Today’s leading organizations are going through an agentic business transformation. This change takes AI from concept to measurable impact, by automating existing workflows and using agents to enhance productivity and reinvent entire functions. Copilot Studio, Copilot’s agent platform, provides a fully managed solution for accomplishing this.

Using Copilot Studio, organizations around the world can quickly bring the benefits of AI to their business. Copilot Studio empowers companies to streamline and automate their processes with agentic workflows, create single-purpose agents to solve specific problems, and develop multi-agent solutions that drive measurable business outcomes at scale. The result: a scalable, secure, and governable foundation that supports the needs of IT administrators and business owners measuring return on investment (ROI). This system accelerates agentic transformation by delivering speed-to-value without sacrificing quality or control.

At the same time, with Microsoft 365 Copilot, users can easily use AI to improve their personal and team productivity. This tailored experience for Microsoft 365 Copilot users offers a fast, guided way to set up agents to support your work and automate everyday tasks, removing them from your plate.

Today, we’re excited to share new capabilities in Copilot Studio that support all of these scenarios and groups that use our product, making it easier for makers and administrators to shape agent behavior, enforce organizational standards, and extend functionality with AI.

End-user improvements

Our Copilot Studio experience for building agents and workflows, as well as our agent building capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot, continue to support agent creation for all users, from professional makers and IT administrators doing enterprise AI transformation, to employees building agents and workflows for their personal use. Recent updates focus on making the process simpler and more efficient.

What’s new in Microsoft 365 Copilot

• Redesigned creation experience: Build and refine agents through an improved conversational interface that guides users and taps into an expanded set of work-related knowledge sources.
• File generation with natural language: Agents built in Microsoft 365 Copilot, can now create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in seconds using natural language commands.
• Seamless upgrade path: Copy agents from Microsoft 365 Copilot to Copilot Studio in one click, unlocking advanced AI agent customization.
• Workflows agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot: Create, build, and manage workflows using natural language in chat. Boost productivity with quick scenarios like daily triage, weekly digests, and lightweight approvals—all directly within Copilot.

Maker improvements

IT application developers and other professional makers in the business can already build sophisticated agents in Copilot Studio without needing to code. Copilot Studio includes capabilities such as connecting and acting across more than 1,400 systems of record via Model Context Protocol (MCP), Power Platform connectors, and the Microsoft Graph. It also includes broad and deep tooling like autonomously writing and executing code, delivering rich out-of-the-box agent analytics and ROI measurement, and more, all built on the Microsoft governance and security platform. We’re excited to share new capabilities that give makers even more flexibility and control to design enterprise agents tailored to their unique organizational needs.

• Choose your own model: Select from leading options like OpenAI’s GPT‑5, Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.5, and Opus 4.1 to power your agents. This empowers you to tailor agent intelligence to fit your specific business scenario, optimize performance, experiment with new capabilities, and deliver agents that meet your organization’s unique needs.
• Ensure agents are ready for launch, and don’t regress over time, with Evaluations: Built-in evaluation tools help you test agents against real-world scenarios, compare versions, and track performance with clear metrics. Evaluations can give teams greater confidence that their investments are performing as expected.
• Computer use: Agents can now automate tasks across apps and websites, using secure Windows 365 experiences—from hosted browsers for quick web automation to IT-managed Cloud PC pools for rapid scalability.

Admin improvements

As agents become central to automating work and transforming workflows, Copilot Studio is introducing new governance and protection capabilities designed to help organizations maintain strong oversight.

• Expanded agent analytics: Clear insights into connected and child agent performance, detailed visibility into Copilot Credits consumption and limits, AI-generated summaries of top analytics insights, and interrogating analytics using natural language.
• Real-time protection: Copilot Studio integrates with Microsoft Defender and other trusted security platforms, providing continuous monitoring and protection against threats like prompt injection—helping every agent run more safely.
• Microsoft Entra Agent ID: Every agent made in Copilot Studio now gets a unique Microsoft Entra Agent ID, making it simple to register, manage, and govern your entire agent fleet.

Agent 365 and Copilot Studio: Unified control for agents

Agents are handling more responsibilities across enterprise operations and Copilot Studio is your launchpad for building them. With the introduction of Agent 365—the control plane for agents, the rich governance and management capabilities we offer today including sharing controls, advanced connector policies, agent inventory, zoned environment management, and more, will also be surfaced in the Agent 365 platform when using agents built in Copilot Studio.

Additionally, in Copilot Studio, makers can now build agents that use the new Agent 365 MCP servers. These servers allow agents to schedule meetings in Microsoft Teams, draft documents in Word, send emails in Outlook, and update customer relationship management (CRM) records in Microsoft Dynamics 365. This supports delivery of intelligent, compliant workflows and agents with built-in audit trails and granular policy enforcement—all from one platform.

Agent 365 is available starting today in Microsoft 365 Admin Center with Frontier, Microsoft’s early access program for the latest AI innovations.

Scale to the Frontier Firm with control

True transformation happens when agents are built for scale, governed for compliance, and measured for impact. Copilot Studio delivers that foundation, so organizations can build enterprise multi-agent systems, automate workflows with precision, and reimagine processes while minimizing risk.

EY’s results show what’s possible when you invest in a comprehensive agent platform, built on Microsoft. They are just one of many enterprise organizations implementing agents with Copilot Studio. In this case, their PowerPost Agent built on Copilot Studio led to major improvements in journal processing:

• 95% reduction in lead time
• 37% cost savings¹

Implementing the PowerPost Agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio has fundamentally transformed our journal processing. What once took minutes now happens in seconds—streamlining workflows and improving accuracy.

—Paula Korczak, Product Manager for General Ledger, EY

That’s the difference between cobbling together siloed agent platforms versus investing in a managed scalable agent platform like Copilot Studio: agents and agented process design that is repeatable, auditable, and scalable.

Get started today

To learn more about Copilot Studio and how it can transform your organization’s productivity, visit the Copilot Studio website and sign up for a free trial today. Take the Agent Readiness Assessment to benchmark your organization’s agent maturity across five critical areas—strategy, data, process, culture, and security—and get a personalized report to accelerate scalable agent adoption and drive agentic business transformation.

Want to explore all of Copilot Studio’s adoption content? Visit the Copilot Studio adoption page.

¹ EY redesigns its global finance process with Microsoft Power Platform

The post Why Microsoft Copilot Studio is the foundation for agentic business transformation appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Anthropic models are available to customers in early release cycle environments worldwide today. They will roll out to preview in all environments within two weeks, and be ready for use in production by the end of the year.

Unlocking the power of choice

Copilot Studio will continue to use OpenAI as the default model for new agents, and now you’ll also have the flexibility to choose from Anthropic models, Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1.  You can use these models in Copilot Studio in two ways:

• Orchestration: Build, orchestrate, and manage agents powered by Anthropic models for advanced reasoning, workflow automation, flexible agentic tasks, and tool use.
• Prompt builder: The prompt builder drop-down menu makes it simple to choose your optimal model for each scenario.

With more options and control over model selection, we empower you to choose the best model for your use case – no matter the industry, function, or process.

How to get started with Anthropic models in Copilot Studio

Admins control how Anthropic models are used within their environment, with clear options for enabling, managing, and restricting access.

• Opt-in at launch: Anthropic models must first be enabled by your admin in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (MAC) before they can be used across your tenant.
• Environment management: Once enabled in MAC, Anthropic will be on by default in the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC). There, admins have additional controls to manage how Anthropic models are accessed by makers in Copilot Studio environments.
• Automatic fallback: If Anthropic models are disabled, agents built with it will automatically switch to the default model, OpenAI GPT-4o. No additional configuration required.

Step by step: Building an HR onboarding agent in Copilot Studio

Let’s say you’re an HR professional building an agent to automate employee onboarding. Here’s how you’d get started:

1. Create a new agent: Open Copilot Studio and begin creating your HR onboarding agent.
2. Connect knowledge sources: Link relevant HR documents, FAQs, and policy resources to your agent.
3. Design prompts and flows: Set up conversational logic and workflows your agent will use to interact with new hires.
4. Select your model: In the settings panel, you’ll find the option to select your agent’s primary model for reasoning and responding. You can choose from available options, including OpenAI GPT-5 or the newly added Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 models.

5. Configure AI tools: Model choice extends to custom prompts as well, allowing you to tailor your agent’s behavior to the strengths of each model for different tasks. For example, you might select one model for conversational employee FAQs and communications but use a different model for compliance checks and policy interpretation.
6. Deploy and test: Launch your agent, test onboarding scenarios, and iterate based on feedback.

When it comes to determining the right model for the right job, the answer depends on your unique goals. When building agents, there is no universal solution. The right model is the one that fits your use case. And with multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio, you can even coordinate multiple agents with different primary models, and they will work seamlessly together.

Experiment, share, and shape what’s next

We’re just getting started with model choice in Copilot Studio. Whether you’re using OpenAI, Anthropic, or both, you have the flexibility to choose the right model for your agent. We encourage you to explore, test different models for your use cases, and share your feedback. Your insights help us improve every day and shape what’s next for agentic AI at Microsoft.

Looking for more information to help you get started?

• Learn more about model choice in Copilot Studio
• Read the blog on expanding model choice in M365 Copilot with Claude in Researcher
• Join us at the Power Platform Community Conference in Las Vegas and connect with makers, experts, and innovators shaping the future of Copilot Studio

The post Anthropic joins the multi-model lineup in Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

One unique benefit of using the GPT-5 system is that it enables your agent to utilize your instructions and prompts as a guide for selecting the ideal model using GPT-5’s real-time router for each task or response.

• For simple or routine prompts and instructions, GPT-5’s high-throughput model for chat is used, prioritizing speed and straightforward responses.
• For complex or more open-ended agent steps, GPT-5’s deeper reasoning model will be used, taking its time to craft a plan, gather and comprehend all relevant context, and check its work before providing a thorough response.

GPT-5 to orchestrate your agents and summarize answers 

An agent’s orchestration model powers how it interprets instructions, generates a plan, uses tools, and responds with generative answers. Smarter orchestration means sharper agents. With GPT-5, agents built in Copilot Studio have sharper reasoning in ambiguous situations to determine the right next step, increased coherence in multi-turn conversations, and stronger instruction following, all of which improve overall agent performance. 

From today, makers building agents in early release cycle environments will see a new option to pick their agent’s model in the settings page. If makers select GPT-5 Auto, then the agent will use GPT-5’s real-time router to choose the right model, either GPT-5’s high-throughput model or the deep reasoning model, allowing the agent to self-select the right balance of speed and planning. Alternatively, makers can select GPT-5 Reasoning to ensure that the agent primarily uses the deep reasoning model for complex scenarios. 

GPT-5 to power your agent’s tools  

Tools are a key ingredient in enabling agents to address business processes, and custom prompts are one of the most flexible tools in Copilot Studio’s agent-building toolbox. Custom prompts let makers apply AI models with specific instructions to complete sub-tasks like creating a document in a specific format based on all the information gathered so far or extracting an invoice number from many uploaded invoices. 

Now, makers creating custom prompt tools for agents in early release cycle environments will see GPT-5’s high-throughput model and the deep reasoning models as options to use. With longer context support and improved document understanding, custom prompts using the high-throughput model will offer natural, context-aware responses with faster response times. Using the multi-step logic of GPT-5’s deep reasoning model, prompts complete complex tasks like planning and analysis with increased accuracy. 

Get started today 

With GPT-5 in Copilot Studio, not only are you able to use a cutting-edge AI system, but you also benefit from Copilot Studio’s ongoing optimizations, like agent-specific fine tuning, GPU infrastructure management on a global scale, and simple ways to upgrade existing agents to new models, in addition to having the flexibility of being able to bring your fine-tuned models hosted in the Microsoft Foundry Models.  

GPT-5 in Copilot Studio is releasing today as an “experimental” AI system for use in agents built in early release cycle environments, enabling makers to test in new and existing agents. We anticipate moving GPT-5 in Copilot Studio to all environments later this month. Learn more about early release cycle environments and agent model selection. Read more about GPT-5 in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft Copilot Studio is an intuitive agent development platform, where users can build agents using natural language. It is a secure, enterprise-ready SaaS platform, uniquely integrated with both the Microsoft ecosystem, including Copilot, and external data vendors. Copilot Studio has a complete set of tools that lets you accelerate building the right agents for your business, helping to multiply capacity, reduce development costs, and increase customer satisfaction—fast. 

The post Available today: GPT-5 in Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.