Move over, copilots: it’s time to make room for the AI agents.

That has been the message from the software industry in recent days, as some of the biggest companies have lined up behind the latest idea for how to turn generative artificial intelligence into a staple of working life.

Microsoft, Salesforce and Workday this week put agents at the centre of their AI plans, while Oracle and ServiceNow have also used the industry’s annual round of user conferences this month to promote the idea.

AI assistants known as copilots — a term first popularised by Microsoft — have become the software industry’s main response to the generative AI unleashed by the launch of ChatGPT nearly two years ago.

The latest wave of AI agents are designed to go further and take actions on behalf of users. While agents have become the newest front in the battle between tech giants like OpenAI and Google, they have also turned into the software industry’s latest attempt to sell generative AI to business customers.

The evolution reflects both an advance in the underlying technology, as well as a new marketing pitch from an industry looking to capitalise on a heavily hyped technology that has yet to have much impact on its revenues.

If the industry’s claims prove true, the move from AI assistants to agents could also open the door to a far more disruptive phase in the evolution of generative AI, both for workers affected by the technology as well as software companies themselves.

Behind the spread of agents — also widely referred to as “agentic” systems — lie a number of advances in the underlying technology since the first generative AI chatbots.

Greater memory enables the systems to retain a better understanding of context, while planning capabilities have advanced. Agents also often connect to other systems through APIs — application programming interfaces — meaning they can take actions on behalf of a user rather than just return information.

The latest wave of agents is designed to act as an extension of the copilots that came before rather than replace them completely. According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, his company’s copilot software is evolving into an “enterprise orchestration layer”, a conversational interface through which workers will be able to create and use agents to carry out specific tasks.

Initially, AI agents are mainly being promoted as tools to take over simple, routine actions, like filling out an expenses report.

But some companies are already touting their ability to handle more complex tasks, or even take over some jobs completely. Automating customer support systems has been a main area of focus, potentially replacing large numbers of call-centre workers.

So far, generative AI has done little to lift the revenue growth of software companies.

The entire software industry is still in “‘show me’ mode on copilots or AI agents”, says Jim Tierney, a growth stock investor at AllianceBernstein. “It is still an open question exactly how this is going to be monetised,” he added.

Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, suggested there was a lack of traction for copilots, telling the FT: “Microsoft has deceived customers with their AI strategy, they don’t need to DIY it. We build it into our platform, customers shouldn’t be forced to train and retrain their models.”

The software companies are betting that customers will see direct productivity benefits in agents that can take on entire tasks.

According to Microsoft’s Nadella, as AI systems like these become increasingly capable, “models themselves become more of a commodity and all value gets created by how you ground, steer and fine-tune these models with your business data and workflow”.

As agents take on more of the workload, that could put companies like Apple, with its dominant smartphone platform, and Microsoft, with its desktop productivity apps, in the best place to win, said Tierney.

For now, the full implications of that shift are likely to be muted, as the tendency of generative AI systems to “hallucinate” makes users cautious about allowing them to take unsupervised actions.

“I’m sceptical, and even a little bit nervous” about the widespread use of agents, said Barry Briggs, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft and now an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm.

The probabilistic nature of the technology means that customers will not be able to use the technology for important tasks, but instead will have to build it into work processes that give workers the final say, he added.

Yet some companies already claim to be taking the technology to its logical conclusion. Last month Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, said his company was on the way to halving its workforce with AI.

Siemiatkowski also made waves in the software industry by saying Klarna would abandon Salesforce and Workday completely and instead use AI to develop the software it needs to run its business. That claim is widely seen as an outlier in the tech world given the current state of the technology, though it points to what some claim will be a far more disruptive future.

Most software investors, however, are betting the big winners will be the existing powers in the software industry — even if it is still unclear how or when the pay-off from technology will come.

As extensions of copilots, agents are merely the latest step in the attempt by today’s leading software companies to stake out the territory and prepare themselves for the time when generative AI has advanced to a point where it can deliver real productivity gains, said Kevin Walkush, a portfolio manager at Jensen Investment Management.

The current generation of agents were unlikely to do much for software company revenues, he added, but: “It’s all about establishing their beachheads and long-term positioning.”

Even if the incumbents are best placed to win, the shift towards agent-based systems could still cause upheaval in the way they do business. Most have charged customers a licence fee based on the number of workers who use their software — a model that would be threatened if AI agents make a serious dent in staff counts.

In response, most software companies have started to test usage-based pricing that ties their revenue to query volumes. Salesforce, for instance, says it will charge $2 for each “conversation” with its AI agents. Many also talk about a shift to outcome-based pricing that will allow them to share in some of the gains that customers get from using the software, though it is unclear how this might work.

“It’s early, we don’t know how the pricing models will play out,” said Byron Deeter, a partner in Bessemer Venture Partners and investor in early-stage software companies.

Like the move to the cloud, when a change in the way software companies book revenues caused a period of turmoil for the industry, the shift to a new pricing model for AI “might be bumpy for public [software] companies”, he added.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Sri Lanka’s presidential election has headed into a run-off, with leftist outsider Anura Kumara Dissanayake leading the vote count but failing to pass the 50 per cent threshold needed for an outright victory in the south Asian country’s first election since it fell into default.

Dissanayake, a neo-Marxist candidate was leading with 40 per cent of the vote with about half of the ballots tallied on Sunday, according to the election commission.

Under Sri Lanka’s electoral rules, voters can rank second and third-choice candidates. If no candidate receives more than 50 per cent, those second-preference votes are added to the tally of the two leading candidates to determine a winner.

Sajith Premadasa, the main opposition leader and son of a former president, was in second with about 32 per cent of Saturday’s vote. Incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe placed third, with about 16 per cent.

Analysts said a victory for Dissanayake would be a stunning political upset in Sri Lanka and cast new doubts on its fragile $3bn IMF-backed debt restructuring in the country that has endured two years of economic crisis and austerity.

His National People’s Power coalition has just three MPs in the 225-member parliament, which is dominated by parties backed by traditional elites. 

Wickremesinghe, 75, took office in 2022 after Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign debt and then-leader Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country amid severe economic turmoil and power cuts.

He campaigned as a the guarantor of financial stability, and last week his government said it had reached a draft agreement with holders of Sri Lanka’s $12.5bn defaulted bonds that “almost completes” the restructuring. The deal will still require a formal sign-off from the IMF and creditors.

Dissanayake, 55, has pledged to maintain the IMF facility but wants alter some of its rigid conditions to grant more relief to the country’s 23mn people, about a quarter of whom are in poverty.

The NPP’s election manifesto called for a renegotiation of the IMF agreement to make it “more palatable and strengthened”, with more focus on relief for the poor.

On the campaign trail, Dissanayake also vowed to tackle corruption and slash privileges for the ruling class, such as generous pensions and car permits, and pledged to reopen all human rights cases involving the Rajapaksa regime during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war.

“AKD benefited by a swing of all the votes of the Rajapaksa party towards him,” said Kusal Perera, a political commentator, referring to Dissanayake by his initials.

Harini Amarasuriya, an MP with the NPP, said the strong first-round result represented a rejection of “the traditional elite politics that was part of our culture”. 

“This is not just a transfer of power from one party to another. It’s a real shift in power dynamics.”

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A leading government adviser has called on ministers to urgently address low childhood vaccination rates by investing in frontline services after new data revealed an “extremely worrying” decline in uptake.

Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said the government needed to increase funding, especially for frontline nurses and health visitors with local knowledge.

“The system for mopping up those who find it hard to access vaccination is not currently robust enough,” he told the Financial Times.

“We have to get this right, the future health of our children depends on it, and even their lives.”

The warning comes after data published by NHS England last week showed that uptake of all 14 key childhood vaccinations has fallen over the past year, with no vaccines meeting the World Health Organization’s target of 95 per cent coverage.

The share of children vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) by their second birthday fell to a 14-year-low of 89 per cent in the year ending March 2024.

The UK Health Security Agency last month warned of a back-to-school resurgence of measles after major outbreaks in London, the West Midlands and North West drove infections to the highest levels since 2012.

Pollard said the spread of measles was a “red flashing warning light” that other diseases would soon start spreading without urgent action.

Low vaccination rates are a global problem, with nearly three-quarters of children living in countries where low vaccine coverage is driving measles outbreaks.

Dr Mary Ramsay, UKHSA director for public health programmes, said disruption to healthcare during the Covid-19 pandemic and complacency had caused vaccination rates to drop in England.

“While there is much focus on vaccine hesitancy . . . it is not driving the long-term decline we have seen in uptake,” she said.

“[It] is more likely a combination of some people being complacent about the risk of some diseases, but also about people’s lifestyles and finding time to ensure your child attends their appointment.”

A 2023 survey by UKHSA found that 88 per cent of parents were happy with the safety of vaccines for babies and young children, although rates were lower among ethnic minorities and people from lower social grades.

Pollard said a lack of access was the main reason for the decline, with parents finding it difficult to find available appointments and to travel to GP surgeries, especially if they have to take multiple children on public transport.

He added that some communities were unaware that vaccines are free, while others may have unfounded concerns over their safety.

MMR vaccination rates were lowest in London, which is home to 17 of the 20 areas worst affected by measles outbreaks. Hackney and the City of London had the lowest uptake across all local authorities in England, with coverage of only 68 per cent last year, down from 88 per cent a decade ago.

Dr Gayatri Amirthalingam, UKHSA immunisation deputy director, said London had “an ethnically and socio-economically diverse population and health inequalities persist”.

She added: “The population is also very mobile with many families moving in and out of the city and between boroughs, who may not immediately register with a new GP.”

The NHS launched a new vaccination strategy in December, promising a more flexible appointment system that would make “booking a jab as easy as booking a cab”.

Local health teams will also have more flexibility to offer immunisation services in local venues such as community centres, sport facilities and places of worship.

Steve Russell, NHS national director for vaccinations and screening, said too many children were still not fully vaccinated against preventable diseases such as measles and whooping cough.

The Department of Health and Social Care said the NHS and GP practices send reminders to encourage parents and carers of children not fully vaccinated to come forward, adding it continued to look at ways to further boost vaccine uptake through community pharmacists and health visitors.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

In newly liberated but starving Naples, the American general Mark Clark hosted a banquet. He was served the humanlike flesh of a manatee taken from the municipal aquarium, which disturbingly resembled “a little girl who had been cooked”.

So, at least, runs the version of this often-told anecdote in Curzio Malaparte’s sensational semi-factual novel The Skin. Keith Lowe, however, has found that the aquarium remained open and stocked after the Allies occupied Naples in autumn 1943. It charged 20 lire to soldier-tourists to view the uneaten marine life. For Lowe, Mark Clark’s manatee menu symbolises the process “by which fiction becomes myth, myth becomes recollection, and recollection becomes history”.

During and after the Fascist breakdown and the retreat of German forces, the Italian port suffered more from this slide between fact, memory and legend than almost any other theatre of the second world war. Torrid literary reportage has fixed the image of what journalist Alan Moorehead called “the moral collapse of a people” into anarchy, crime and despair as authority broke down. In The Skin, or Norman Lewis’s celebrated memoir Naples ’44, or John Horne Burns’s novel The Gallery, the city figures as a lurid arena of violent chaos and lawless sleaze.

For sure, Lowe’s meticulous historical sleuthing reveals disorder on a monumental scale, with “theft, prostitution or illegal trading” the sole means of survival for many citizens. But he also recovers the hidden history of a Mediterranean metropolis that freed itself from German domination before the Allies arrived — only to find its dreams for social renewal dashed by the naivety, ignorance and mismanagement of its well-intentioned liberators.

Especially in Savage Continent (2013), Lowe has made a speciality of aftermaths: what happens as conflicts end, and the “dramatic, exhilarating and traumatic” events that follow. On 1 October 1943, the King’s Dragoon Guards drove to cheers and flowers into a joyful city. Soon, Naples became a template for both the sunny and shady sides of post-Nazi life — and an early warning that allowed the blundering Allies to raise their game as social rebuilders later in 1944.

Lowe begins with the mingled hedonism and horror of the months after liberation. The departing Germans had trashed the place — 300 sunk craft choked the harbour — and terrorised the people. “Miracles of reconstruction” with military value (rebuilding the shattered port, quashing a typhus epidemic) coincided with the neglect of civilian needs by an Allied Military Government (AMG) largely staffed by “well-meaning mediocrities”.

Naples turned into “a playground for foreign troops”, often drunk. One-fifth of the US 1st Armored Division contracted a sexually transmitted infection. Breakdowns in rationing and food distribution drove the spread of rampant corruption, “wholesale thievery” and large-scale prostitution: symptoms not of “moral collapse”, but rational behaviour as mass starvation loomed.

Naples 1944 then backtracks to the Fascist era and its finale in the stirring, often spectacularly effective, revolt of the Neapolitans themselves. During the “Four Days” of late September 1943, which “set the entire city alight”, audacious guerrilla exploits hastened the German exit. A closing section argues that Allied mis-steps, above all their eagerness to reinstate old elites, “smothered at birth” local hopes for reform. Lowe explains that foreign stereotypes, with Naples as an idyll of happy-go-lucky pleasure-seekers or “a paradise inhabited by devils”, played their part in blurring the Anglo-American vision.

Admirably, Lowe checks salacious myths against a vast range of Italian sources. He portrays the liberated city not as some grotesque pageant of vice but the stage for innumerable human dramas of heroism or compromise. If he judges the strategic bungles of the AMG harshly, Lowe recognises that exasperated Italian colleagues found officers “kind, patient and reasonable” — but way out of their depth.

“The prosecution of the war”, not civic revival, set their agenda. As this rigorous, but humane and colourful history, shows, that priority let a sclerotic status quo return. US politician Adlai Stevenson, who visited in 1944, warned that after a “total war”, “the peace must also be won”. Further north, the Allies applied that lesson. In Naples, they never did.

Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos by Keith Lowe William Collins £25, 400 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Remember the good old days? When office corridors buzzed with the sound of ideas bouncing between senior executives and junior recruits? And the kitchens! New products conceived in the time it took for the kettle to boil. Not to mention all that learning. In the past, a new starter only had to sit within five yards of an experienced colleague to absorb the entire contents of their brain.

Such pre-pandemic nostalgia infused the vision laid out this week by Andy Jassy, chief executive of retailer Amazon, who ordered a full-time return to the office. In a memo, he said the move would make it easier for staff to “learn, model, practice”. It would also “strengthen our culture” while making things like brainstorming “simpler and more effective”.

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s rose-hued parade. But in ancient times — five years ago — employees would also bitch about silos, poor training and productivity. Remember offices on Fridays? No, me neither. What about off-site meetings because headquarters was too stultifying to produce new ideas? Sadly, yes. 

Of course, coming together in the workplace can spur connections, innovation and learning. My best gossip is usually from serendipitous chats. For some, the commute provides the spring in their step. But let’s not get carried away. The office is not the solution to every single workplace problem.

However, some seem to think it is — even if that view is not backed up by evidence. In her new book, Over Work, Brigid Schulte describes a leadership “echo chamber”. One expert tells her their team “was actually more productive” when working flexibly “not just in terms of hours worked, but literally in output”. They can readily demonstrate this to the CEO, but “can’t get them to listen because instead they’re listening to their fellow CEOs”. Other bosses flex RTO mandates to signal muscular leadership: take Elon Musk, who once described “laptop classes” as “living in la-la-land”.

Who knew something as boring as an office could become the centre of a culture war? But here we are. When UK business minister Jonathan Reynolds said flexible working could enhance productivity and opportunities this week, Kemi Badenoch, candidate to be leader of the opposition Conservative party, condemned his sentiment.

Back and forth we go, distorting statistics, trading insults — shirkers on the one side, dinosaurs on the other. Will it never end?

David D’Souza, director of profession at CIPD, the human resources body, says it is a distraction “from critical conversations about productivity, flexibility, job security, fairness and balance. Organisations should be weighing up the complex factors behind this decision-making on evidence, as opposed to just feelings or what they see [others] doing.” Some human resources chiefs tell him of “pressure from the CEO” to see more physical presence on site “due to personal preference or nostalgia”. 

Yet despite the noise, the reality is leaders are generally pragmatic. Most white-collar employers offer some flexibility over location because it benefits staff and bosses. In the US, 67 per cent did, according to the Flex Index report. In the UK, the CIPD puts it at 83 per cent. A recent study in the Nature journal found that “a hybrid schedule with two days a week working from home does not damage performance” and improved staff satisfaction and retention.

Nick Bloom, one of the authors, told me he is sceptical of Jassy’s performance rationale because it goes against “data from many other studies in other companies showing that once you have three days a week in the office that generates about the same productivity as five”. While two extra days boost facetime, mentoring and culture-building, staff do not have quiet time at home for deep work. Counter to the slacker argument, “we know WFH workers tend to skip lunch and work pretty hard during the day”, he said.

Which raises another explanation for Jassy’s RTO mandate. In his memo, he outlined a future vision of Amazon with “fewer managers [to] remove layers and flatten organisations”. Bloom muses that presenteeism might be the best strategy to make this happen. “Requiring five days in the office will lead to a surge in quits.” 

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but one thing is for certain: Amazon needs home workers. Otherwise, who will be there for the package deliveries?