The other day, I learned two new terms, agent
boss and frontier firm. And I immediately thought,
oh, wow, I can finally be the boss of something.
Both of these terms I found in the latest Work
Trend Index annual report published by Microsoft
on April 23rd, 2025. The article defines frontier
firms as companies structured around on -demand
intelligence empowered by hybrid teams of humans
plus agents. These companies scale rapidly, operate
with agility, and generate value faster. And
illustrates the journey to becoming a frontier
firm in a three -phased approach. Phase one,
humans with assistants. Every employee has an
AI assistant that helps them work better and
faster. Phase two, human agent teams. Agents
join teams as digital colleagues taking on specific
tasks at human direction. And phase three, human
-led agent -operated. Humans set direction and
agents execute business processes and workflows,
checking in as needed. And it's in this final
third phase that every employee becomes an agent
boss, which by the way is defined as someone
who builds, delegates to, and manages agents
to amplify their impact, working smarter, scaling
faster, and taking control of their career in
the age of AI. Now, the article says that it
used seven indicators to identify who has an
agent boss mindset, comparing company leaders
in light blue to employees in dark blue. These
indicators are familiarity with agents, regular
AI usage, trust AI for high -stakes work, expect
to manage agents, use AI as a thought partner,
see AI as a career accelerator, and saving one
hour more daily with AI. And I'm guessing many
of you watching can already check off some of
these boxes today, which is great because AI
skilling and digital labor are top workforce
strategies for company leaders. Which brings
me to something tactical and the question this
video poses, how can you become an agent boss
today, fast track your company to phase three
and secure your career? Now we already have the
tools and the technology. So let me share my
thoughts on this. By the way, welcome to Collaboration
Simplified. My name is Shervin Chaffee, and I
work at Microsoft as a Co -Pilot Principal Technical
Specialist. I've been bossing around agents for
about a year now. It's fun, and I'm happy to
share with you everything that I've learned.
First, you need the Microsoft 365 Co -Pilot license,
which is for work, by the way, not family or
personal use. Most agent features you build are
included with it as you can see in this graphic.
You can also see what we will charge for additionally
using messages which cost about a cent a message.
Like autonomous triggers for example. Second,
and this is very important. you'll need to start
blending in business workflows with technical
solutions. It's perfectly fine to create agents
for your own personal use and that's a great
starting point. But if you start scaling your
agents to solve business pain points and automate
workflows, now we're talking. You're gonna get
noticed. Here's some examples of the types of
work various lines of businesses are engaged
in. What workflow do you think you can automate
in your business? Now that we've got some of
the basics out of the way, it's time to start
thinking about building agents. I propose a crawl
-walk -run approach, which overlays nicely with
the agent spectrum that goes from simple to advanced.
On the simple side, I'd use Agent Builder to
build some simple agents. either just for yourself
or to share with your colleagues. And as you
become more comfortable with agents and want
to move to the middle part of the spectrum, now
is a good time to get access to Copilot Studio
and start building in there. Remember that business
workflow and automation tip? Here's one that
automates HR vacation booking with a connection
to ServiceNow. Remember, you're not locked in
just to Microsoft products. You can easily connect
these agents to non -Microsoft applications.
There are many other ideas that I'm sure you
can come up with for your specific business.
Share them in the comments. And finally, to be
a top -notch agent boss, you're going to need
to make autonomous agents. Agents that automatically
run in the background and do work that you tell
them to do. This is really cool stuff and it's
only going to get better as we add features like
agents controlling agents. Which reminds me,
you can easily get into Agent Sprawl. Too many
agents. And the article talks about dialing in
the human to agent ratio. Too few agents per
person, you'll underutilize both agentic and
human resources, leaving potential efficiencies
on the table. Too many agents per person, this
overwhelms the human capacity for applying judgment
and decision -making, introducing business risk
and potential employee burnout. But with the
optimal balance, agents enhance productivity
and innovation while humans provide robust guidance
and oversight. Oh, and as cool as it is to build
your own agents, don't forget that there's an
app store with pre -built agents that you can
use already. With that, I hope you now have some
concrete steps you can take to become an agent
boss. And for your next video, I recommend you
watch this. It'll go into more details about
the different types of agents, demos, how they're
built, and provide links to other videos with
step -by -step building instructions. Don't forget
to give this video a like and I'll catch you
on the next one.