I paid Microsoft's premium Copilot agents to do my work - they were confidently bad at it

The Microsoft Copilot Analyst agent at work Ed Bott/ZDNET

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ZDNET's key takeaways

Copilot agents are built to help with research and analysis.

In my tests, those agents didn't produce useful results.

Troubleshooting with Copilot wasted time and solved nothing.

Microsoft is spending an insane amount of money on its AI features, building data centers and licensing large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, while it also tries to build its own in-house alternatives.

The goal, driven straight from the top of Redmond's org chart, is to turn the combination of Windows and Microsoft 365 into an "agentic OS," capable of doing the tasks that make corporate life miserable: writing memos, building presentations, organizing meetings, and automating routine tasks.

Also: AI PCs aren't selling, and Microsoft's PC partners are scrambling

But are those investments paying off? Developers seem to be generally happy with the productivity gains they're seeing from tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, but the agents working in the business sphere don't seem nearly as competent.

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