AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: Microsoft’s Ray Smith on How AI Transforms Businesses

In this episode of the AI Agent & Copilot Podcast, recorded at the AI Agent & Copilot Summit, John Siefert hosts Ray Smith, VP of AI Agents, Microsoft, to review major highlights from the keynote at the event.

AI Agent & Copilot Summit is an AI-first event to define opportunities, impact, and outcomes with Microsoft Copilot and agents. Building on its 2025 success, the 2026 event takes place March 17-19 in San Diego. Get more details.

Key Takeaways

AI Agent & Copilot Summit: Smith presented the keynote at the AI Agent & Copilot Summit this past March in San Diego, California. With his expertise on AI agents, Smith shared where we are today, strategically, with agents and where we are going to be in the future.
Customer journey: Businesses and customers have been going through a journey to discover how they can leverage AI technology and maximize its full potential. Smith’s keynote touched on that journey as well as how organizations are developing agentic solutions to unlock fully autonomous agents.
The big disruption: The keynote acknowledged the business transformation of AI and “the big disruption that’s coming for all our businesses.” Essentially, it will impact how we live and work. It’s important to contextualize the technology within the scope of your specific business.
Consider the outcomes: “Fundamentally, it’s all about outcomes…If there’s no outcomes or you’re not tracking the goals and objectives, you’re really just kicking the tires on cool tech,” he noted. Providing tangible use cases and capabilities makes it more action-oriented; it becomes more autonomous when these capabilities are running automatically in the background.
Creating the muscle: By building use cases early on, businesses will quickly “develop the muscle and start getting real creative around ways to transform their business.” The concept of creating the muscle can lead to building out the muscle network with consistency. There’s no perfect time to get started, so it’s best to pick up the tools and just start educating yourself.