AI agents are only as capable as the tools, skills, and information they can easily connect to. In sales, the intelligence that drives great decisions—buying signals, conversation insights, market and account context—often lives outside the customer relationship management (CRM). Getting it into the flow of work has traditionally meant costly integrations or data-duplication projects only the largest companies could sustain.

The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is an open standard that lets AI agents securely connect to external tools, systems, and data sources. MCP helps organizations unlock the full value of their CRM data by connecting agents to the systems, tools, and knowledge they already use. It extends first-party agents, unifies fragmented business data, brings CRM intelligence into any experience, and accelerates the development of custom agents. For Dynamics 365 Sales, that means agents can securely tap trusted intelligence in real time without requiring sellers or IT teams to rebuild integrations or duplicate data. The value shifts from data plumbing to intelligent action, giving sellers and sales leaders a more complete, connected, and actionable experience inside Dynamics 365 Sales.

Our Microsoft-built sales agents in Dynamics 365 Sales—including the Sales Qualification Agent and Sales Opportunity Agent—are built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, where MCP tools plug in natively. You can bring your existing partners, licenses, and trusted data directly into Dynamics 365 first-party agent experiences without standing up new CRM integrations or duplicating data.

The result
Higher-value Dynamics 365 first-party agents that reason over trusted third-party intelligence and improve output and results.
Lower friction to adoption, because you can use the tools you already have and trust across multiple experiences.
Clear differentiation, where the Microsoft experience can better support agentic sales use cases and workflows, connecting CRM data, partner intelligence, and business context across Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft 365, and beyond.
MCP helps turn Dynamics 365 into an agent-powered engine for action
Data and sales intelligence are just the beginning. Because MCP is an open protocol, the same model that brings trusted data into your agents can connect them to nearly any external system or capability, from research and enrichment to workflow, analytics, and tools your teams have not even adopted yet. Today’s launch partners are a powerful starting point and as the MCP ecosystem grows, so does what your agents can do. This strengthens the broader Microsoft Copilot ecosystem and reinforces Microsoft’s agent extensibility.

Not just first-party agents
These partner MCP servers also work with any custom agent built in Copilot Studio, not only our first-party Dynamics 365 Sales agents. Customers can bring this same flexibility into the agents they build for their own specific workflows.

If you already subscribe to these solutions, this is immediate added value. Your existing subscription now flows directly into your agentic workflows in Dynamics 365 Sales, putting data and capabilities you already have to work inside the agent experience, with no duplicate integration or added licensing.

Announcing new MCP partners

ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo: Connect ZoomInfo’s verified business-to-business (B2B) data and context to Microsoft Copilot Studio via ZoomInfo’s headless go-to-market (GTM) context layer, GTM.ai. This surfaces 400M contacts, 100M companies, 120M direct dials, and billions of buying signals inside Microsoft Dynamics 365. In Dynamics 365 Sales agents, customers can enrich contact and account records inline with verified contacts, firmographics, technographics, funding history, and intent signals without manual entry or tab switching.

Dun & Bradstreet
Dun & Bradstreet: Anchored by the global standard D-U-N-S® Number identifier, the D&B Commercial Graph MCP server provides the foundational context layer that allows AI agents to understand business identity, relationships, and risk across the global economy, delivering outputs that are consistent, explainable, and auditable. Leverage the Commercial Graph in Copilot Studio to create custom agents and workflows across finance and credit, supply chain, compliance, risk, sales & marketing, and enterprise master data use cases.

LeadIQ
LeadIQ: LeadIQ connects directly into the Sales Qualification Agent, the same AI agent already researching and scoring every lead that enters Dynamics 365 Sales. Instead of bolting on a separate enrichment step, LeadIQ becomes a knowledge source inside that existing research flow: as the agent evaluates a lead, it calls LeadIQ for a verified work email and phone number, and the result lands in the lead’s Deeper insights alongside the agent’s other findings, cited, sourced, and ready before a seller ever opens the record. There’s no new tool to learn and no separate enrichment step to run. Verification just becomes part of your Dynamics 365 workflow.

Draup
Draup: Draup brings context-rich account and market intelligence into the Sales Qualification Agent—hiring surges, funding events, IT spend shifts, executive moves—then converts those buying signals into clear next actions. Every lead arrives researched, prioritized, and paired with a recommended play.

Gong
Gong: Bring Gong’s account and deal insights directly into the Dynamics 365 agent experience. With real-time customer insights like objections raised, risks flagged, or agreed-upon next steps right at sellers’ fingertips, GTM teams can execute on informed next-best actions.

Enlyft
Enlyft: Enlyft helps B2B technology vendors and their partners turn deep account intelligence—technology adoption, buying propensity, and competitive footprint into pipeline. Our MCP connector brings that intelligence into Dynamics 365 Sales agents, so a qualification agent reasons over a prospect’s real tech stack, competitive install base, and fit signals before a seller ever engages.

HG Insights
HG Insights. HG Insights extends Dynamics 365 Sales agents with trusted B2B market context through Model Context Protocol (MCP), giving sellers direct access to company intelligence—such as technology adoption, cloud and AI maturity, IT investment signals, firmographics, and market context—right inside the agent experience. By combining CRM data with this external market intelligence, Dynamics 365 Sales agents help reps prioritize accounts, uncover whitespace opportunities, and recommend more informed next actions throughout the sales cycle. HG Insights is trusted by 95% of Fortune 1000 B2B tech companies and every major hyperscaler to find, target, and convert their best opportunities faster, and this integration brings that same market intelligence to Dynamics 365 users.

These launch partners highlight how powerful and extensible Dynamics 365 Sales agents can become with MCP: more connected, more contextual, and easier to extend with the partner intelligence customers already trust. Customer can use parter MCP tools with Microsoft-built agents such as Sales Qualification Agent and Sales Opportunity Agent, or bring those same tools into custom agents built in Copilot Studio.

To get started, choose the sales scenario you want to improve, connect the right partner MCP tool, and define the insight or action the agent should support. Learn how to add custom research insights and MCP tools to Dynamics 365 Sales agents.

Want to become a partner? The MCP ecosystem on Copilot Studio is open and growing. Certify your MCP server to make your solution available to Dynamics 365 Sales customers.

The post Extending agentic Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales with MCP appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Expectations for agents are changing quickly. Teams want to move beyond conversational experiences to systems that can help get work done by interacting with applications, executing workflows, collaborating across tools, and supporting customers more naturally across channels.

But getting there can be tough. Many organizations are still balancing modern, real-time AI experiences with older systems and processes that were never designed to work together. That can leave teams stuck maintaining brittle automations, disconnected processes, and rigid customer interactions that are difficult to evolve. New updates in Microsoft Copilot Studio focus on helping organizations achieve more connected, adaptive automation systems—structured where needed and adaptive where valuable.

Computer use and workflows: Adapt automation to your team’s real work

Traditional automation works best in predictable environments. But many real business processes are anything but predictable. Interfaces change. Vendor portals update unexpectedly. Legacy systems lack APIs entirely. As a result, even relatively simple processes can require constant maintenance just to keep automations running reliably.

That’s the kind of gap computer-using agents are designed to help close.

Computer-using agents are now generally available

With computer-using agents now generally available in Copilot Studio, organizations can build agents that interact directly with websites and desktop applications through the user interface (UI). This helps you automate processes that previously relied on brittle scripts or manual workarounds because the underlying systems lacked APIs.

With the new release also comes new enterprise-ready capabilities designed to help you operationalize UI automation more confidently. Organizations can now manage credentials more securely, choose models best suited for different automation scenarios, and build more resilient automations that can adapt to changing interfaces instead of breaking whenever a screen or webpage changes.

In addition, organizations can now embed computer-using agents directly into multi-step workflows. This feature, now moving into preview, further helps teams combine API-based actions, approvals, business logic, and adaptive UI interactions within the same automation system.

But adaptability automation still needs structure. As organizations scale beyond isolated automations, teams need a way to orchestrate all these in a way that’s easier to understand, maintain, and evolve over time.

That’s where the new workflows experience in Copilot Studio comes in.

A simpler, more intuitive way to build powerful workflows

Now available in early release environments, the redesigned workflows experience introduces a more intuitive visual designer for building and orchestrating agentic automation in one place. Instead of stitching together disconnected tools and logic across multiple surfaces, you can design workflows end-to-end on a unified canvas. This helps you more clearly see how actions, decisions, and AI-powered steps work together across a business process.

A core component of the new experience is the ability to add existing agents directly into workflows. These agent nodes allow you to create automated solutions that keep the scalable reliability of workflows while bringing in AI intelligence when you need it. For example, when a workflow hits a decision that can’t be captured in simple if-then logic—where it needs to use reasoning over context, orchestrate tools, or retrieve knowledge from multiple sources—an agent node can help bridge the gap and make your workflow more effective.

The new designer also helps reduce friction for teams building and maintaining these systems. Inline configuration, simplified building blocks, and node-level testing help validate workflow behavior earlier and iterate more quickly. In addition to agent nodes, AI-powered actions like classification, content generation, and decision support can now be incorporated directly into the workflow.

Together, these updates help organizations combine deterministic orchestration with adaptive execution—structured where needed, adaptive where valuable.

How Graebel combines flows and computer-using agents

Graebel, a global leader in talent mobility, processes thousands of employee relocation requests each year. Most of these come in as unstructured emails filled with unique instructions, attachments, and edge cases. Because Graebel’s proprietary Global Connect platform lacked API support, earlier automation efforts proved too rigid to keep up with the variability of real-world requests. That meant lots of manual input and handoffs—which automation was supposed to solve. Basically, Graebel needed automation that could use reasoning, not just click.

Working with GET AI and Microsoft, Graebel built the Graebel Service Order Agent in Copilot Studio using computer use capabilities to help automate the process end to end. The agent can interpret incoming emails, validate requests against business rules, operate Global Connect directly through the UI, and escalate exceptions through workflows when needed.

By adopting Microsoft Copilot Studio and AI agents, we’ve moved beyond traditional automation to a more intelligent, scalable operating model. This initiative strengthens our ability to serve clients faster and more accurately while positioning Graebel for long-term growth.

—Matt Brownlee, Chief Revenue Officer, Graebel

The Service Order Agent is live today and designed to scale across more than 30 relocation service categories. So far, results include a meaningful reduction in manual effort, faster service-order turnaround, more consistent data quality, and a repeatable blueprint for bringing intelligent automation to the rest of their operations.

Connect intelligent automation systems with Work IQ and interoperable agents

As automation systems become more adaptive, another challenge quickly emerges: connection. Even the most capable agent can only go so far if it operates in isolation. Many organizations are still navigating fragmented ecosystems where agents, workflows, APIs, and external tools all function separately. This naturally makes it difficult to share context or complete work across systems without custom integration effort.

This fragmentation—which is very common—slows adoption and makes it harder to scale intelligent automation beyond isolated pilots.

Now, new interoperability and extensibility capabilities in Work IQ help organizations build more connected agent systems—making it easier for agents, workflows, and enterprise tools to operate together across environments.

With the new Work IQ REST API and command-line interface (CLI) capabilities, teams can integrate Work IQ more flexibly into existing operational and development workflows. Support for remote model context protocol (MCP) servers also introduces a more standardized way to connect agents with tools, services, and enterprise resources. This reduces the need for one-off integrations across growing agent ecosystems.

And as organizations deploy more specialized agents across departments and business processes, coordination between those agents becomes increasingly important. With agent-to-agent (A2A) communication now generally available in Copilot Studio, agents can exchange information, delegate tasks, and be set up to work together more effectively across systems and workflows.

Together, these updates continue the shift from isolated AI experiences toward connected operational platforms—where workflows, agents, APIs, and enterprise systems can be designed to collaborate more naturally across the organization.

Learn more about these new Work IQ interoperability and extensibility updates.

Bring more natural, responsive experiences to customer voice interactions

For many organizations, voice support is still one of the most difficult channels to modernize. Customers get stuck in rigid phone trees, repeat information multiple times, or lose context entirely when they’re transferred to a live agent. Meanwhile, service teams are under pressure to handle growing call volumes without sacrificing customer experience.

Copilot Studio is helping organizations move beyond those limitations with real-time voice agents, now generally available in North America through Dynamics 365 Contact Center. These capabilities help organizations build more natural voice experiences that can identify callers, answer questions, take action during conversations, and transition customers to live agents while preserving context.

Support for speech-to-speech (S2S) voice experiences also makes it easier to connect voice agents into existing customer service and operational systems.

Now, as voice agents become part of real customer interactions, governance and operational readiness become increasingly important. A poor escalation experience, missing context during handoff, or lack of monitoring can quickly become a customer trust issue—not just a technical issue.

That’s why we’re also sharing a new in-depth voice agent governance guide. It covers practical considerations for scaling customer-facing and real-time voice agents responsibly, including escalation testing, monitoring, security, compliance, and operational readiness.

Learn more about real-time voice agents in Copilot Studio and explore the new governance guidance for customer-facing voice agents.

What else is new and improved in Copilot Studio

• A new orchestration layer in Copilot Studio improves how agents execute business processes with greater accuracy and efficiency. Built on an upgraded AI stack, it has demonstrated measurable gains—improving evaluation performance by approximately 20% while decreasing net token usage by 50%—so agents can complete tasks more reliably and cost-effectively.¹ By strengthening tool orchestration and execution quality, the new orchestrator helps ensure more consistent outcomes across complex, multi-step business processes. The result is faster, more dependable automation that scales across enterprise scenarios. This feature is currently in early release environments, where it applies automatically.
• Agent lifecycle visibility updates help the whole team understand an agent’s approval and publishing status. Agent creators can more easily understand whether an agent is still generating, ready for testing, successfully published, or encountering issues, which reduces guesswork during development and iteration. For IT and platform teams managing agents across environments, clearer publishing and status visibility can make it easier to identify stalled deployments, troubleshoot operational issues, and maintain better oversight as agent programs scale.

All together, these updates are focused on helping teams solve the kinds of problems that slow automation efforts down in the real world: workflows that break when systems change, disconnected tools that create extra manual work, and customer experiences that still feel rigid or fragmented.

With new investments across computer-using agents, workflows, interoperability, and real-time voice, Copilot Studio continues to expand as the agentic platform for building agents, apps, and workflows. The goal is simple: help organizations build systems that are easier to connect, easier to adapt, and easier to operate at scale—without losing the structure, visibility, and governance enterprise teams depend on.

Stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio

More is coming across voice channels, workflows, and the building experience. Check out all the updates as we ship them, as well as new features releasing in the next few months here: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

To learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio and how it can transform productivity within your organization, visit the Copilot Studio website or sign up for our free trial today.

Take your automation further

Design adaptive AI systems that integrate across tools and workflows to help teams get meaningful work done.

Try Copilot Studio today

¹ Source: Microsoft usage data, 2026.

The post New and improved: Computer-using agents, a new workflows experience, and real-time voice experiences appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Microsoft Copilot Studio helps organizations move beyond isolated AI experiences and build connected systems of agents that can scale, adapt, and deliver real business value. Recent enhancements focus on making it easier for agents to work together across tools and data sources, while giving makers more control over how those agents behave in production.

What you’ll see this month: New generally available capabilities for multi-agent coordination across Microsoft Fabric, the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK, and open Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocols—all of which help agents collaborate across your ecosystem and perform more valuable work. Plus, you’ll find updates to prompt authoring, model choice, and governance controls that can help make it faster to build and refine high-quality agent experiences with confidence.

Agents that work together across your entire ecosystem

The challenge in scaling AI inside an organization isn’t creating a useful agent. It’s about getting many agents—across teams and tools—to work together in a way that’s reliable and repeatable.

In many organizations, data teams might build one kind of agent, app teams another, and productivity teams yet another. Each agent can be valuable on its own, but once a workflow needs knowledge from one system, reasoning from another, and action in a third—teams often run into brittle handoffs and custom integration work. This slows agent adoption and makes it harder to move from promising pilots to real business impact.

This month, Copilot Studio takes a meaningful step forward: several multi-agent capabilities are rolling out to general availability over the next few weeks, giving your teams new ways to connect and orchestrate agents across your ecosystem. These updates include Microsoft Fabric integration, Microsoft 365 Agents SDK orchestration, and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication—all designed to help your agents operate together as a coordinated system rather than in isolated silos.

Multi-agent support for Microsoft Fabric

With multi-agent support, your Copilot Studio agents can work with Fabric agents to reason over enterprise data and analytics at scale. That means you can connect business-facing agent experiences more directly to the data estate they already rely on, without treating every data-intensive scenario like a one-off engineering project. Instead of working with limited or disconnected data, these agents will be able to operate with full business context—helping make their outputs more accurate, relevant, and actionable.

Multi-agent support for the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK

Using the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK, teams can now orchestrate Copilot Studio agents alongside agents built for Microsoft 365 experiences. Instead of recreating the same logic across multiple agents (think retrieving data, applying business rules, or completing common tasks), you’ll be able to reuse and combine existing capabilities. This makes it easier to compose cross-app workflows from what’s already been built, reducing duplication and keeping experiences more efficient and consistent.

Agent-to-Agent (A2A) support

With A2A support, Copilot Studio agents can directly communicate with and delegate work to other agents—first-party, second-party, or third-party—using an open protocol that allows universal access. This matters because the future of enterprise AI will not belong to a single stack. Organizations need to build agents on platforms that can participate in a broader ecosystem, not just operate within one product boundary. Copilot Studio A2A provides that interoperability and power.

The impact of multi-agent systems

We’ve already seen the power of this approach with the Ask Microsoft web agent, one of our early “customer zero” implementations. As site traffic and knowledge sources grew, the single-agent architecture began to strain, creating slower response times. Using Copilot Studio, the team upgraded the agent to a modern architecture with generative orchestration and multi-agent coordination.

Now, multiple sub-agents handle different parts of the site—Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, pricing, trials, and more—while the main agent orchestrates them to provide fast, coherent, multi-turn responses. This setup allows Ask Microsoft to answer complex questions involving multiple products or services, and to tailor responses based on where the customer is on the site.

Building a more advanced assistant with Copilot Studio has meaningfully raised the bar for our customer experience and enabled us to scale faster across products to deliver real business impact.

—Alyse Muttera, Director of eCommerce Programs at Microsoft

To show how this approach works in other organizations, consider a common scenario at a bank. The loan department has one agent handling mortgage applications, while the banking department runs a separate agent for account inquiries. A customer, however, expects a single seamless experience.

Multi-agent orchestration lets each specialized agent manage its area of expertise while coordinating responses behind the scenes. For instance, if a customer asks about a mortgage payment and their account balance in the same interaction, the system delivers a cohesive, context-aware answer that combines insights from both agents—no juggling multiple interfaces required.

When specialized agents work together behind the scenes, customers can get a unified experience and employees can get time back.

That’s exactly the kind of impact Coca‑Cola Beverages Africa is realizing today by using Copilot Studio agents and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to autonomously run planning cycles and automate workflows end to end, saving planners 1 to 1.5 hours every day.

These features will be fully available to all eligible customers as of April 2026. Three capabilities, one outcome: agents that can operate more like a system and less like a collection of disconnected point solutions.

Build prompts faster while maintaining control

As agent experiences grow more sophisticated, the quality of the prompt an agent maker uses matters more. A great prompt yields more powerful results from agents than a good prompt, and fine-tuning prompts is key to unlocking them.

But in practice, prompt iteration has historically felt disjointed and slow. Makers previously balanced their flow of work with jumping into a separate editor, making a small change, testing it, and then repeating the process again. That friction can add up quickly, especially when teams are tuning prompts for specialized business scenarios.

The new immersive Prompt Builder, now generally available, helps reduce that friction by bringing prompt editing directly into each agent’s Tools tab. You can update instructions, switch models, add inputs or knowledge, and test changes—all in one place. Instead of breaking context every time you want to refine an agent’s behavior, you can iterate while staying grounded in the agent you’re building.

This matters most in real-world scenarios where prompt behavior is tied to domain knowledge and policy nuance. For example, a team building an agent to support clinical documentation might need to refine instructions, swap in a better knowledge source, and test outputs against terminology that is common in healthcare but more likely to trigger default safeguards. Doing that from one workspace can make iteration faster and help lower the effort required to get a production-ready result.

More options for prompts: Content moderation and model choice

Speaking of triggering default safeguards, Copilot Studio has also added content moderation settings for prompts, now generally available in supported regions. This gives makers more control over harmful content sensitivity on managed models, including turning down that sensitivity to help unblock legitimate scenarios in industries like healthcare, insurance, and law enforcement, where default settings may be overly restrictive for the content being processed.

For even more control over prompts, the Prompt Tool now supports Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 in paid experimental preview in the United States. That gives makers more choice in matching the right model to the right prompt, rather than forcing every scenario into the same tradeoff profile. This feature is great for teams that want more flexibility in how they balance performance, reasoning depth, and cost.

All together, these improvements help teams move faster on prompt iteration while maintaining the control and flexibility required in production scenarios.

What else is new and improved in Copilot Studio

We have also recently released several additional updates across automation, meetings, retrieval quality, and model support.

• ServiceNow and Azure DevOps connector quality improvements are now generally available. These help agents better understand operational questions, retrieve the right ticket or work item data, and return more complete, actionable answers automatically.
• Evaluation automation APIs are now generally available through Microsoft Power Platform APIs and connectors. These APIs help make it easier to run evaluations programmatically and integrate quality checks into continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows.
• Agents for Microsoft Teams meetings can now access real-time meeting transcripts and group chat. This supports scenarios like answering questions during the meeting, surfacing relevant information, or helping track decisions and follow-ups as they happen.
• Model context protocol (MCP) apps and Apps SDK support have expanded how agents connect to your external work apps, helping to make it easier to integrate business systems and enable agents to take action across your broader ecosystem—not just respond with information.
• Additional model support, including Grok 4.1 Fast, GPT-5.3 Thinking, and GPT-5.4 Instant in paid experimental preview, gives makers more options as they tune experiences for speed, cost, and capability.

Overall, these updates reflect a continuing broader shift in Copilot Studio: moving from building individual AI experiences to building connected, governed systems that can fit more naturally into how work already happens. As you scale up your organization’s use of multi-agent ecosystems, these will help your teams reach further across channels and knowledge sources to more accurately fulfill your business needs.

Stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio

More is coming in April 2026 across voice channels, workflows, and the building experience. Check out all the updates as we ship them, as well as new features releasing in the next few months here: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

To learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio and how it can transform productivity within your organization, explore Copilot Studio features and pricing or sign up for our free trial today.

Build powerful agents

Create, customize, deploy, and manage agents with Copilot Studio—and explore the features, use cases, and resources that help you get there.

Try Copilot Studio today

The post New and improved: Multi-agent orchestration, connected experiences, and faster prompt iteration appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

At our AI Tour in London, we’re excited to announce a new set of capabilities that enable you to build autonomous agents, which will be in public preview at Microsoft Ignite 2024. These agents understand the nature of your work and act on your behalf—providing support across business roles, teams, and functions.

Since the introduction of generative AI and Microsoft Copilot, our work has rapidly evolved. In our Business Applications, 2.1 million users engage with Copilot monthly, benefiting from AI-driven experiences and workflows with Microsoft’s commitment to privacy, security, and compliance.

Companies like McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home, Thomson Reuters, Clifford Chance, and more around the world, are seeing an incredible impact from the use of Microsoft Copilot Studio and our modern business applications. They’re becoming true AI-first companies. AI-first companies leverage a combination of people, Copilot, and agents to be more efficient, improve customer engagement, and improve employee experience.

Microsoft Ignite 2024

Discover how autonomous agents can empower your organization at Microsoft Ignite.

Register for the event

Copilot is your personal, private assistant that works solely for you, enhancing your capabilities. And agents are expert systems that operate autonomously on behalf of a process or company. You configure, secure, and test your agent, and then it automates for you and your team across apps and data sources. We expect every employee will have Copilot and will be supported by many agents.

Every organization is unique, and this uniqueness is a competitive advantage. Organizations need a platform that empowers users to create their own agents for specific processes. Copilot Studio plays that crucial role by customizing Copilot and creating agents for your entire company.

Where agents thrive in the AI world

Organizations are always looking for ways to enhance efficiency, improve customer experience, and drive growth, but identifying the starting point is crucial. Copilot Studio can help you modernize existing processes or create new ones, paving the way for innovation and unlocking additional business value.

Organizations like Pets at Home have created autonomous agents for specific business workflows in Copilot Studio. Pets at Home, the UK’s leading pet care business, created an agent for its profit protection team to more efficiently compile cases for skilled human review, which could have the potential to drive a seven-figure annual savings.

We’re using AI to do the time-consuming work so our colleagues can use all resource and expertise to make decisions quickly based on large amounts of data. It’s truly helped empower colleagues through both the level of information at their fingertips, and in time spent on more nuanced and insightful work. The agents solution allows the profit protection team to more effectively assess cases for potential profit loss and dedicate more of their time to skilled analysis, rather than simply information gathering.

—William Hewish, CIO, Pets at Home

In collaboration with Microsoft, and as part of a broader AI transformation playbook for itself and its clients, McKinsey & Company is creating an agent that will speed up the client onboarding process. The pilot showed lead time could be reduced by 90 percent and administrative work reduced by 30 percent. The agent automates complex processes, such as identifying the right expert capabilities and staffing teams, and acts as a single place where colleagues can ask questions and request follow-ups. Streamlining tasks and reducing manual inputs, this agent could potentially save consultants many hours, allowing them to spend more time with clients.

“We are excited about the power of copilot agents in taking AI transformations to the next level. We’ve seen early success of our pilot agent that was built for our own organization, in collaboration with Microsoft. And we see tremendous potential for agents to help our clients rewire the way their businesses operate.“

—Rodney Zemmel, senior partner at McKinsey & Company

In continuation of Thomson Reuters’ collaboration with Microsoft, the company built a professional grade agentic solution for legal due diligence. This complex workflow requires significant legal expertise and specialist content, and the ambition was to make this process more efficient. The agentic solution combines the knowledge, skills, and advanced reasoning of Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, and integrates into Microsoft’s productivity tools to take on key tasks in this workflow. By significantly transforming the way work happens, the solution helped lawyers close deals more quickly and efficiently for their clients. Initial tests indicate that several tasks in the due diligence workflow could be cut by at least 50%.

Autonomous agents are positioned to create AI-first business processes across various departments like IT, marketing, sales, customer success, and finance in industries such as travel, retail, and financial services.

On top of being able to build and manage agents from scratch with Copilot Studio, we’re introducing ten new autonomous agents in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to build capacity for sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams.

New capabilities coming to Copilot Studio

Autonomous triggers

Agents can automatically respond to signals across your business and initiate tasks. They can be configured to react to events or triggers without human input that instead originate from various tools, systems, and databases, or are even scheduled to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

Dynamic agent plan

Each business process can have different paths since agents create dynamic plans on the fly to handle and complete tasks. Users can view the underlying logic for each of the agents’ paths, which includes key details, steps, and systems involved. This provides insight into why the agent chose a particular method, its decision process, and context, along with detailed steps, including variables and outputs, which are crucial for debugging.

Activity overview

Trust, dependability, and precision are at the core of establishing agent autonomy in organizations. The true strength of these agents is their ability to monitor activities across real-world scenarios, which in turn enhances business outcomes. To further transparency and accountability, we’re launching an “Activity” tab that enables makers to access a complete log of past agent runs, including progress tracking, identification of blocks, trend analysis, and review of earlier decisions.

New models like the OpenAI o1 series

Copilot Studio agents use the latest models, including the OpenAI o1 series, which is being used in the limited private preview for autonomous agents. These models are optimized for advanced reasoning tasks, enhancing the ability to solve complex problems.

Secure and trusted platform

Microsoft is committed to the advancement of AI driven by responsible AI principles that put people first.

Organizations are equipped with enterprise data protection including a comprehensive set of features to secure agents, including encryption, data loss prevention measures, and a responsible AI strategy to mitigate AI-related risks such as prompt injection. The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls, managed through the admin center, including robust authentication protocols.

Agent guardrails and controls are established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions. You can implement access controls for creating, sharing, and using agents. And you can establish policies and information labels to safeguard data and monitor agent usage.

You can also oversee the lifecycle management of agents efficiently with process governance, from creation to retirement. You can establish policies regarding resource utilization, access permissions, and publishing. And you can audit events and obtain insights into application performance to ensure continuous improvement and compliance.

With the comprehensive tooling provided by Copilot Studio, businesses can build, secure, and deploy agents tailored to their organizational needs. Read more about agent security here.

Becoming an AI-first company

Copilot is emerging as the new user experience, acting as your UI for AI, making workflows smarter and more resilient through agents. Powered by your data, converted into knowledge, it’s organized and reasoned over in a secure environment to fuel Copilot and all your agents. This shift empowers organizations to leverage and create sophisticated, intelligent applications.

With Copilot Studio, everyone can become an AI-first company

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 to experience the public preview of these autonomous agents. Discover how they can empower your organization to not only adapt but to lead in this exciting new era of AI innovation, truly embodying the principles of an AI-first approach.

• Learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio governance.
• Join us at Microsoft Ignite to learn about Microsoft’s latest innovations for AI transformation.
• Get in touch with a Microsoft representative today.
• Read the Official Microsoft blog from Jared Spataro.

The post Unlocking autonomous agent capabilities with Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

For executives, understanding the role of conversational AI within the broader low-code strategy is critical to staying competitive. This technology is not just about keeping pace—it’s about setting the pace and meeting human beings, customers, and employees alike, where they are. And human beings are becoming harder to please. In a recent article, McKinsey & Company observes that two-thirds of millennials expect real-time customer service, and “three-quarters of all customers expect consistent cross-channel service experience.”¹ AI-enabled customer service tools can help deliver those experiences for both customers and employees.

In this blog post, we’ll walk through how conversational AI can improve both customer and employee experiences. We’ll also examine how Microsoft Copilot Studio enables organizations to build, deploy, and scale custom copilots, which are pivotal for driving efficiencies and tackling unique business challenges, thereby allowing the creation of solutions that are precisely tailored to organizational needs.

Improving customer satisfaction and engagement

According to the 2023 Gartner^® report How Generative AI Can Help Meet Customer Experience Expectations, “Customer retention and growth feature heavily in the plans of executives interested in generative AI. Thirty-eight percent of leaders see improving customer experience and retention as the primary purpose of initiatives to deploy applications trained on large language models, while 26% highlight revenue growth. Only 17% cite cost optimization”.²

One example of a company using conversational AI and low-code to improve customer experiences is Nsure.com, a medium-sized organization of 900 employees. The company, which matches customers with insurance carriers, has been using Copilot Studio to create copilots—custom AI assistants that can take on mundane and repetitive tasks so employees can concentrate on higher-value responsibilities.

Copilot Studio provides thousands of pre-built data connectors, which make it easy for organizations like Nsure.com to point their custom copilots to multiple first- and third-party data sources, tailor them for different applications, and extend capabilities from basic knowledge-based responses to complex task automation.

Nsure.com builds its copilots to support sales activities (including up-selling and cross-selling) and streamline interactions with customers, with a goal of having as much as 90% of incoming customer requests handled automatically. With copilots processing insurance quotes, payments, renewals, and discounts, Nsure.com agents can focus on what they do best: providing high levels of attentive customer service.

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Improving the employee experience

Copilots automate everyday business processes, which empowers employees to spend more time on complex tasks, strategic initiatives, innovation, and higher-value responsibilities, leading to more satisfying employee experiences and an overall increase in staff productivity.

One company with an especially ambitious automation goal is Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), one of the largest combined natural gas and electric energy companies in the United States. In just four years, the company has used low-code and conversational AI to empower more than 4,300 makers, including advanced digital creators and new citizen developers, to realize more than 315 low-code/no-code solutions that save nearly 527,000 hours (almost $75 million in savings) each year.

We felt there was a ton of value to be had throughout our organization in terms of streamlining and automating a lot of low-value work and re-dedicating people in the organization to doing high-value work.

Mark Seveska, Executive Sponsor, IT Products and Enterprise Solutions, PG&E

Thanks to a powerful new AI assistant built with Copilot Studio that now meets 25% to 40% of PG&E’s help desk demand, the company has optimized the workloads of its busy agents and provided sizeable labor savings and service-level improvements. In fact, the amount of time saved on just one process—automating end-to-end SAP account unlock requests—adds up to 840 saved hours per year.

Low-code development can facilitate collaboration and communication among teams by providing real-time access to information, coordinating workflows, and fostering collaboration between different departments or team members, like business users and pro developers.

According to Gartner Webinar, “By 2026, code written by developers/humans will be reduced by 50% due to generative AI code generation models.” ³

Further underlining the transformative power of AI, research presented in a Gartner webinar on generative AI’s practical applications suggests a significant shift in the development landscape. By 2026, human-written code could be reduced by up to 50% due to the advent of generative AI code generation models, reshaping the future role of developers and accelerating the pace of innovation.³

For instance, Africa’s largest bank—Standard Bank of South Africa—has adopted a low-code approach to automate processes, conduct analyses, and develop solutions for various business requirements. They have established a Center of Excellence (CoE) to support more than 1,500 citizen developers who utilize Microsoft Power Platform across the bank’s global network.

Employees who had never dreamed of being developers were surprised at how easily they could build solutions with Power Platform to solve their business challenges.

Richard Blackwell, Standard Bank Infrastructure Management, Employee Experience, Head – Engineering Team, Standard Bank of South Africa

With strong governance, thanks to its CoE, the bank has been able to grow from productivity solutions for smaller teams to enterprise solutions, like an IT help desk bot built in Copilot Studio that now resolves 99% of all employee queries.

Discover how Microsoft Copilot Studio can help improve customer and employee experiences in your organization.

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As we wrap up our discussion, it’s clear that the transformative power of AI lies in its capacity to elevate both the customer and employee experience. By integrating conversational AI and crafting your own copilots with Copilot Studio, organizations can unlock unprecedented levels of efficiency, gain deeper customer insights, and chart new pathways for growth, truly embodying AI as a strategic asset.

Whether you’re at the inception of your AI adoption journey or looking to scale existing capabilities, Copilot Studio offers a robust, low-code platform that simplifies the design, enhancement, and management of AI copilots, making it accessible for users of all expertise levels to deploy solutions across various channels swiftly. Begin your transformative journey with Copilot Studio today and extend the capabilities of copilots or create ones uniquely on your own.

Start a free trial of Copilot Studio.

Sources:

¹ The next frontier of customer engagement: AI-enabled customer service, McKinsey & Company, 2023.

2 Gartner, How Generative AI Can Help Meet Customer Experience Expectations, By Gene Alvarez, Uma Challa, Leah Leachman, 3 August 2023.

3 Gartner Webinar, Beyond the Hype: The Practical Applications & Use Cases of Generative AI, 2023.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Improving customer and employee experiences with Microsoft Copilot Studio   appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

We’re grateful to our early customers who have already adopted Copilot Studio and are building amazing solutions for their end-users. Here are just a few highlights:

Copilot Studio enables us to build and make quick updates to an employee facing copilot that can reason over multiple knowledge sources and provide consistent and relevant answers. Copilot Studio has helped us reduce the workload and costs of our support team, while increasing the engagement and loyalty of our employees.”

Ramesh Murugan, Director, Employee Technology & Experiences

The City of Kelowna in British Columbia, Canada is building a copilot as part of a solution that makes it easier to apply for building permits. The copilot asks citizens what they want to build, and Power Automate feeds these responses to Power Apps, which then populates the official building permit forms on behalf of the user. The first phase of the solution is focused on swimming pool permits and is set to launch in March 2024. The city plans to extend the capabilities of the app to eventually cover all permit types.

City of Kelowna has built copilots using Microsoft Copilot Studio, specifically to support our building application process, revolutionizing the way we serve both the citizens and also builders. These copilots have enabled us to create a streamlined and user-friendly interface where applicants can easily submit and track their building permit.”

Jazz Pabla, Director of Information Services

Copilot Studio and Microsoft Copilot Service enables the team at RSM, a Microsoft Partner, to provide unified conversational experiences without changing applications. By providing actions, surfacing insights, and automating actions, team members are able to reduce onboarding time while dramatically improving client experiences and reducing mean time to resolution.

At RSM, we use a range of Microsoft AI technologies, including Microsoft Copilot Studio, to create copilot experiences that deliver compelling outcomes for our clients and team members. The easy-to-use and extensible features of Copilot Studio allow us to adapt to a range of different and changing needs and help us identify new opportunities to serve our customers and teams.”

Mike Gillis, Owner/Principal

Holland America will use Generative AI in Microsoft Copilot Studio to power an online concierge to support bookings. Available at any time on HollandAmerica.com, the Concierge agent will be available to answer any questions customers have and will be available throughout the digital journey.

Booking a cruise can be tough due to room options, packages, and entry requirements. We think generative AI can guide customers effortlessly, matching the perfect vacation from booking to cruise for each guest.”

Scot Pettit, Sr Director E-commerce

An Post, the provider of postal services in Ireland, chose Microsoft Copilot Studio to create an easy way for customers to get answers to their questions about postal products and services. The copilot can also be used to track packages, improving efficiency for both An Post and its customers.

Copilot Studio has enabled An Post to deliver a valuable self-service automated digital solution. The use of Generative AI technology will allow us to elevate the customer experience and increase our speed-to-market delivering on our Digital Strategy to support more customers online.”

Des Morley, Chief Digital & Technology Officer

HP will use Copilot Studio to provide product recommendations. For example, small business customers can identify which products are the best fit for their specific software and business needs. Customers can use natural language to accomplish tasks in far fewer clicks than a decision tree or filter-based design. HP will take advantage of Copilot Studio’s ability to reason over the content already on its website to quickly create this experience. With instant access to a wealth of product information surfaced through the Generative AI capabilities of Copilot Studio, HP provides a richer experience for its customers.

We are using Microsoft Copilot Studio to build a copilot for HP’s customer-facing website to engage customers at scale and educate them on the right products for their needs, and more. Copilot Studio enables real-time responses to customer queries using Generative AI. The better we communicate about our products, the more trust and business opportunities we can create.”

Mohamed Zohny, Global Head of Social Media & Digital Innovations

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is one of the largest combined natural gas and electric energy companies in the United States. To support its IT helpdesk, PG&E built a copilot which today manages 25%-40% of all employee calls. These optimizations save the company more than $1.1 million annually. Using generative answers in Copilot Studio, the copilot will soon be able to access the company’s knowledge based automatically and return answers back—no scripting required. Read the full story here.

With Power Platform, we’re not only saving money, we’re helping drive a renewed joy of innovation across the company.”

Alla Gogerman: IT Leader, Intelligent Process Automation and Digital Productivity COE

Share your story with us!

Do you have a similar story or experience to share? We are excited to learn more about how organizations like yours are using Copilot Studio and other AI capabilities in Power Platform! Submit your story at https://aka.ms/ShareAIStory

In the meantime, you can learn more about Microsoft CoPilot Studio through these resources:

• Copilot Studio website
• Product documentation

The post How early adopters are transforming their organizations with copilots appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.