Amanda Silver is a corporate vice president at Microsoft’s CoreAI division, where she works on tools for deploying apps and agentic systems within enterprises.

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Microsoft VP Amanda Silver argues that AI agents represent a watershed moment for startups comparable to the shift to public cloud. Multi-step AI agents can now automate tasks like dependency updates (70-80% time reduction) and incident response, reducing operational costs and enabling smaller teams to build higher-valuation companies. The main barriers to agentic deployment aren't technical uncertainty but rather unclear business use cases and poor data strategy. Human-in-the-loop workflows remain important for critical operations, though automation continues expanding into areas like package inspection and code deployment.

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