This edition of the monthly roundup recaps new features for Microsoft Copilot Studio customers that were released in April 2025. For the earliest peek at the biggest new features being unveiled, register for Microsoft Build on May 19– May 21, 2025.

Now, on to the newest updates for Copilot Studio and agents across Microsoft 365 Copilot: 

1. Computer use in Copilot Studio agents: new limited research preview 
2. New Microsoft Graph connectors 
3. Advanced approvals in agent flows
4. Copilot Studio support for customer managed keys 
5. Return on investment (ROI) analysis of Copilot Studio agents with Microsoft Viva Insights
6. Autonomous agents and generative orchestration support in Analytics 

1. Computer use in Copilot Studio agents: new limited research preview 

Computer use is coming to Copilot Studio through an early access research preview. This new capability allows Copilot Studio agents to treat websites and desktop applications as tools. With computer use, agents can now interact with any system that has a graphical user interface—navigating menus, clicking buttons, and typing in fields. Per Charles Lamanna, CVP, Business & Industry Copilot, “If a person can use the app, the agent can too.” 

Learn more about computer use, including potential use cases, and let us know if you would like to be a part of the limited research preview. Make sure to register for Microsoft Build in May 2025 to see computer use in action.

2. New Microsoft Graph connectors 

This month, we introduced an array of powerful new Microsoft Graph connectors that are now available in preview, further enhancing your agents’ capabilities and productivity within Copilot Studio.

• Guru: Quickly integrate Guru’s AI-powered knowledge system, allowing your teams to rapidly locate critical insights and streamline knowledge sharing. 
• GitLab (issues, merge requests, knowledge): Boost DevOps collaboration by seamlessly searching and analyzing GitLab issues, merge requests, and documentation directly from Copilot Studio. 
• Asana: Enhance your project management effectiveness by embedding Asana tasks within Microsoft 365 workflows, facilitating timely completion and clearer visibility across projects. 
• 15Five: Elevate productivity and employee engagement by incorporating 15Five’s performance management data into your agents. 
• Miro: Facilitate visual collaboration by accessing, summarizing, and utilizing ideas from Miro boards right within Microsoft Copilot, promoting creative problem-solving. 
• Trello: Simplify project management and improve tracking of tasks, deadlines, and assignments by integrating Trello into your Copilot workflows. 
• Zendesk: Optimize customer support efficiency with advanced ticket tracking and analytical capabilities through Zendesk integration. 
• Smartsheet: Streamline your project management activities with effortless search and summarization of Smartsheet data directly within Copilot Studio. 
• Seismic Content: Efficiently access sales content, analytics, and collaborative resources by integrating Seismic Content, empowering sales and marketing teams. 

Admins can find all these connectors ready for configuration in the Microsoft Power Platform admin center. Once configured, these connectors will be available for makers to use in Copilot Studio. Learn more about Microsoft Graph connectors on Microsoft Learn.

3. Advanced approvals in agent flows 

Approvals are a vital part of business operations, and now they’re getting a major upgrade. With advanced approvals in agent flows, now in public preview, organizations can create multi-stage processes with distinct steps and decision-makers at each point. You can also build in conditional logic, allowing workflows to automatically adapt based on outcomes, criteria, or business rules—making complex approval chains more robust. 

 This launch marks a major step forward in flexibility and control for approval workflows—and it’s only the beginning. We’re already working on expanding the feature set with capabilities like reminders and escalations based on user feedback. Explore how advanced approvals can help you better mirror your organization’s real-world decision-making and drive smarter automation on Microsoft Learn: Advanced approvals in agent flows. 

4. Copilot Studio support for customer managed keys 

Copilot Studio now allows you to govern your agents with your own encryption keys. Instead of Microsoft managed keys, admins will be able to create customer managed keys (CMKs) hosted in Microsoft Azure Key Vault. This is a critical improvement for greater control over how your company’s data is stored at rest, and it serves as another way for Copilot Studio customers to opt for self-managing their agents

With these CMKs, organizations gain full control of their company’s data and its protection, including the ability to create, rotate, and revoke encryption keys at any time. Using Key Vault, you can define set lifetimes and enforce rotation policies. All agent-related content, including topics, settings, configurations, and conversation transcripts, can be encrypted and secured under your governance. 

Tenant admins can support CMKs through the Microsoft Power platform admin Center (PPAC), where they can define which environments support CMK encryption. Once allowed, Copilot Studio automatically integrates with Key Vault triggers to enforce encryption without requiring additional setup from customers. 

Microsoft is dedicated to advancing enterprise security by providing organizations with the tools and technologies they need to protect sensitive data, meet evolving compliance requirements, and operate with confidence. This includes a strong focus on helping to ensure that data remains secure, trustworthy, and resilient. Learn everything there is to know about CMKs.

5. ROI analysis of Copilot Studio agents with Viva Insights 

Now available in public preview, the integration between Copilot Studio and Viva Insights brings powerful new visibility into how your conversational agents are being used—and the business value and outcomes they’re driving. 

With this integration allowed, you can access aggregated usage trends and impact analysis for agents across the company, all within Viva Insights. It’s a streamlined way to track adoption and usage over time, quantify the business impact of your agents, and make informed decisions about future investments. 

Whether you’re scaling agents across teams or fine-tuning a single high-impact scenario, this integration helps turn data into direction. This feature is supported by default for commercial cloud customers and available in public preview for both public and government cloud environments. To get started, simply allow the Copilot Studio Viva Insights integration from the Microsoft Power Platform admin center. 

6. Autonomous agents and generative orchestration support in Analytics 

The Analytics page in Copilot Studio has enabled new features for a more comprehensive look into your agents’ health and performance.

Generative orchestration trend analysis is now supported in Analytics, in addition to classic mode support. Regardless of which orchestration mode you have enabled for your agents, you’ll see all your key performance indicators (KPIs) on the dashboard, including answer rate and quality, actions, usage, duration, and success rate for individual agents as well as overall trends. Whether in generative mode or classic mode, you can expect a smooth, familiar, and robust Analytics experience.

If you have generative orchestration enabled, that means you can configure autonomous triggers and build autonomous agents. Now, you can also see data about autonomous agents’ performance on the Analytics page. This provides additional visibility beyond the custom reports you can build from the agents’ transcripts, visualizing aspects like number of triggers, percentage of successful runs, and duration of the autonomous agent actions. You can not only see the overall performance of your autonomous agents at a glance, but you can also access detailed analysis of each of the agents’ different components. 

Both generative insights and autonomous agent data are available in all regions, and automatically enabled in Analytics, so take a look and try them out! 

Stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio 

Check out all the updates live as Copilot Studio ships them, as well as new features releasing in the next few months.

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

The post What’s new in Copilot Studio: April 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

1. Autonomous agents: now generally available
2. Deep reasoning in agents
3. Agent flows in Copilot Studio
4. Generative orchestration: now generally available
5. Model Context Protocol
6. Tools and prompts inside Copilot Studio
7. Open web search
8. Find and install Microsoft-built agents inside Copilot Studio
9. Private preview opportunity: try GPT-4.5 in Copilot Studio

1. Autonomous agents: now generally available

Responding instantly to critical events is more vital than ever, especially for organizations operating on a global scale. Whether it’s a finance team managing budget thresholds, a sales team seizing renewal opportunities early, or a frontline team addressing urgent low-supply alerts, timely action drives efficiency and impact.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of autonomous agents, designed to keep you proactive by automating responses to critical events. The need for manual checks, scheduled workflows, or complex custom API solutions is gone. Using triggers, you can configure your agents to wait for specific events and execute a set of actions when that event happens. The instructions you provide—written in natural language, not code—add autonomous capabilities to your agent which can then monitor, detect, and react to pertinent events to automatically carry out the workflow you defined.

These workflows can handle a wide variety of tasks, from simple actions, like notifying users of updates, to more complex automation, such as automatically ordering new equipment for your department when a new employee joins. While these agents run in the background, you’ll maintain full visibility into every action the agent takes through the Activity tab, ensuring transparency and control.

With triggers, agents evolve from working with you, to also working for you. Autonomous agents dramatically save time for individuals, teams, and entire organizations by automating business processes and getting tasks done across every department.

Learn more about getting started with triggers here.

2. Deep reasoning in agents

On March 25^th, CVP Charles Lamanna announced the preview release of deep reasoning for agents, which enables agents to handle complex business processes more effectively. With this new release, agents can leverage advanced reasoning models like OpenAI o1, along with your enterprise data, to process information, analyze data, and help you take action in subjective, complex situations.

Deep reasoning can be applied in both declarative and autonomous agents—and, in fact, you can build your own deep reasoning agents to solve complex problems specific to your organization and data. There are many ways to use deep reasoning agents’ critical thinking skills, including analyzing intricate patterns in demand forecasting, qualifying and categorizing sales leads, identifying opportunities and providing smarter recommendations, and more.

Check out this video for an example demonstration of how deep reasoning can help a team create RFPs and respond to customers more quickly:

Copilot Studio agents with deep reasoning capabilities process information more thoroughly, analyze complex business data sets to uncover deeper insights, and help enterprises make better decisions. Employing these skills in autonomous agents, especially, can create a whole new world of opportunity to offload, streamline, or augment business processes throughout your organization.

Learn more about deep reasoning in autonomous agents here.

3. Agent flows in Copilot Studio

At the other end of the reasoning spectrum, agent flows in Copilot Studio enable you to execute repeatable business processes by automatically following a predefined sequence of actions. Generally available on March 31^st, agent flows are structured, rules-based workflows that incorporate AI actions to quickly produce predictable results.

When do agent flows make sense over the use of a self-assembling agent? They’re ideal for business processes that require consistency and control, such as routing tasks or applying rules, and can be very helpful in maintaining compliance. Because they are designed to replicate a process every time—even hundreds or thousands of times a day—agent flows don’t require the reasoning or generative effort of a self-assembling agent, which makes them faster.

Note that agent flows can operate independently or integrate as actions within existing agents. Built using prebuilt or custom connectors, flows can also be reused across agents to reduce setup time and standardize efficiencies across your organization.

Watch this demo and see how you can build an agent flow inside Copilot Studio to manage customer feedback:

With options to add both deep reasoning and agent flows to your automated business processes, you can choose the right AI tool for the job at hand and enjoy a truly well-rounded agentic experience.

4. Generative orchestration: now generally available

Anticipating every possible question an end-user might ask agents is nearly impossible. With generative orchestration now available in general availability for English (en-US) agents, you no longer have to try. This powerful feature eliminates the need to manually define countless trigger phrases or delineate every conversation flow through topics.

Unlike classic orchestration, which relies on predefined, manually authored topics, generative orchestration enables agents to generate contextual intelligent responses on the fly based on your organizational knowledge sources, actions, and topics. Agents can even generate their own questions to collect information they need to solve the end-user’s problem, or ask for confirmation when needed before executing an action. This creates more natural conversations, decreases escalations and abandonment rates, and broadens the range of scenarios agents can successfully support.

Generative orchestration further enables your agents to handle multiple requests that come in a single query, such as an end-user asking to find their nearest store and get that store’s opening hours. By being able to comprehensively answer the end-user’s questions, the agents create a better experience and higher satisfaction during agent interactions.

To enable generative orchestration, simply toggle it on from your agent’s overview page. You can also find it in “Agent Settings” under the Generative AI tab. Try it out today and unlock more intuitive, more engaging, and more natural conversational agent experiences.

Learn more about generative orchestration here.

5. Model Context Protocol

In March, we announced the public preview of Model Context Protocol (MCP) support in Copilot Studio — a powerful new way to streamline how you connect AI apps, APIs, and data sources into your agents. MCP makes it easy for makers to integrate knowledge servers and external tools directly into Copilot Studio, helping you build and scale intelligent agents faster than ever.

MCP connectors automatically bring actions and knowledge from your server into your agent, including names, inputs, outputs, and descriptions, and keeps them in sync as updates happen on the backend. That means no more manually updating outdated tools. Even better, you now have access to a growing library of pre-built, MCP-enabled connectors in the marketplace, making it faster and easier to tap into existing systems while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance.

For makers, MCP unlocks a new level of flexibility and efficiency. With Software Development Kit (SDK) support, you can build your own MCP server, publish it through a connector, and instantly use those tools in your agents. Whether you’re working with internal APIs or third-party services, MCP empowers you to create more responsive intelligent agents with less complexity, and more time to focus on innovation.

Learn more about how to get started with MCP here.

6. Tools and prompts inside Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio has a new centralized place where makers can create, manage, and assign reusable functionality across agents: Tools. At the Copilot Studio application level, you’ll find Tools in the left-hand navigation. Click into it to try out the first tool available, Prompts.

In Copilot Studio, prompts instruct the GPT model to behave in a certain way or perform a specific task. A custom prompt can guide the model to answer a question, complete text, translate languages, summarize a document, and identify tasks, to-dos, and action items in text. The complexity of a custom prompt can range from a single sentence to something more intricate, depending on the task. When this prompt is assigned to an agent, the agent follows the prompt before responding, giving the maker more control over the responses the agent will generate and resulting in higher-quality answers or actions from the agent.

The Prompts tool allows makers to easily create custom prompts inside Copilot Studio, either at the app level—then assigning the prompts to agents—or within an agent or topic. Inside the tool, you’ll find out-of-the-box templates to help you instruct the model effectively, or you can write the prompt from scratch. Then you can test the prompt with sample data or inputs before assigning it to an agent.

The Tools menu and in-app prompt builder are powerful new additions for two reasons. First, they streamline the experience so that it’s easier to get started on prompts, easier to test, and easier to work on prompts at the level you need them (app, agent, or topic), all inside one tool. These prompts also use the same consumption-based meter as those created in the external tool, no extra license or cost involved.

Second, they make these functions endlessly reusable. Makers can build a prompt once and assign it to multiple agents, and any maker can use prompts created by other makers in the same Copilot Studio environment. More consistent, more collaborative, and more scalable. All this results in more effective agents and more efficient business processes.

Future updates will expand available tool types, but you can start using the prompt builder inside Copilot Studio right away. Check out Tools in the left navigation of Copilot Studio, and keep an eye out for new tools coming soon!

7. Open web search

Open web search has arrived in Copilot Studio, giving your agents the ability to surface high-quality, real-time information from the web when configured knowledge sources fall short. This new capability helps your agents deliver relevant responses in broader, more open-ended scenarios like research, content creation, and competitive analysis—without requiring makers to anticipate every possible data source in advance.

Connecting agents to publicly available information through open web search significantly expands their ability to provide accurate and up-to-date answers. Whether enhancing internal knowledge with the latest technological advancements or empowering end-users with richer, more flexible responses, this integration ensures your agents stay relevant and valuable. This can help to increase usage, drive higher satisfaction rates, and create greater impact.

Build smarter, more adaptable agents that seamlessly meet a broader range of business needs with this capability, now available in public preview.

8. Find and install Microsoft-built agents inside Copilot Studio

The Microsoft-built and Microsoft-certified agent catalog is now available in preview for admins to discover and install within Copilot Studio! On the “Create” page in Copilot Studio, admins will now see available agents under the “Built by Microsoft” heading and can click on an agent to install it.

Once installed, the admin can go to the new agent from the installation dialog box or the banner at the top of the page. From there, they can customize the agent, install first-party add-ons, and configure connections as needed.

By accessing the whole agent installation process inside Copilot Studio, it’s faster and easier to create the agents you need, empowering your team to more efficiently deploy, manage, and scale properly configured agents across your organization and processes.

Learn more about how to install agents from the catalog here.

9. Private preview opportunity: try GPT-4.5 in Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio is actively testing GPT-4.5, the latest AI model from OpenAI, to power generative answer experiences. Today, we are making GPT-4.5 available to customers through a limited preview!

Users will have the opportunity to explore the capabilities of Copilot Studio agents powered by GPT-4.5 on an agent-by-agent basis. If you would like to explore GPT-4.5 in Copilot Studio and register your interest in the preview, click here.

More ways to stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio 

Check out all the updates live as we ship them, as well as new features releasing in the next few months here: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio – Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn 

Get started today 

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

The post What’s new in Copilot Studio: March 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

• Publish custom agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
• Add enterprise data with new Microsoft Graph connectors 
• Import and export agent components in Microsoft Copilot Studio 
• Analytics updates, including actions analysis and transcript enhancements
• Security: Cross-prompt injection attack (XPIA) mitigation improvements
• Microsoft 365 Agents Software Development Kit for JavaScript
• Embedded agent builder updates, including public web scoping and user feedback
• Twelve new languages supported in conversational agent creation experience

Publish custom agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

We’re excited to announce that the ability to publish your custom agents created in Copilot Studio directly to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is now in public preview, unlocking new capabilities to customize and extend Microsoft 365 Copilot. This latest update enables your agents to take advantage of the full functionalities of Copilot Studio within Copilot Chat.

Accordingly, your agents published to Microsoft 365 can now utilize features like agent handoff, Azure AI Foundry integrations, orchestration selection, and—where more control of the conversation is needed—topics. They can also automate and execute business processes using autonomous triggers. With this greater functionality comes the need for greater oversight, so makers can also monitor their custom agents’ trends and performance with analytics (see more updates on analytics below).

Customers can also access the full security and governance features in the Microsoft Power Platform admin center, along with messages, quick replies, and adaptive cards enabled for Copilot Chat. Whether you’re launching a new agent or publishing an existing one, you can now benefit from additional channels and enable employees to access these agents through Microsoft 365 Copilot. To get started, head to Copilot Studio, enable the Microsoft 365 Copilot Channel, and select “Submit to Teams or Microsoft 365” when publishing.

Add enterprise data with new Microsoft Graph connections 

Enterprise data is the cornerstone of businesses: shaping strategies, driving decisions, and making it possible for your agents to provide accurate and context-rich responses. This month, we released new out-of-the-box Microsoft Graph connectors in Copilot Studio and Copilot Chat out to public preview. Now you can connect your agents to data in Stack Overflow, Salesforce Knowledge, GitHub, and Unily, which makes it easy for your organizations’ agents to access and use those content sources.

Development teams can now retrieve documentation, code snippets, and track issues directly from GitHub repositories using simple queries from within Copilot Studio. Teams gain immediate access to both community and internal Q&A data, enabling instant solutions to coding and IT challenges. Additionally, sales, frontline, and customer support teams can pull customer insights, FAQs, and case resolutions from Salesforce Knowledge.

To get started, configure the new connectors in the Microsoft 365 admin center. For more details, check out our guide: Set up Microsoft Graph connectors in the Microsoft 365 admin center | Microsoft Learn. Once the applications are connected, add them as Knowledge Sources in Copilot Studio. These connectors will also show up as additional knowledge in the Microsoft 365 agent builder.

Import and export agent components in Copilot Studio 

In many cases, an organization’s agents will share common messaging and content sources, actions, triggers, and entities. Rather than repeatedly copying and pasting these foundational elements for every new agent, makers and admins can now use Component Collection to import, manage, and export core agent components—including topics, knowledge, actions, and entities—across various environments. This process not only accelerates agent creation, but it also allows you to designate a preferred solution that automatically integrates changes through Component Collection and Solution Explorer.

Customers can also configure pipelines and guide makers, which empower admins to centrally govern citizen-led and pro-dev-led projects at scale with less effort. Admins set up the appropriate safeguards that govern and facilitate solution development, testing, and delivery across the organization. Then, makers can submit deployment requests to admins from within Copilot Studio. 

With the ability to set, template, reuse, and govern components, the process of building and scaling agents becomes easier, faster, and more consistent. To learn more about these capabilities, check out the following resources: 

• Create and manage solutions in Microsoft Copilot Studio 
• Export and import Copilot using solutions 
• Create reusable component collections (preview) 
• Set your preferred solution 
• Overview of pipelines in Microsoft Power Platform 

Analytics updates: Actions analysis, transcript enhancements, and Government Community Cloud availability

When it comes to understanding agent experience, optimization, and ROI, analytics are critical. This month, Copilot Studio rolled out several new analytics features. The built-in analytics page will now feature detailed insights and telemetry for the actions configured within the agent. This new view allows makers to identify the most-used actions, evaluate execution success, and optimize workflows with real-time data—critical for continuing to optimize and improve an agent’s performance and value.

Additionally, makers and admins with the “Transcript Viewer” role and permissions can now access a comprehensive view of conversations and responses for trend analysis and diagnostics. This feature has been eagerly anticipated; it provides deeper insights into the conversations your agents have with end users and how they track to the various key performance indicators (KPIs) within the analytics dashboard. These transcripts include detailed topic initiation, node triggers, and outcomes to help diagnose and refine interactions.

Lastly, we’ve expanded the regions in which customers can take advantage of these robust analytics insights by expanding to the Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) in general availability. Review and benefit from these advanced analytics to gauge user engagement, performance, and satisfaction so you can further refine your agents. All these updates empower makers and admins to spot trends, resolve issues faster, and optimize performance, helping agents work more effectively for your end users.

Security: Cross-prompt injection attack (XPIA) mitigation improvements

Every year, cyberattacks get more sophisticated. In this age of generative AI, cross-domain or cross-prompt injection attacks (XPIAs) can occur when there are malicious instructions passed to the agent from an external system. These attacks can result in the agent taking an action or sending a message based on the malicious instructions.

At Microsoft, we’re committed to continuing cutting-edge research and proactive development to keep Copilot Studio language models and customers secure. It’s imperative that customers are protected from attacks that target agents to perform malicious actions that the’re not configured to automate. Based on state-of-the-art research, we recently rolled out a feature that adds more protection against—and better detection of—XPIAs, further reducing the risk of a successful attack. This feature is enabled by default everywhere and cannot be disabled.

What does this mean for Copilot Studio customers? It means you’ll be able to meet more stringent security requirements related to security protections, and that your data and operations are safeguarded against evolving threats. This proactive approach helps ensure that your organization remains compliant with industry standards and best practices for cybersecurity.

Microsoft 365 Agents Software Development Kit for JavaScript

The Microsoft 365 Agents Software Development Kit (SDK) is a powerful tool that provides developers with building blocks to create agents that handle user interactions, orchestrate requests, generate responses based on enterprise knowledge, and collaborate with other agents. In November 2024, we announced that the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK would support C# development. Now, developers can also use JavaScript to create agents.

With the rollout of this feature, developers can take advantage of their existing skills and knowledge in JavaScript to build sophisticated agents that can enhance productivity and streamline business processes. The Microsoft 365 Agents SDK provides interoperability with Copilot Studio, allowing developers to extend existing agents built using Copilot Studio with additional functionality.

For all the information and documentation, check out the Agents for JavaScript repository on GitHub. You’ll find samples, templates, test bots, and plenty of other resources to get started.

Embedded Microsoft 365 agent builder updates

We’re excited to announce two powerful improvements to the embedded agent builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot, powered by Copilot Studio: Public web scoping and end user feedback.

Makers can now ground their Copilot agents on scoped publicly available websites, and leverage these websites as knowledge. Rather than letting agents perform a full web search, makers can constrain their agents’ external knowledge sources to specific websites for the most relevant answers. This capability already existed in custom agents built from Copilot Studio, but it now extends to agents built in Microsoft 365. This feature is enabled automatically under the “Configure” tab. In the “Knowledge” section, simply enter the URLs of approved public websites and your agents will use those as their knowledge base.

This new feature gives makers greater control over the information that Copilot agents access, and helps ensure responses are more accurate and scoped to the right context. By specifying trusted websites, makers can enhance the reliability of the agents’ answers and provide end-users with more consistent responses. Additionally, this capability helps in maintaining the integrity of the information provided by the agents, by limiting the sources to those that have been vetted and approved by the makers.

The public web scoping feature is particularly useful for organizations that have specific knowledge bases or industry-specific websites they rely on. By integrating these sources, agents can deliver more specialized and contextually appropriate responses, which can be crucial for customer support, technical assistance, and other use cases where more precise information is necessary. This increased function can even help reduce the frequency of escalations to human support.

Makers can also now submit feedback—compliments, problems, or suggestions—directly to the product team from inside the Microsoft 365 agent builder. Just as end users can rate an AI-generated agent response with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, makers can now do so in preview chat. You can also use the “Send Feedback” option to send feedback at any time while using agent builder, and there’s a specific feedback option if a responsible AI (RAI) error pops up. When submitting feedback, you can choose to write a comment and, optionally, allow the product team to collect supporting metadata like AI Prompt, AI Response, and Conversation ID. (You can review this data before clicking send.)  

This feature is exciting because makers now have a way to share feedback without breaking their flow during the agent authoring process, and with relevant surrounding context. This helps the product team react quickly to feedback, without needing to go back and forth to get additional troubleshooting information, and gets you back on track as soon as possible.

Twelve new languages supported in conversational agent creation experience 

Meillä on ilo ilmoittaa…

Miło nam ogłosić…

เรามีความยินดีที่จะประกาศ…

We’re delighted to announce the addition of twelve new languages to the conversational agent creation experience in Copilot Studio and the Microsoft 365 agent builder. The new supported languages include Chinese (traditional), Czech, Finnish, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

This feature enables expanded language support in areas where the Microsoft 365 agent builder was recently launched. It’s auto-enabled for makers whose browser language is one of the supported languages and whose environment is in a Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service supported region. The language of the conversational agent creation experience will default to the browser language if the specific language is supported in this new update. This means that thousands of makers can create new agents in their native language, without further configuration, and serve their local customers natively.

Read more about language support and use in Copilot Studio here.

More ways to stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio

Bookmark this page to learn about features as we ship them, as well as upcoming releases: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio – Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn.

Get started today

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

The post What’s new in Copilot Studio: February 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

For this edition, we’ll talk about:

• Copilot Chat recap
• PAYGO meter for Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Enhanced Answers with Semantic Search
• Knowledge tuning public preview
• Image upload
• Security data loss prevention (DLP) updates
• Arabic (ar-SA) language support

Copilot Studio in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

As a part of our continued mission to empower every person with a Copilot and transform their business with agents, we announced Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, a free and secure AI chat experience powered by GPT-4. With Copilot Chat, your entire organization can start using Copilot and agents today. These agents are easy to create directly in Copilot, highly discoverable, and can be published to Copilot Chat. This enables org-wide agents to be used in a common UI for all employees, regardless of Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing, making agents more accessible for all.

For example, a team could build a Budget Agent that is equipped with knowledge about the team and helps submit expense reports, provide financial insights, and check policy compliance—and everyone on the team could use this agent through Copilot Chat, even if they don’t have an individual Copilot license.

This experience is designed to be enterprise-grade, providing security, privacy, and compliance features for all users. Additionally, IT controls are available to manage and monitor the usage within the organization.

Read the full announcement of agents experienced in Copilot Chat.

Shared consumption meter for Copilot Studio

In December 2024, we introduced consumption-based pricing for agents built in Copilot Studio. This new billing model offers greater flexibility and scalability for organizations looking to easily use natural language to build agents, without committing to upfront license purchases.

The PAYGO meter allows customers to pay only for the messages they consume, providing a cost-effective alternative to the traditional prepaid message packs. This model is designed to accommodate varying usage patterns, making it ideal for businesses with fluctuating demands.

Under the PAYGO model, customers are billed $0.01 per message. This includes both classic (non-generative AI) and generative answers. Agent responses generated from grounded knowledge, outside of the Microsoft Graph, will cost two messages. The consumption rate for autonomous agents and agents with generative orchestration will scale based on the complexity of the task completed. The PAYGO meter uses your Azure subscription as the payment instrument, ensuring seamless integration with existing billing processes. This meter is available in regions where Copilot Studio’s generative AI capabilities are also available.

Following is a list of Copilot Studio events and their respective billing rates:

• Classic answer: 1 message
• Generative answer: 2 messages
• Autonomous action: 25 messages
• Tenant Microsoft Graph grounding for messages: 30 messages

By paying only for the messages consumed, organizations can optimize their spending and avoid overpaying for unused capacity. There are no in-product feature differences between the PAYGO meter and the prepaid message packs. Customers can have the same capabilities and benefits, regardless of the billing model they choose. However, if the purchased capacity of message packs is reached with the pre-paid packs, makers will be restricted from creating, editing, or publishing agents for the duration of the month in which capacity was reached.

We recommend signing up for the meter even if you purchase message packs to handle these scenarios without disruption. The meter won’t count utilization in any month until purchased message packs have been fully exhausted. If capacity is reached, agents that are already published will remain functional without interruption, but updates to the agent cannot be published during that time. Learn more about message allocation.

Setting up the PAYGO meter for Copilot Studio is a straightforward process. Administrators can manage their message capacity and monitor consumption through the Microsoft Power Platform admin center (PPAC). The capacity management features provide detailed, daily usage data, helping organizations plan and budget effectively.

See more information on setting up consumption billing.

Improved SharePoint responses with semantic search

We’re excited to announce enhanced search capabilities in Copilot Studio, which enables semantic search over your SharePoint knowledge.

By enabling the new “Enhanced search” results, your agent can leverage the semantic index for Copilot feature to semantically index the data you have stored in SharePoint and yield more relevant search results. You can easily control the “Enhanced search” results setting from the “Generative AI” settings page.

This feature is turned on by default, so you can get immediate benefits without additional setup. Tenants with Microsoft 365 Copilot can create custom agents and leverage the same index used by Microsoft 365 Copilot. These same tenants can also use SharePoint and Microsoft Graph connectors containing files up to 200 MB, resulting in answers that are more relevant for you.

To benefit from this more robust indexing capability, agents must share a tenant with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Learn more about billing for tenant Graph grounding for messages.

Learn more about enhanced search.

Knowledge tuning in public preview

The ability to make data-driven decisions and fine-tune your knowledge accordingly is now available to all in public preview. Adding knowledge to agents equips them with your enterprise-specific data and enables agents to generate responses grounded on that information. However, agents can still face challenges in identifying the correct data. By leveraging these new advancements for knowledge tuning and knowledge analytics, makers can get recommendations and insights into how their knowledge sources are utilized by their agents and ensure their knowledge is more robust and effective.

The “Knowledge” page now includes relevant analytics such as knowledge usage, errors, and answer rates. Makers will also have access to suggestions for how to improve their knowledge, including Microsoft Dataverse tables, SharePoint libraries, or public websites that may be relevant to their agents.

Additionally, makers can designate verified and trusted knowledge sources as official sources so that these specific sources are prioritized and highlighted in responses provided by the agent.

We hope that these improvements will help makers derive even greater value from their data sources. We’re not stopping here though, additional capabilities coming soon include further recommendations on relevant Microsoft Graph files or SharePoint libraries, and the ability to define custom instructions for connectors or SharePoint data sources.

Learn more about the advanced knowledge tuning capabilities.

Let agents analyze images for you

Today, employees and customers who chat with agents for support are limited to sending and receiving messages only. However, many scenarios require sending an image for the agent to analyze and respond appropriately. This capability is now available in public preview.

When end-users upload images to the chat, agents can seamlessly analyze both text and visuals, ensuring a smooth conversation flow and expanding the range of supported scenarios. Whether you’re a field technician attaching a photo of a faulty part for troubleshooting or an analyst sharing a chart for insights on emerging trends, this feature enhances how agents can support your needs. Users can upload a wide range of images, including products, blueprints, maps, and charts. 

To try out this feature, head to Copilot Studio and enable “Image input” under the “Generative AI” section of the agent’s settings. Keep in mind that enabling end-user image uploads requires “Generative mode” to be turned on. Once enabled, see how your agent can analyze and respond to the images you send.

Learn more about image input from users.

Security and data loss prevention (DLP) updates

We believe it’s critical to secure agents built in Copilot Studio and are always investing in ways to improve security and governance features in this pursuit.  Currently, DLP enforcement is disabled by default. The process to enable and enforce these DLP policies is a two-step process, resulting in many agents published without sufficient DLP configured.  

Starting January 2025, the default mode for all tenants has been changed to be Soft-Enabled. The Soft-Enabled DLP state allows published agents to continue to run without enforcing any DLP policies. However, it blocks any further updates to agents that are affected by DLP blocks. In addition, the option to toggle to Disabled mode in the PowerShell module will be disabled. 

Furthermore, in February 2025 the default mode for all tenants will be changed to Enabled. Enabled mode enforces DLP checks completely for running agents and updates to existing agents. All published agents and updates will be subject to the DLP policies that apply as defined by the tenant.

These changes will help ensure all agents built and published through Copilot Studio are safe and secure, and follow the DLP policies defined by the tenant.  

Learn more about DLP and other best practices.

Arabic support is now available

We now have 27 languages in Copilot Studio, with the addition of Arabic. This exciting update brings enhanced accessibility and usability for our Arabic-speaking users.

Users can now chat in Arabic to ask questions or seek support, with responses also generated in Arabic. Agents grounded in knowledge can provide accurate and relevant answers in Arabic, ensuring seamless communication. Additionally, Arabic is available for interactive voice response agents, making voice interactions more inclusive and effective. 

However, there are some important limitations. Arabic is not currently available in the UI of the authoring canvas or maker experiences within Copilot Studio. Additionally, Arabic is not yet supported for “Generative mode,” which enables agents to leverage large language models to dynamically select the best combination of topics, actions, and knowledge sources during conversations.

We’re committed to continuously improving our platform and expanding language support to better serve our user base. Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements.

Learn more about all the supported languages.

More ways to stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio

Bookmark this page to learn about features as we ship them, as well as upcoming releases: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio – Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn.

Watch monthly episodes highlighting Copilot Studio news and feature deep dives in “This Month in Copilot Studio” with Dona Sarkar, Microsoft Principal Cloud Advocate, and Kendra Springer, Principal Group Product Manager with Copilot Studio: This Month in Copilot Studio.

Get started today

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

New Copilot Studio documentation updates

• Language support
• Manage message capacity
• Disable or limit sharing of agents
• Allow image input from users, and image analysis (preview)

The post What’s new in Copilot Studio: January 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Here is a summary of the key announcements for Microsoft Ignite 2024: 

• Copilot Studio expands knowledge with advanced tuning capabilities and third-party sources. Makers will be able to boost the quality of their agents with the latest generative models, new knowledge sources, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enhancements. They will also be able to curate and fine-tune their knowledge—seeing what works well and what doesn’t—so that agents can provide relevant answers to its users. Analytics on knowledge sources will also be available. 
• Use Azure AI capabilities directly in Copilot Studio. Makers will now be able to utilize custom Azure AI Search indexes as a knowledge source for custom RAG scenarios and call any of the more than 1,800 prebuilt or custom-built Azure AI models from within Copilot Studio. 
• Autonomous agents are now in preview. Makers can now build agents that work on their behalf, without having to prompt the agent, saving human hours and increasing efficiency. They can create these agents from scratch or configure agents that are prebuilt in Copilot Studio. 
• New multi-modal capabilities allow agents to interact beyond text. Organizations can now add generative AI to their voice solutions, including to their interactive voice (IVR) system, or deploy agents in applications and other experiences for users to interact with using their voice. Not only will users be able to speak to these agents, they will also be able to upload images and prompt their agent to analyze and answer questions about the image.
• The Microsoft 365 Agents SDK is in preview. Developers can now build enterprise-grade, scalable, multi-channel agents with code using the SDK. These agents can operate across a variety of channels including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, web, and more. They can also access Copilot Studio agents, to extend its capabilities, enabling continuity from Copilot Studio to code-first scenarios. The SDK is available in C# and, developers can call AI services of their choice, including Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, or others. 
• New analytics are available. In addition to analytics on knowledge sources, makers will now also be able to see session data and trends sooner. Key KPIs, such as engagement rate and satisfaction scores will show trends from the previous period.
• Information workers can build agents directly in Microsoft 365. With Copilot Studio’s simplified agent builder experience, accessible directly within Microsoft 365 Copilot, information workers can easily build and share their own agents. 
• Copilot Control System enables IT to confidently adopt and deploy Copilot and agents. The Copilot Control System is a collection of IT capabilities that include data access and security policies, management controls for Copilot and agents, and measurement reports and tools to track adoption and business value. 

Below, we will explore some of the categories in more detail. 

Copilot Studio adds knowledge curation and third-party sources 

Copilot Studio is deepening knowledge and RAG capabilities. We’re lighting up connectors to bring in new knowledge sources. Makers can now enable agents with real-time knowledge from multiple third-party sources, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. Copilot Studio only semantically indexes the metadata from these tables, and without data movement, helps answer complex questions from these third-party sources. This is now in preview. 

Beyond access to new knowledge, Copilot Studio is utilizing the latest GPT models and optimizing RAG strategies, to get high-quality answers. Finally, with advanced knowledge tuning, makers can have more control over data sources. Makers will now have visibility over what sources are being used, what types of user questions remain unanswered, and what the accuracy of responses are. They can also see analytics, like usage rates and error reporting for their top five sources, to understand if they should tweak certain sources. Knowledge tuning also suggests additional knowledge that should be added from your organization and provides a guided way to filter and prioritize sources. 

Use custom Azure AI capabilities directly in Copilot Studio 

Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry are becoming more integrated to enable more complex, custom scenarios. This lets Copilot Studio customers take advantage of their investments in Microsoft’s broad Azure AI Foundry offerings.

For example, makers often have large corpuses of data in Azure AI that they now can use as a knowledge source directly in Copilot Studio. Makers can already perform search operations on vectorized indexes built in Azure AI Search to access unstructured data. Now, they can bring this data and custom RAG to Copilot Studio for accurate results. By connecting all their data sources, organizations can see that agents are more grounded in their business data and provide specific, high-quality responses. 

That’s not all. More advanced Azure AI capabilities are being surfaced in Copilot Studio. Makers will soon be able to access models from the Azure AI model catalog, which has more than 1,800 models available. They’ll also be able to access and call their own custom fine-tuned models that they have built from inside Copilot Studio. 

Finally, as accessing Azure AI capabilities in Copilot Studio becomes more common, there will be an update to purchasing. Microsoft will introduce an option to buy Copilot Studio messages with an Azure meter for pay-as-you-go consumptive billing to provide customers with flexibility. 

Autonomous agents

Organizations have been creating agents that provide users with information and that take actions when asked. Now, they can take it a step further with autonomous agents that work independently on behalf of a user, team, or organization to automate complex business tasks.

Users can design an agent to detect select events, like an email arriving, respond, and then use generative AI to trigger a chain of actions to orchestrate a series of complex, long-running business processes. For instance, an agent can assess the intent of an email, look up the sender’s details and account, see prior communications, check inventory, respond to the sender, ask for their preferences, and then take the appropriate actions to close a ticket—saving users time as they focus on high-priority tasks. Learn more about the features in-depth.

Autonomous agents enable AI to work for its users. They can run all the time and take on the burden of functional business processes, only notifying users when necessary. Makers can build autonomous agents from scratch, or configure agents that are prebuilt in Copilot Studio, like select functional agents. 

As a reminder, agents come with comprehensive enterprise data protection features for security, along with other guardrails and controls including encryption, data loss prevention, and a responsible AI strategy to address risks like prompt injection. Administrators can also implement strict security measures for data sources, manage access controls, and establish policies to safeguard data and monitor usage, while overseeing the entire lifecycle of agents to ensure compliance and continuous improvement. Learn more about enterprise protection, guardrails, controls, and lifecycle management.

New voice and image features further enhance the Copilot Studio platform 

Copilot Studio has now been enhanced to include voice capabilities. Organizations can embed their agent into a modern interactive voice (IVR) system, transforming a rigid experience into a flexible, generative AI system using all of Copilot Studio’s knowledge and action capabilities. Simply point to your knowledge sources and your IVR can handle a long array of sophisticated questions over the phone, allowing organizations to reduce escalations. These intelligent voice-enabled agents can recognize speech, handle interruptions, detect silence, and offer re-prompts to improve user satisfaction. 

Beyond just IVRs, speech enabled agents can be embedded into applications, standalone kiosks, concierge systems, and more. A hotel app, for example, can use a Copilot Studio agent that has been grounded in the hotel’s menus and the hotel website to act as an in-room concierge to guests. 

In addition to voice features, users can now upload images and ask Copilot questions about their image such as, “Why is my bill higher this month?” Uploading images can also add rich context to a dataset, whether it’s in customer service, sales, or elsewhere. For example, a seller can say, “Add these hand-written notes to the CRM,” saving time, while easily adding data to their system. 

Code-first developers now have access to the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK 

Copilot Studio makers and developers can now expand their agent’s capabilities with code, enabling them to bring together the best of low-code and code-first worlds. The Microsoft 365 Agents SDK enables developers to bring capabilities hosted in Copilot Studio to code-first agents, facilitating seamless low-to-pro code agent development. 

With the Agents SDK, developers can build enterprise-grade, scalable, and multichannel agents. Developers have full flexibility to connect to the AI services of their choice including Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, Copilot Studio or others. Agents built with the SDK can be deployed across a variety of channels such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, web, and over 10 other third-party messaging platforms. The SDK is now available in preview. 

Improved analytics and insights 

With our new analytics investments, makers will be able to get deep insights into how their generative system is working. In addition to the knowledge analytics metrics mentioned earlier, like source usage and accuracy of responses, there will also be improvements to top level metrics.

These metrics will be improved, more performant, and expose longer term trends. Makers will be able to choose between graphs filtered by specific outcomes, so they can understand KPIs and customer satisfaction. They will also be able to drill down and get more detailed insights. All of this will make it even easier to iterate and improve their agents.  

Users can add and build agents directly within Microsoft 365 Copilot 

Information workers already use Microsoft 365 Copilot to enhance their day-to-day productivity. Now, they can make Copilot more personalized by extending it with specialized agents. Agents reference knowledge given to them via graph connectors or file uploads, like enterprise-specific data in Dynamics 365, SharePoint sites, and line of business systems. Agents can also be given actions like sending emails, updating records, or creating support tickets. Users can either add these agents from a store within Microsoft 365 or build their own in a new, streamlined Copilot Studio experience embedded directly inside Business Chat (BizChat) and SharePoint. Individuals can customize or deploy agents that are prebuilt. Examples of these agents include Employee Self-service Agent, Store Operations Agent, and others. 

The new Copilot Studio agent builder experience enables users to easily create an agent in a few minutes, simply by describing what it should do with natural language and pointing it to the knowledge it needs—all within the Microsoft 365 Copilot experience. Agents can be shared, @ mentioned in Microsoft Teams, or interacted directly with through a chat window in Microsoft 365 Copilot. This functionality is now generally available and is already being used by users to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot to transform their business processes—read the full announcement.

Join us in exploring Microsoft Copilot Studio and build your own agent! 

Get started

Join us at Microsoft Ignite, in person or online. You can: 

• Watch Microsoft Ignite session BRK165: What’s new with Copilot Studio and Agents. 

• Check out features as they come to preview, including autonomous agents, advanced knowledge tuning, image upload, analytics, and the Azure AI Search integration. Agent builder and generative AI in IVR systems are both generally available. 

The post Copilot Studio is enhancing its platform with knowledge improvements, Azure AI integration, and more appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

For this edition, we’ll talk about how it’s easier than ever to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with the new embedded Copilot Studio agent builder. We’ll discuss our new autonomic agentic capabilities, hot off the press from our Microsoft AI Tour in London. And we’ll touch on some of the recent model updates to GPT-4o and knowledge enhancements we’ve made—enabling agents to reason over large, complex files that include media. Last, we’ll cover some of the great admin features announced at the Power Platform Community Conference.

Enable Microsoft 365 Copilot to do more with Copilot agents

Your information workers already use Microsoft Copilot to enhance their day-to-day productivity. You can make Copilot even smarter and personalized by extending it with various specialized agents.  

You can grant these agents knowledge by pointing them to your enterprise-specific data in Microsoft Dynamics 365 in SharePoint sites, and in line-of-business systems, using graph connectors or simply uploading files. You can also give agents the ability to take actions like sending emails, updating records, or creating support tickets.

You can create a variety of these agents—each equipped with the knowledge and the skills needed to perform a specific function. Your budget agent understands your purchase policies and can take action to submit a new expense report. Your HR agent can help users answer questions about your employee policies and help resolve tickets. All of these can be added to Copilot, giving it new skills and making it increasingly powerful.

Users can find various pre-published Copilot agents in a new store within Microsoft 365, and they can interact with them with a simple @mention, or by opening a direct chat window. And users can now easily create their own agents with a new, streamlined Copilot Studio experience embedded directly inside Business Chat and SharePoint. Using this experience, any information worker can easily create an agent, simply by describing what it should do with natural language and pointing it to the knowledge it needs. And with a few clicks the agent is ready to interact with or share with others. This functionality is now generally available—read the full announcement here.

New agentic capabilities coming to Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio offers a complete platform for creating, managing, publishing, and sharing agents, combining managed SaaS infrastructure, built-in AI models, a low-code design environment, and access to thousands of prebuilt connectors. And with Copilot Studio, you can create and publish agents to all kinds of channels—not just to Copilot. You can publish your agents to Microsoft Teams and embed them in websites, or mobile apps, or on social media.   And now, with new features we’re releasing in broad public preview at Microsoft Ignite 2024, these agents can do more than just interact with users on chat. They can operate autonomously in the background, reacting to events and not just conversation, and shepherding long-running tasks to completion. This takes us from agents that work with you to agents that work for you.

New autonomous triggers. You can now set your agent to listen for an event and provide language model instructions for how you’d like it to behave when the selected event occurs. You can create a vast array of event triggers to activate your agent—from simple events to complex flows powered by Microsoft Power Automate. For example, you could set your agent to run whenever a new row is added in a particular SAP table. Every time this happens, the agent could generate a summary of a case, look up the assigned worker, and send them an email with relevant documents from a knowledge base.  

Testing for agentic triggers

You can also review the underlying logic behind the agents’ previous runs in the activity pane—including what happened once it was triggered, the steps it took to follow the instructions you provided, the systems and APIs it called, and the reasoning it used to make specific choices. This visibility offers valuable insights into the agent’s decision-making process and context, while also displaying detailed steps, variables, and outputs to allow you to debug and improve your agents.

Finally, you can also review the previous runs your agent in the activity pane, allowing you to see each time the agent was run, which runs were successful, which ones were not, and why. Similar to chat transcripts, you can use this agent activity log to review and refine your agents.

Learn more about autonomous agents by reading “Unlocking autonomous agent capabilities with Microsoft Copilot Studio”.

Working with large, media rich files as knowledge

Every single month, we’ve added new knowledge capabilities to Copilot Studio—including new connectors, new supported knowledge sources, and various advanced capabilities. In October 2024, we’ve recently added the ability to reason over rich media like images, graphs, and charts in your knowledge sources. Going beyond just text, the system understands how images contribute to the document’s meaning, offering richer, more informed responses. For instance, if you have a diagram showing the assembly of a product or a chart tracking financial data, you can ask Copilot Studio questions, and it will account for the image’s content, positioning, and relevance within the broader document context.

What sets Copilot Studio apart is its holistic approach to document analysis. It doesn’t just examine individual images in isolation; instead, it considers multiple images on a page, how they are arranged, and how they interact with surrounding text or tables. This allows for more nuanced answers, especially in documents where visual relationships are key. This capability helps agents better utilize not just the text component of the page but analyze complex image-rich documents without missing critical details that might be lost without understanding the visual context.

What’s more, you can now upload multiple large, image rich files, each up to 512 MB, as knowledge sources for your custom agents in Copilot Studio. Our underlying knowledge service, powered by Microsoft Dataverse, indexes the uploaded files and generates vector embeddings of the file content. This allows Copilot Studio to deliver semantic results when users ask questions about the file contents. All files are securely stored in Dataverse, benefiting from the robust security and governance controls that apply across all Microsoft Power Platform constructs, providing strict data safety and compliance at every level.

Announcing several admin features for greater control

We’re excited to announce a suite of powerful new admin features in Copilot Studio, built to give administrators greater control, visibility, and security across the organization’s agent deployments. These tools enable fine-tuned data governance, enhanced auditing capabilities, and robust user authentication, providing admins with everything needed to manage agents across their organizations with confidence.

Admins can now enforce data loss prevention (DLP) policies for critical features like knowledge, AppInsights, connectors, actions, and more—all through the Microsoft Power Platform admin center. To strengthen visibility, we’ve released audit logs in Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Sentinel, allowing for real-time monitoring and alerting on agent activity. Additionally, admins can set up agents to run connectors and flows using end-user credentials by default, ensuring secure, user-specific access.

Further enhancing security, we’re introducing support for sensitivity labels on knowledge with SharePoint, displaying sensitivity levels in chats for transparency. End-user authentication can now use Microsoft Entra ID with certificate providers, supporting the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative requirements for more secure agent interactions. Makers will also see security alerts when publishing an agent if secure defaults have been modified, keeping them informed of potential risks.

Rounding out these new features, admins can configure environment routing for safer, more controlled agent development spaces, as well as a welcome message to inform makers of privacy and compliance best practices. Last, with the new inventory feature in Microsoft Fabric (currently in private preview), admins have a comprehensive view of agent assets, enhancing oversight across Copilot deployments. These updates mark a significant leap forward in empowering admins to manage and secure their agent solutions to meet organizational standards.

Learn more about common security questions.

More ways to stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio

Check out all the updates live as we ship them as well as new features releasing in the next few months.

Watch monthly episodes highlighting Copilot Studio news as well as how to feature deep dives in “This Month in Copilot Studio” with Dona Sarkar, Microsoft Principal Cloud Advocate, and Kendra Springer, Principal Group Product Manager with Copilot Studio.

Get started with Copilot Studio today

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

The post What’s new in Copilot Studio: November appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

For instance, consider the potential of a copilot that can react when an email arrives, look up the sender’s details, see their previous communications, and use generative AI to trigger the appropriate chain of actions in their response. From understanding the intent of the email, to looking up the sender’s details and account, seeing their previous communications, checking inventory, responding to the sender asking for their preferences, and then taking the appropriate actions to close a ticket—orchestrating and shepherding an entire process over days. 

With such capabilities, copilots are evolving from those that work with you to those that work for you. They can be designed to handle specific roles or functions, such as IT, marketing, sales, customer success, and finance across various industries, including travel, retail, and financial services. 

With these new capabilities, here are some examples of the kinds of copilots our customers can build

• IT help desk. IT support is complex, involving tickets, order numbers, approvals, and stock levels. Opening and closing a ticket can be a long-running task that spans days. A copilot can now handle this process, interfacing with IT service management applications, resolving IT tickets with context and memory, creating purchase orders for device refresh, and reaching out and getting managers approvals—all independently.
• Employee onboarding. Onboarding new employees is often expensive and slow. Now, imagine you’re a new hire. A copilot greets you, reasons over HR data, and answers your questions. It introduces you to your buddy, provides training and deadlines, assists with forms, and sets up your first week of meetings. Throughout all of this, the copilot is in touch, guiding you through the weeks-long onboarding and account set up processes.  
  
• Personal concierge for sales and service. Balancing exceptional customer experience while meeting ambitious revenue goals can be challenging. When a copilot serves guests, it can use the memory of previous conversations with guests to remember their preferences, make reservations, handle complaints, and answer questions related to the products and services on offer. The copilot learns from its interactions and proposes new ways of handling customer scenarios. By doing so, copilots can increase upsell and attachment rates, driving revenue for the resort while simultaneously enhancing guest experience, satisfaction rates, and repeat business.

Let’s dig deeper into a few of the underlying capabilities that make all this possible:

• Asynchronous orchestration of complex tasks. The first is the ability to use generative AI-powered planning and reasoning to manage complex, multistep, long-running tasks. For example, reacting to a new order means determining the need to verify inventory, triggering the right payment processes, pinging a supervisor for approval if the amount is above a certain threshold, and replying with a confirmation. Many of these events can take hours—or even days—to complete, but the copilot will run through them, maintaining the necessary state and context to do so.
• Memory and context. One of the frustrating things about support has traditionally been having to repeat information: who you are, what your policy number is, what your address is. There is no continuity of conversation. Copilots will now learn from previous conversations from the users and utilize this knowledge to continually personalize interactions. A copilot may not need to ask you for your laptop model or your address when you call again for the same issue. Conversations will thus become long-running, contextual, and deeply personalized.
• Monitor, learn, and improve. Copilots can now learn and adapt, offering monitoring and teaching capabilities to make their interactions better. Each copilot records a comprehensive history of its activities, providing transparency into its performance, including user interactions, actions taken, and feedback received, and you can see what decisions it made—and correct and teach them—with just a few clicks.

• Delegation with confidence and guardrails. When developing copilots with agent capabilities, establishing clear boundaries is paramount. Copilots operate strictly within the confines of the maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions. The data sources linked to the copilot adhere to stringent security measures and controls, managed through the unified admin center of Copilot Studio. This includes data loss prevention, robust authentication protocols, and more.

These advanced new capabilities in Copilot Studio are currently accessible to customers participating in an Early Access Preview where organizations such as Centro de la Familia are excited to explore agent capabilities that support teachers and case workers, allowing them to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time working with children, ultimately leading to better child outcomes. Based on feedback from program participants, we will continue to iterate and refine these capabilities for broader access in a preview planned for later this year. 

Additional innovations with Copilot Studio

There’s a lot more to share at Microsoft Build with Copilot Studio, and we’ll touch on just a few of our new capabilities here. To learn more—just sign up and try it out for yourself here.

It’s easier than ever to create copilots. With Copilot Studio, creating and testing copilots is now incredibly simple. You can create your copilot with our brand new conversationally driven experience—simply describe what you want it to do, and what knowledge you want it to have, and Copilot Studio will create your very own copilot. You can then immediately test it out, add additional capabilities, such as your own actions, APIs, and enterprise knowledge—and then publish it live with a few clicks.

Connect all your enterprise data with Copilot connectors. Customers want copilots connected with data from their own enterprises business systems and apps. Copilot connectors enable anyone to ground their copilot in business and collaboration data. This makes it possible for copilots to use various data sources, including public websites, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Dataverse tables, Microsoft Fabric OneLake (coming this calendar year), Microsoft Graph, as well as leading third-party apps. You can even create your own custom generative prompts to configure how a copilot handles a response from an API or connector.

Here are a few examples of how Copilot connectors can transform copilot experiences for specific personas or functions:

• Legal and Compliance. Navigate complex legal landscapes with a Copilot extension that queries specific legal datasets, ensuring controlled and compliant responses without overwhelming users with extraneous information.
• HR Helper. Assist employees with accessing essential resources for benefits and PTO policies, and even book time off directly through Copilot.
• Incident Report Coordinator. Workers can locate the right documentation, report incidents, and track them efficiently, all within the context of the chat.

Starting in June 2024, developers can access the public preview for Copilot connectors and stay informed on updates here.

Conversational analytics (private preview): One of the most common asks from customers has been the need for deeper insight into what their copilot is doing, how generative AI is responding, when it was unable to give the right answers and why—and recommendations on what to do to improve it.

Our new conversational AI analytics and insights will help to deepen makers’ understanding of their users’ satisfaction, provide insights into the kinds of questions users are asking, which generative answers are helpful and which are not—and where adding new and updated knowledge sources or creating custom topics can help.

Templates: If simply describing your copilot to build it wasn’t easy enough, Copilot Studio will now also include a variety of pre-built copilot samples for departments and industries. Some templates—such as Safe Travels for comprehensive travel support, Organization Navigator for organizational clarity, Kudos Copilot for fostering recognition, Wellness for employee health insights—are available now, with many more releasing in the coming months.

Enhanced security and controls (public preview): Administrators can now configure advanced settings beyond the default security measures and controls. With Microsoft Purview, Copilot Studio administrators gain access to more detailed governance tools, including audit logs, inventory capabilities, and sensitivity labels. They will be able to review comprehensive audit logs that cover tenant-wide usage, inventory (with API support), and tenant hygiene (such as data loss prevention violations and inactive copilots), enabling them to effectively monitor business impact. Both creators and end-users will be able to view sensitivity labels when responses are generated using AI-powered answers based on SharePoint documents.

With all the amazing innovations, numerous organizations are using Copilot Studio to build transformative generative AI-powered solutions. Check out this story from Nsure on how they are using Copilot Studio:



Get started today with Copilot Studio

This is just a glimpse of all the exciting innovation around copilots and Copilot Studio—we have a host of exciting new capabilities to share in our sessions at Build. So, join us in watching the sessions below, and try out Copilot Studio yourself and build and share your very own copilot in minutes.

Watch the sessions at Microsoft Build:

• “Microsoft Build opening keynote”
• “Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud”
• “Shaping next-gen development: the future of Copilot in Power Platform”

Deeper dives:

• Breakout: “What’s new with Microsoft Copilot Studio”
• Breakout with demos: “Build your own copilot with Microsoft Copilot Studio”
• Breakout with demos: “Build Microsoft Copilot extensions with Copilot Studio”
• Demo (live only): “Build your own Copilot extension with Microsoft Copilot Studio”

The post Microsoft Copilot Studio: Building copilots with agent capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Over the last year alone, Generative AI has changed chatbots in many ways, but one of the most significant is that it has enabled them to produce natural and engaging responses that go beyond simple pre-defined rules or templates. By using advanced natural language models, chatbots can generate context-aware and personalized answers that match the tone, style and intent of the user. Generative AI also allows chatbots to learn from data and feedback, improving their performance over time and adapting to changing user needs and preferences.  Generative answers in Power Virtual Agents is a great example of how generative AI has saved makers significant time, and also made the chatbot more useful and intuitive for users.

Microsoft Copilot, combining the power of large language models with your organizations data is already one of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet – and it’s just getting started.  And, to respond to our customers’ needs as they adopt Copilot within their organization to ensure they do this successfully, we are excited to share that Power Virtual Agents will now play an even more important role in Conversational AI.

Today, we are announcing Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code comprehensive conversational AI solution that unlocks new Copilot capabilities: connect copilot to your data using pre-built or custom plugins and GPTs, create and orchestrate workflows and manage your copilots in one central place and ultimately build standalone copilots for your organization. Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers will be able to use Copilot Studio for customization to provide tailored responses and workflows for unique scenarios. Power Virtual Agents has provided the foundations for and will become part of Copilot Studio, together with Microsoft’s leading conversational AI technologies.

You can read more about the announcement here.

We want to personally thank every Power Platform community member, customer and partner who has used Power Virtual Agents over the years, creating innovative solutions, transforming both employee and customer experiences for the better and enabling us to get to this point today.

For existing Power Virtual Agents customers, there will be no interruption to your experiences or solutions. You will be able to use the same capabilities now found within Microsoft Copilot Studio – and all your existing bots will light up within Copilot Studio, just as they did in PVA.

We’ve been inspired by so many of the innovative solutions that customers have built using Power Virtual Agents.

The Miami Dolphins, well known in the world of American Football, uses Power Virtual Agents on its web properties to streamline the thousands of requests it gets from fans for information on events and facilities. By resolving 97% of conversations with the bot, service agents can focus on providing exceptional customer service and increasing ticket sales.

When the world changed at the beginning of COVID-19, Kobe, a city in Japan started receiving a massive amount in calls from concerned citizens that they couldn’t handle.  Using Power Virtual Agents, in two weeks, they built a solution that reduced the number of calls by 90% and ensured that citizens received the critical information and support that they needed.

And, Rabobank, a multinational banking institution in the Netherlands, made the innovative concept of conversational banking real, enabling connected customer engagement and continuous conversations across all channels, blending human and artificial interactions, with up to 80000 calls per month handled entirely through automation.

As Power Virtual Agents enters the era of Copilot, I am incredibly excited to see what amazing copilots you will build next, with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Thank you again, the Power Virtual Agents team.

The post Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

• New Generative Actions capabilities—Limited preview
• Generative Answers capabilities—Public preview
• Copilot in Power Virtual Agents—Generally available
• Unified bot building canvas—Generally available
• Azure custom language model integration—Public preview
• Instant generative bots for Microsoft Power Pages—Public preview

The new era of generative bot building

Bots typically do two things: provide users with answers (“How wide is this item?”) and complete actions by calling back-end APIs (“I’d like to make a payment”). Traditionally, both sets of experiences were built using hand-built dialogs. Bot builders had to anticipate every question or action a user might request, and then craft dialogs to handle each.

Now with generative AI and Power Virtual Agents, you simply point the bot to a knowledge source—a website, an internal SharePoint, or documents—and the bot uses generative answers to provide a rich multi-turn chat experience using the content.

But what about actions? Now you can point your bot to a collection of your tenant APIs, and when a request comes in that requires calling an action, the bot uses the new generative actions engine to intelligently call the right APIs to complete their requests.

Together, these two features transform the way bots are built today. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Conversations over your data with generative answers

We first announced our generative answers capabilities—which allow users to point to their public website and get answers from them—back in March 2023. Now, at Microsoft Build, we’re announcing the preview of the capability with numerous enhancements: You can now point to multiple knowledge sources—external sites, documents, internal SharePoint sites, or a combination of these—and promptly have rich, multi-turn conversations over that knowledge.

You can configure settings, customize the way the bot responds—and even build highly custom topics that can fetch data from your backend systems (for example, a billing or customer relationship management system)—and pass them into our new generative answers node to enable conversations over custom data.

Figure 1. Generative answers configuration and settings page with multiple data sources.

Figure 2. The new generative answers node within the canvas.

What’s more, if you have a Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service instance for your company data, you can hook it up with Power Virtual Agents to use with a few clicks, allowing your bots full access to those capabilities.

Try out generative answers now with a simple demo bot—just enter your company website and start chatting instantly. If you like what you see, want to extend with more knowledge sources, or author custom dialogs—you can sign up instantly for a free trial of Power Virtual Agents (for United States-based customers).

Turn conversation into action with generative actions

Generative answers can help answer user questions, but when actions and APIs need to be called, builders traditionally hand-craft dialogs around each. But that approach is fragile and time-consuming since it’s hard for a developer to anticipate every possible action a user might need to take.

Watch this video to see it in action

With our new generative actions capabilities—now available in Limited Preview—a bot maker can simply expose their tenant APIs, enterprise-specific Microsoft Power Automate flows, or other actions to the bot to use in conversation.

The bot understands the user’s request, looks through its library of actions, and identifies the ones that can fulfill the request. It then self-assembles and chains them together—and even generates questions for the user for any additional information it needs to complete the request.

The author can even see the bot’s rationale, watch it evaluate and decide which tools to chain together and what questions to ask—in the full generative actions-tracing canvas.

Figure 3. Test generative actions tracing and watch the chain log progress. 

Taken together, generative answers and actions help usher in a complete transformation of bot building by helping bot authors be more productive. Bot authors no longer need to build and curate hundreds of dialogs for every question a user may ask—instead, they can just point the system to the right knowledge sources. There is no need to anticipate and hand-build dialogs for every possible common action that is needed—just point to the right set of connectors for existing APIs and the bot will help you with the rest. Between answering user questions by chatting over proprietary company information to dynamically assembling APIs to take action and complete user requests, Power Virtual Agents and generative AI have changed bot building for the better—saving bot authors’ time so they can focus on what’s most valuable for their organizations.

Register your interest at https://aka.ms/PVAPreviewSignUp for the limited technology preview of generative action capabilities in Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents—for professional developers and low-code developers alike

Even with the power of generative answers and actions, a bot maker may wish to supplement their bot with handcrafted dialogs—say, for a set of business-critical topics. Power Virtual Agents allows professional developers and low-code users to work together in the same experience to make this easy to do with the new advanced authoring canvas.

Low-code users can use the powerful graphical experience to build dialogs, use Microsoft Power Fx to manipulate data, build rich conversations with interactive adaptive cards, images, and videos, and create bots with Power Virtual Agents’ built-in universal large language models that require no custom model training. Copilot in Power Virtual Agents allows users to get started quickly—type in a sentence or two in natural language and a full multi-turn dialog will be created for you. You can even publish your bot to other low-code solutions including Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Pages.

Developers can now use all the capabilities of Azure Bot Framework natively in Power Virtual Agents—including a built-in code side-by-side editor, adding APIs or actions to the bot, trapping and triggering events, and manipulating data and variables—and even connect to Azure Cognitive Services (Preview) to create custom natural language models and more.

And low-code users and professional developers can collaborate in the same studio with our rich multi-authoring tools to build and maintain bots and add sophisticated actions.

Watch this video overview to see the full arc of modern bot building in action. And get your bot up and chatting with Power Virtual Agents—generally available today.

Happy bot building!

The post Reinvent your AI assistants with generative answers, actions, and more in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

To help your team take on these complex challenges and drive your business toward future success, it’s essential to invest in the right technology.

Discover the next generation of intelligent business applications

The future of business starts today—and we’re excited to invite you to get a first look at what you need to get ahead at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event. Watch product leaders guide you through the new capabilities. See hundreds of new product features, advancements, and innovations to help you drive revenue, delight customers, increase visibility, and strengthen collaboration across your organization.

Learn about the new features and capabilities being released across Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, including:

Conversation boosters in Power Virtual Agents empower everyone in your organization to build useful bots in minutes. Conversation boosters enable you to tailor the conversations your bots have with context based on your data by simply pointing your bot to a URL when there’s no topic already available. After searching your organization’s information, results are filtered and summarized in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Your bots will be able to adapt and answer users’ questions for these new topics in minutes.

Here’s a preview of bots guided by conversation boosters—all done without the need for manual work:

See conversation boosters in action for both customer-facing bots and employee-facing scenarios, and for Copilot features—also available to try now.

With Copilot in Power Virtual Agents, AI capabilities simplify and speed up bot building—saving makers hours previously spent making and maintaining bots and topics. Tell Copilot what data to collect and a dialog will be created with trigger phrases, entities, variables, and branching. You can also use natural language prompts to refine your bots and update them manually with an intuitive graphical user interface.

More enhancements in advanced bot building include an intuitive conversation authoring studio, end-to-end software as a service (SaaS), and thousands of prebuilt connectors that make it easier for professional and citizen developers to create, collaborate, deploy, and manage intelligent bots.

PowerFX also supports bot building with features to access and use data, eventing logic, and code—and create interactive visual cards for conversations.

And there’s much more in store. You’ll also see how these solutions work for businesses like yours with demos hosted by Microsoft product experts. You’ll hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms, about how to innovate with business applications to grow your business faster than ever. The team behind the Microsoft Power Platform 2023 release wave 1 will also share insights and guide you through how all these updates, advancements, and new tech will help you:

• Expand visibility, reduce time, and enhance creativity in your departments and teams with unified, AI-powered capabilities.
• Empower your employees to focus on revenue-generating tasks while automating repetitive tasks.
• Connect people, data, and processes across your organization with modern collaboration tools.
• Innovate without limits using the latest in low-code development, including new next-generation AI capabilities.

AI innovations

A major theme of this digital event is the evolution of AI. Leaders in the field will show you some of the latest developments in AI that are leading the next generation of business applications. You’ll also join us for a special session that includes a deep dive into the tech behind language models hosted by Dr. Walter Sun, Microsoft Vice President, AI in Business Applications. Throughout the event, you’ll receive expert guidance on how to build more agile, customer-focused teams by empowering your solutions with AI and see firsthand how to get more value out of your data, collaboration, and tools.

Brand-new insights from the experts

Find out how to enhance your customer experiences across your business with a look at real-life scenarios in expert-led demos of new capabilities and features. Gain valuable insights for overcoming your current challenges from other Microsoft customers who will share their journeys. And get answers to questions from the experts during a Q&A chat.

For a range of key best practices, strategies, and insights applicable to organizations across many industries, you don’t want to miss this digital launch event.

Watch product leaders guide you through the new capabilities. We hope you’ll join us.

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

9:00 AM–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC–7)

The post Explore new capabilities in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.