Digital agents powered by artificial intelligence have emerged as the latest battleground for major technology firms.

As the number of companies seeking to streamline business operations with the advanced tech grows, the competition between Microsoft (MSFT) and Salesforce (CRM) has been especially pronounced.

On Monday, Microsoft became the latest company to jump into the agent race, launching 10 autonomous agents as part of a suite of enterprise tools unveiled at its AI Tour event. Touting the feature as “the new apps,” Microsoft hailed its ability to simplify enterprise tasks, saying initial pilots showed a 90% reduction in lead times and a 30% reduction in administrative work.

“The impact of this is tremendous,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, speaking in London. He added, “We now have at-scale evidence of how these tools are fundamentally changing, … increasing value, and reducing waste.”

The announcement came just weeks after Salesforce announced the buildout of its own autonomous agents through the Agentforce platform, underscoring the AI-driven opportunity companies see in enterprise.

Hailed by Salesforce as the third wave in the AI revolution, customized agents enable companies to move beyond traditional chatbots that answer to pre-programmed responses to digital assistants that can reason, tackle multiple tasks at the same time, and make judgments based on a broader set of data.

Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih said the use cases are especially abundant in customer relations management, where agents can handle everything from product returns to crafting sales pitches.

“It goes from being a single step prescribing, almost micromanaging what the AI should do versus asking the agent to figure out what it needs to do,” Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance (video above).

Microsoft, Salesforce tout digital assistants as the future

Other companies have touted their own specialized use cases for AI agents.

Cloud software provider ServiceNow (NOW) has announced plans to integrate AI agents into its human resources and IT platform. Dating app Grindr is working on an AI-agent wingman that would seek out relationship prospects and help set up dates. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) helps clients develop their own agents for internal use, including legal work.

And in a recent podcast interview, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang envisioned a future where 100 million AI agents would be deployed within the company.

“Our inbox is going to be full of directories of AIs that we work with,” he said. “AIs will recruit other AIs to solve problems. AIs will be in Slack channels with each other and with humans.”