
Once again, Microsoft had the right idea before the market was ready for it. As we’ve seen time and time again, the company built the future more than a decade early, then moved on without catching the world.
Copilot can absolutely do this kind of agent-like work today, and in many ways it exceeds what Google promises. But moments like these remind me that Microsoft’s biggest problem isn’t vision, it’s time. They invent the thing, put the thing on the shelf, and then watch someone else re-announce it with perfect market conditions. It’s a pattern I’ve followed for years, and this anniversary is a perfect example of it.— Daniel Rubino, Editor-in-Chief
This story was originally published May 19, 2016By John Callaham.
“At Bing Concierge Bot, our team is building a highly intelligent productivity agent that communicates with the user over a conversational platform such as Skype, Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. The agent does what a human assistant would do: it performs tasks on behalf of the user by automatically completing tasks for the user. Users speak all languages, speak to the agent in natural language, and respond in natural language. It connects to service providers and completes the task for the user, for example, the user “take me to an Italian place tonight make a reservation,” he might ask, and the agent would answer, “For how many people?”
There is no word on when we might see the Bing Concierge Bot arrive for consumers.
