Microsoft has announced its new-look Customer Intent Agent in a move it describes as “accelerating the journey toward fully autonomous contact centers.”
The tech giant first unveiled the Customer Intent Agent, available across its Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Customer Service offerings, in January 2025.
Upon the original announcement, Microsoft showcased how the AI Agent scans service conversations to pinpoint the contact center’s core demand drivers, or ‘intents’.
From there, it clusters transcripts, case notes, and summaries to map each intent and outline the steps to a successful resolution.
That intelligence then plugs into other AI agents, automating knowledge article creation, informing self-service interactions, and boosting the agent-facing Copilot.
Meanwhile, the Customer Intent Agent keeps working in the background, unpacking emerging customer intents, enabling the creation of new knowledge content, and expanding the scope for contact automation.
As that scope increases, so does Microsoft’s ambition to deliver an autonomous contact center.
Still, there is a long way to go here, with Gartner recently predicting that half of contact centers will abandon plans to reduce headcount due to AI.
Nevertheless, Microsoft still aims to usher in the autonomous contact center with its latest updates to the Customer Intent Agent.
The New-Look Customer Intent Agent
As noted, the Customer Intent Agent maps out troubleshooting flows for specific queries. Yet, it didn’t alter that flow based on live customer context… until now.
Indeed, the AI Agent now plays Overwatch, ingesting context from customer conversations to tweak the troubleshooting flow in real time.
So, for example, if the customer changes intent mid-interaction, the Intent Agent suggests next questions and an alternative path for the agent, live or AI, to follow. That path comes in the form of a playbook that it collates.
Alternatively, suppose the Intent Agent doesn’t grasp the contact reason. In that case, it will now prompt the customer-facing agent to ask follow-up questions, ensuring their understanding and ability to provide the best possible next steps.
These are the headline new features. Yet, contact centers can also now have the Intent Agent front up their voice channel. So, it interacts in natural language with the customer, narrowing down their intent and identifying the best possible solution.
Finally, as new intents and troubleshooting flows stream into a central library, they now come with more context, including which flow is best in specific scenarios. That helps improve the accuracy of assisted conversations.
Admins can filter, validate, and approve resolutions in the library, ensuring human oversight as the technology keeps improving.
Microsoft’s Progress in the Contact Center Space
Microsoft entered the CCaaS market in July 2024, with its chief differentiators being in its broader portfolio that includes Teams, Power, and Azure Communications Services (ACS).
Yet, it’s also notable how it’s one of only a few CCaaS providers actively talking about the role of AI agents beyond one-to-one customer conversations.
Indeed, it’s also trumpeting AI agents for mining intents and spinning up knowledge, while embedding them into its Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
That’s a rarity, with only one percent of enterprise software applications embedding AI agents, as of 2024. However, Gartner predicts that this will rise to 33 percent by 2028.
In this sense, Microsoft is ahead of the curve, even if it’s still largely putting bricks in the wall in terms of its broader CCaaS platform capabilities.
As it does so, it must prove that it’s a dependable CCaaS provider. After all, while eye-catching AI is impressive, referenceability is often the determining factor in enterprise contact center buying decisions.
After all, that’s why new market entrants often struggle to gain market share quickly, even the likes of Microsoft and Google.
For more on Microsoft’s contact center journey, check out CX Today’s recent article: Microsoft’s Contact Center Celebrates Its First Birthday: 3 Takes on Its Journey So Far
