Ten years ago today, Microsoft was quietly testing something called the Bing Concierge Bot, and looking back on it now, I can’t help but laugh at how familiar it sounds. The whole pitch was an AI agent that lived inside your conversations, understood natural language, handled tasks, and fetched information for you — basically the same thing Google just announced today with its new AI information agents.
Once again, Microsoft had the right idea way before the market was ready for it. And like we’ve seen so many times, the company built the future a decade too early, then moved on before the world caught up.
Copilot can absolutely do this kind of agent‑style work today, and in many ways, it’s already ahead of what Google is promising. But moments like this remind me that Microsoft’s biggest challenge isn’t vision — it’s timing. They invent the thing, shelve the thing, and then watch someone else re‑announce the thing with perfect market conditions. It’s a pattern I’ve watched for years, and this anniversary is a perfect example of it.— Daniel Rubino, Editor-in-Chief
This story was originally published on May 19th, 2016, by John Callaham.
Google revealed its AI-driven Assistant as part of its Google I/O 2016 developer conference this week, for a launch later this year. Google says it will give users real two-way conversations on search items, and that Assistant will be able to know the context of those chats to give users the right information.
In Microsoft's job listing (via ZDNet) for an engineer in its Applications and Services Group, it describes the Bing Concierge Bot as a similar concept:
"In Bing Concierge Bot Our team we are building a highly intelligent productivity agent that communicates with the user over a conversation platform, such as Skype, Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. The agent does what a human assistant would do: it runs errands on behalf of the user, by automatically completing tasks for the user. The users talk to the agent in natural language, and the agent responds in natural language to collect all the information; once ready, it automatically performs the task for the user by connecting to service providers. For example, the user might ask 'make me a reservation at an Italian place tonight', and the agent will respond with 'for how many people?'; after several such back-and-forth turns it will confirm and book the restaurant that the user picked."
There's no word on when we could see Bing Concierge Bot arrive for consumers.