Microsoft created Bing for AI agents

Microsoft expects most online searches to be completed soon Artificial intelligence agents Acting on behalf of humans, not humans themselves. The big tech company has just announced Microsoft Web IQ, its new set of APIs designed specifically for it Artificial intelligence agents Which helps them scrape the web faster and more thoroughly.

Microsoft said during its annual developers conference that Web IQ is a search engine for artificial intelligence systems. Microsoft buildon Tuesday. It connects AI tools to information across the web, but presents it in a different way than a search engine presents to a human.

“We traditionally have search engines for humans, like Bing,” Jordi Ribas, head of search and artificial intelligence at Microsoft, told CNET during an interview Monday morning.

What is growing rapidly now are agent search engines, Ribas said. “Web IQ is our solution for this type of search engine, and it provides that context…web documents, news, images and videos that are relevant to the agent’s query, and then the agent uses them for grounding.”

While humans and bots search differently, Microsoft was able to draw on its expertise from Bing to build Web IQ.

“We’ve leveraged everything we’ve done in the last 20 years from Bing, while at the same time redesigning and rebuilding it from the ground up to make sure we have a search engine that’s highly optimized for agents,” Ribas said.

The difference between search activity performed by humans versus AI agents lies in how the information is presented. For humans, this means ranking search results according to what the person is trying to find. For AI agents, it looks like a comprehensive but condensed page of results that can be analyzed without using too many tokens. So Web IQ had to deliver high-quality results quickly, in a compact package.

Symbols These are small pieces of written text – typically about four English characters per token – that AI models process to generate responses to your prompts. The more tokens the AI ​​model uses, the higher the output cost.

Agent AI is the next step beyond chatbots. Instead of AI telling you what steps to take, it steps in and completes tasks for you. You may have already dealt with some forms of agentic AI, such as self-driving cars Smart home assistantsbut newer artificial intelligence agents, e.g OpenClawcan work more independently.

Web IQ leads the industry in quality of search results, token efficiency, response time — 95% of the time, it responds in less than 165 milliseconds — and in token efficiency, Ribas said. Microsoft said it’s about 2.5 times faster than any other product out there.

The Web IQ APIs, a component of Microsoft IQ — which was also announced during the Microsoft Build keynote — are already being used to power Microsoft’s AI offerings, Co-pilotin addition to OpenAI ChatGPT “For a while.”

“Many other systems are also parked on Web IQ,” he added, though Microsoft wouldn’t specify which ones at this time.

Ribas said that while he believes the number of searches conducted by agents will be lower than some estimates — which suggest they will conduct 1,000 times more queries than humans within a few years — he certainly believes AI agents will conduct more than humans by the end of the year.

“We expect agents to make more queries easily than humans, just because of the nature of the number of queries they make per chat response, and the fact that AI systems will continue to accelerate and grow,” Ribas said. “And for every query or every problem that these systems make, you generally need to run multiple queries into a system like Web IQ.”