{"id":1155944,"date":"2025-11-19T14:51:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T22:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-project&p=1155944"},"modified":"2025-11-21T10:20:04","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T18:20:04","slug":"agents-for-productivity","status":"publish","type":"msr-project","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/agents-for-productivity\/","title":{"rendered":"Agents for Productivity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Agents for Productivity<\/h1>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Agents for Productivity (A4P) is a M365 Research initiative to enable Microsoft to deliver reliable, highly capable, and scalable agentic solutions that drive measurable productivity impact. The strategy addresses two core challenges: technological gaps (tool integration\/selection, memory & context management, advanced reasoning) and operationalization barriers (realistic benchmarks, prod\u2011like environments, unified evaluation & tech transfer). The approach is composable and platform\u2011driven, pairing foundational components (orchestration, procedural memory, planning) with a research kit (benchmarks, environments, evaluation\/debug pipelines) to accelerate adoption across M365.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research Areas<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  • Orchestration Intelligence & Advanced Reasoning<\/strong>: Innovate across the orchestration stack (post\u2011training for tool\u2011rich, long\u2011horizon tasks; planning & multi\u2011agent workflows; enterprise\u2011grounded RL environments). Goals include scaling tool\/API awareness, improving plan optimization, and establishing realistic evaluation aligned to Office\/Windows workflows.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Agentic Memory and Context Management<\/strong>: Deliver tenant\/user\u2011scoped procedural memory to preserve know\u2011how across sessions and projects; progressively unify curation with semantic\/episodic memory while enforcing contextual integrity in sharing scenarios. Focus areas include capture from prior executions\/demonstrations, background curation & retrieval, and human\u2011in\u2011the\u2011loop editing and feedback<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Computer-Using & Hybrid Agents<\/strong>: Expand automation coverage via robust GUI+API execution across M365\/Windows, improving grounding for visual actions and progressing toward a multimodal World Model for safer, sample\u2011efficient learning and model\u2011based RL.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Agents for Productivity (A4P) is a M365 Research initiative to enable Microsoft to deliver reliable, highly capable, and scalable agentic solutions that drive measurable productivity impact. The strategy addresses two core challenges: technological gaps (tool integration\/selection, memory & context management, advanced reasoning) and operationalization barriers (realistic benchmarks, prod\u2011like environments, unified evaluation & tech transfer). The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1146181,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"research-area":[13556],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-1155944","msr-project","type-msr-project","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-locale-en_us","msr-archive-status-active"],"msr_project_start":"","related-publications":[1128276,1128837,1141355,1145327,1145329,1146345,1146435,1148072,1148074,1152860,1153106,1155432],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-groups":[793670,811276,1054512,1145968],"related-events":[],"related-opportunities":[],"related-posts":[],"related-articles":[],"tab-content":[],"slides":[],"related-researchers":[{"type":"guest","display_name":"Jim Kleewein","user_id":786892,"people_section":"Executive 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