Microsoft is no exception and as we sought to build an employee self-service agent, we learned a great deal about how to securely build, deploy, and measure the success of an enterprise-wide agent.

In this blog post, you’ll understand our best practices for deploying enterprise-wide agents with a focus on our own development and deployment of the Employee Self-Service (ESS) agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio to Microsoft 365 Copilot respectively.

Our journey to a simple enterprise-wide employee self-service agent began back in 2013 with the launch of our HRWeb SharePoint site as a centralized repository of critical HR policy and benefits information. That led us to eventually build a chatbot in 2021 to reduce HR inquiry escalation to our HR policy teams.

Now with generative AI, we’ve revolutionized employee support by building the ESS agent to support HR inquiries, dramatically enhancing efficiency and the employee experience.

Employees receive accurate, context-driven responses and automated actions—from policy lookups to managing time-off requests—significantly reducing HR costs and enabling greater employee productivity and satisfaction.

Following a successful pilot, Microsoft Digital expanded the ESS agent globally across key markets, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and India.

The journey of creating, securing, and rolling out the ESS agent enterprise-wide revealed five key considerations when building and deploying an enterprise-wide agent:

1. Plan with purpose: Define why, success, and the challenges you’re solving
2. Select and secure optimal knowledge sources for your AI agent
3. Ensure security, compliance, and responsible AI in enterprise-wide agent deployments
4. Build and test the pilot agent with target audiences
5. Scale enterprise-wide adoption and measure impact

Plan with purpose: Define why, success, and the challenges you’re solving

Before you write a single line of code or plan the agent design, it’s critical to define your agent’s purpose. Identify the specific challenges your organization is trying to address. Ask questions such as:

• What pain points exist in the current support experience?
• Who are the end users, and what does their ideal interaction look like?
• How can generative AI improve the resolution process compared to legacy chatbots?

To learn how Microsoft built the agent prompt and responses, check out our  Copilot Studio Implementation Guide blog post.

At Microsoft, we recognized that our existing chatbot solution—while effective—wasn’t optimal, as it required developers to anticipate every possible user question and compelled employees to use exact verbiage to find HR and benefits information, as well as IT-related queries.

To significantly improve this experience, we envisioned an enterprise-wide AI agent using generative answers, orchestration, and actionable capabilities, enabling higher resolution rates and delivering a more intuitive, efficient support experience for our employees.

Below is an example of goals to outline when designing your agent:

Select and secure optimal knowledge sources for your AI agent

Identify core data that optimally solves user challenges

Once you’ve determined the agent’s purpose, the next critical step is identifying the knowledge sources and data on which you’ll build your agent. For most organizations, especially in your initial enterprise-wide agent development and deployment, you’ll want to restrict yourself to the most essential knowledge sources for a few reasons:

• These knowledge sources should be among the most secure in your organization.
• You’ll typically employ some form of role-based access controls (RBACs) to prevent data proliferation.
• They should provide the breadth of knowledge necessary to effectively serve your initial target audience(s) and should be accurate and up to date.

At Microsoft, our journey in HR self-service began in 2013 with HRWeb, our SharePoint intranet, which provided extensive coverage and robust security through built-in role-based access controls. Using HRWeb as the foundation for our generative AI agent allowed us to efficiently deliver comprehensive, secure answers with minimal configuration.

However, recognizing that even high-quality data can become outdated, we proactively analyzed common user searches and frequent support tickets to curate a targeted set of essential questions and answers. This practice highlights the importance of regular data reviews and cleanup to continually optimize your agent’s effectiveness.

Implement data loss prevention policies for knowledge and data connectors

At Microsoft, we recommend establishing three separate environments—development, test, and production—in Copilot Studio, aligned with software development lifecycle best practices.

Using Copilot Studio alongside Microsoft Power Platform, organizations can enforce consistent routing rules and data loss prevention (DLP) policies across all environments, specifically targeting knowledge sources, connectors, and API endpoints.

This approach ensures secure, compliant data interactions, which at Microsoft is mandatory whenever an agent performs actions beyond simple personal retrieval. Learn more about implementing DLP policies in Copilot Studio.

Ensure security, compliance, and responsible AI in enterprise-wide agent deployments

After building your pilot agent in the development environment, it’s crucial to perform thorough security, compliance, privacy, responsible AI, and accessibility assessments before moving into testing and production environments.

At Microsoft, this begins with a comprehensive software development lifecycle (SDL) assessment, where development teams submit detailed documentation to our internal security council, closely monitoring data usage and enforcing stringent security requirements. Key components of the SDL evaluation include:

• Service Tree Metadata
• Confirmation that no production data resides in dev/test environments
• Verification of data encryption at rest and in transit
• Completed threat modeling analysis
• Documentation of secure development standards
• Verified auditing and logging for agent interactions and chat transcripts

Following the SDL assessment, we perform rigorous accessibility tests aligned to Microsoft’s standards and comprehensive responsible AI evaluations by subject matter experts to ensure responses are accurate, consistent, and inclusive. Additionally, proactive “red team” security testing is recommended to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities.

Agents then transition into testing through Microsoft Power Platform pipelines in Copilot Studio, making compliance management especially critical. At Microsoft, we perform additional Tenant Trust Evaluations, including detailed documentation, comprehensive security questionnaires, and formal IT council reviews, to ensure readiness for broader deployment. For sensitive scenarios involving personal data or employee monitoring, we also conduct Works Council evaluations to maintain strict adherence to privacy standards.

We repeat these rigorous assessments whenever introducing new knowledge sources, connectors, or APIs. For example, during the integration of our HRWeb-based agent with our IT Helpdesk agent—creating the unified Employee Self-Service (ESS) agent—these evaluations helped manage data proliferation risks, enabling the ESS solution to remain secure and compliant throughout its lifecycle.

Regardless of your organization’s specific processes, documenting each step thoroughly, maintaining transparency, and actively involving your IT and Center of Excellence teams is essential for effective governance and robust security oversight.

Build and test the pilot agent with target audiences

Once appropriate data-loss prevention measures are approved, your organization can begin building the AI agent. For scenarios involving straightforward generative orchestration—primarily reading and writing—development is streamlined.

However, when handling sensitive data requiring consistent, precise responses, we recommend using the full Copilot Studio instead of simpler tools like Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot or Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

This approach allows the creation of customized response topics, triggered by specific phrases, enabling compliance and accuracy.

At Microsoft, we transitioned to Copilot Studio to precisely handle sensitive HR inquiries, avoiding non-compliant or inconsistent responses for complex questions such as those related to employee compensation comparisons.

Select pilot audience: Select your ideal early adopters for initial feedback

Choosing the right pilot audience and timing is as critical as selecting high-quality data and securing your agent. We recommend initially deploying your AI agent to a focused group—around 100 users—and conducting A/B testing against existing solutions to measure its impact.

Gathering targeted feedback from these early adopters allows for rapid iteration, refinement, and informed expansion of your data sources and agent capabilities.

At Microsoft, we piloted our ESS agent with 100 United Kingdom employees, using the maturity of our HRWeb data in that region to maximize initial impact and insights.

Scale enterprise-wide adoption and measure impact

Rollout at scale: Leverage pilot feedback to refine agent and scale adoption

The initial ESS pilot demonstrated strong results, but scaling the agent enterprise-wide required expanding beyond our primary HRWeb SharePoint site, as critical HR data was distributed across more than 100 different line-of-business (LOB) systems.

Recognizing it wasn’t feasible to integrate all sources simultaneously, we analyzed two years of HR interactions—including tickets, searches, and chatbot conversations—to map data locations, prioritize essential sources, and determine rapid integration strategies.

We focused first on systems easily integrated through existing Microsoft Power Platform connectors and rapidly established corresponding DLP policies. Additionally, we assessed whether certain data sources could be consolidated under the primary HR SharePoint site or other high-value repositories to streamline management.

For maximum organizational impact, Microsoft strategically prioritized deployment in key regions—initially the United States, the United Kingdom, and India—and focused on high-impact teams, such as our sales organization (MCAPS), to showcase the agent externally during customer engagements.

Large enterprises considering similar deployments should anticipate and carefully evaluate these trade-offs to align their AI agent rollout effectively with planned timelines and strategic goals.

Measure and report: Use insights to further refine agent and track ROI

The last stage is where you measure and report on the success of the agent to your team and leadership. Thus, generating the insights needed to refine your agent and demonstrating the ROI to secure continued leadership investment.

At Microsoft, we’re still refining our measurement and reporting strategy for the ESS agent, but some of the key metrics we recommend tracking for any agent are the number of sessions, engagement rates, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, resolution rates, abandonment rates, and knowledge source accuracy rates—all of which are available to development teams out of the box in Copilot Studio Analytics.

Final takeaways about enterprise-wide agents

Enterprise-wide deployment can be highly intensive on the front-end but it’s critical that your organization invests most heavily in the planning, data source selection, and security phases.

These are critical to ensure that your organization has the appropriate agent design in mind from the outset that can optimally impact your target key performance indicators (KPIs), data sources that are most effective to solve end user challenges and drive the greatest ROI, and security practices that thoroughly account for any potential gaps and lock down any possibilities for data proliferation.

This blog post is just step one in helping your organization roll out an enterprise-wide agent. In spring 2025 we’re making our ESS agent generally available as a product to all Microsoft customers so you can use not only our learnings in this blog post, but the efforts of our development teams to help you stand up your own ESS agent.

To learn more about the Employee Self-Service Agent read our Inside Track blog from Microsoft Ignite 2024.

The post How to deploy transformational enterprise-wide agents: Microsoft as Customer Zero appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Our ambition is to empower every employee with a Copilot and to transform every business process with agents. Today, we’re continuing to deliver on that ambition with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Copilot Chat enables your entire workforce—from customer service representatives to marketing leads to frontline technicians—to start using Copilot and agents today. Read the full announcement here. 

Agents play a significant role in how organizations are transforming their business process with AI. Soon agents created in Copilot Studio agent builder and Copilot Studio will be available right from within Copilot Chat. Let’s review how you can pay for agents with Copilot Studio.

Getting started with agent consumption 

Agents play a significant role in how organizations are transforming their business process with AI. Soon agents created in Microsoft Copilot Studio agent builder and Copilot Studio will be available right from within Copilot Chat. Let’s review how you can pay for agents with Copilot Studio. 

Usage of agents is measured in “messages” and total cost is calculated based on the sum of messages used by your organization. You can purchase messages though the Copilot Studio meter in Microsoft Azure, a pay-as-you-go option, for $0.01/message, or via pre-paid message packs priced at $200 for 25,000 messages/month.  

The Microsoft Power Platform admin center is used to set up billing and assign message capacity to Copilot Chat and individual agents. Agent message usage varies with an agent’s complexity, frequency, and the use of specific features. These features have been categorized into five groups, including three new ones introduced today. 

Classic and generative answers 

Answers are how agents communicate with users and are core to the prompt and response interaction model. Answers are charged for every agent response, not for user prompts. As makers build agents, they can define conversational topics, create branching logic flows, and apply generative AI to create responses based on knowledge sources. To support this range of capabilities, we provide two options: 

1. Classic answers, used for predefined responses that are manually authored by agent makers. These are static, do not change unless manually updated, and are typically used when precise responses are required. Classic answers cost one message. 

2. Generative answers, used for dynamically generated responses based on knowledge sources and context. These provide more flexible and natural interactions because they build on a conversation’s context and available knowledge. Generative answers cost two messages. 

Note that users licensed with Microsoft 365 Copilot can use classic and generative answers at no cost as part of their per user license. 

Tenant Graph grounding for messages 

Tenant Graph grounding for messages provides high quality grounding for agents with relevant information from Microsoft Graph, including files stored in SharePoint and external data synched via Graph connectors. It does not include personal Graph data such as emails and chats. Tenant Graph grounding for messages costs 10 messages for each knowledge retrieval. 

This paid capability is optional and you can decide whether to turn it ‘on’ or ‘off’ in Copilot Studio. If this capability is enabled, each time an agent responds with a generative answer, it will utilize knowledge from the tenant Graph and tenant Graph grounding for messages will be billed. This will roll out in phases—existing agents that enabled this feature during preview, along with new agents built in Copilot Studio, will be billed starting on February 1, 2025; and new agents built in Copilot Studio agent builder using this feature will be billed starting today. 

Note that users licensed with Microsoft 365 Copilot can use tenant Graph grounding for messages at no cost as part of their per user license. 

Autonomous actions enter paid preview 

Autonomous agents understand your work, act on your behalf, and can automate complex business processes. We’ve seen significant interest in these capabilities since public preview launched in November 2024, and starting February 1, 2025, we are transitioning to a paid preview program. 

To enable autonomous agents, we are introducing the concept of autonomous actions. Autonomous actions are generatively orchestrated triggers, topics, data connectors, and workflows and are visible in the activity map displayed in generative orchestration mode. Autonomous actions cost 5 messages per action. 

Calculating agent cost  

Agent costs are calculated based on the capabilities from the table above. Here are a few example cost calculations: 

• A hypothetical agent might answer questions from customers on a website. Yesterday, it consumed 500 classic answers and 2,000 generative answers. Therefore, it would cost 4,500 messages, equivalent to $45 for that day. 

• A hypothetical agent in Copilot Chat uses data stored in Microsoft Graph to answer employee questions about HR policies. Yesterday, the agent consumed 200 generative answers and 200 tenant Graph grounding for messages. Therefore, it would cost 2,400 messages or $24 for that day.  

• A hypothetical autonomous agent responds to and routes inbound sales orders from customers. Yesterday, it consumed 100 generative answers, 100 tenant Graph grounding for messages, and 800 autonomous actions. Therefore, it would cost 5,200 messages or $52 for that day.  

Of course, every agent will be different, and the number of messages consumed will depend on usage frequency and complexity. You can learn more about these features and billing. 

We recognize how critical it is to provide you with appropriate governance tools to manage agent costs within your organization. Within Microsoft Power Platform admin center, admins can assign agents to environments, monitor agent usage, and allocate message capacity to ensure you stay in control of billing. 

See a quick walkthrough of agent management within Microsoft Power Platform admin center and learn more about agent management.

¹Each interaction with an agent could utilize multiple utilization rates simultaneously i.e. an agent grounded in Tenant graph could use 12 messages (10 for the graph grounding and 2 for Generative Answer) to respond to a single complex prompt from the user. Most agents built natively in Sharepoint or Copilot Chat will have tenant graph grounding enabled by default. 

²Agent actions are included at no additional cost for interactive use only. Autonomous use will incur a 5 message charge.  

The post Enabling agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat  appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

At Microsoft Ignite 2024, we launched a wide range of agents pre-built for you by Microsoft that span multiple business functions. Deploy these agents immediately or configure many further by incorporating your organization’s knowledge and business logic. Whether you need an employee onboarding agent or an IT helpdesk agent, there are numerous options available. Begin using these agents within Microsoft 365, Copilot Studio, or Microsoft Dynamics 365 depending on the agent you choose.¹

No matter where you choose to begin, explore the list below to understand the scope of available agents. Again, while many of these agents are ready for immediate deployment, you can always create your own in the full Copilot Studio experience, Copilot Studio agent builder, or SharePoint to better suit your specific business needs.

Get started in the full Copilot Studio experience 

Website Q&A: Answers common questions from users using the content on your website. Usable in Microsoft Teams, on the web, and on other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Team Navigator: Assists employees in finding colleagues and their hierarchy within the organization using Teams. Usable in Teams. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

IT Helpdesk: Empowers employees to resolve issues and effortlessly create/view support tickets. Usable in Teams, on the web, and on other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Store Operations: Improves the efficiency of retail frontline workers by enabling easy access to store procedures and policies. Usable in Teams. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Case Management: Provides around-the-clock automated support to customers by understanding their issues and creating cases. Usable on the web and other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Safe Travels: Provides answers to common travel questions and related health and safety guidelines. Usable in Teams, on the web, and on other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Inclusivity: Helps employees to have a safe place to ask questions and to learn how to activate inclusivity in a modern and diverse workforce. Usable in Teams, on the web, and on other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Sustainability Insights: Enables users to easily get insights and data about a company’s sustainability goals and progress. Usable in Teams, on the web, and on other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Weather: Gets the current weather conditions and forecast. Usable in Teams, on the web, and on other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Benefits: Provides personalized information to your employees on benefits offered to them. Usable in Teams, on the web, and on other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Citizen Services: Enables Public Sector Organizations to assist their citizens with information about services available to them. Usable on the web and other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Financial Insights: Helps financial services professionals get information from their organization’s financial documents. Usable in Teams and other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Self-Help: Enables customer service agents to resolve issues faster. Usable in Teams and other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Preview)

Awards and Recognition: Streamlines the process of nominating and recognizing your employees for their contributions and achievements. Usable in Teams and other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio or Microsoft AppSource. (Preview)

Leave Management: Streamlines the leave request and time-off process for your employees. Usable in Teams and other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio or AppSource. (Preview)

Wellness Check: Conducts automated wellness checks to gauge employee morale. Usable in Teams and other channels. Get started in Copilot Studio or AppSource. (Preview)

Sales Qualification Agent: Enables sellers to focus their time on the highest priority sales opportunities. Usable in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Sales Order Agent: Automates the order intake process from entry to confirmation by interacting with customers and capturing their preferences. Usable in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Supplier Communications Agent: Autonomously manages collaboration with suppliers to confirm order delivery, while helping to prevent potential delays. Usable in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Finance Reconciliation Agent: Helps teams prepare and cleanse data sets to simplify and reduce time spent on the financial period close process. Usable in Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Account Reconciliation Agent: Automates the matching and clearing of transactions between subledgers and the general ledger, helping accountants and controllers speed up the financial close process. Usable in Dynamics 365 Finance. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Time and Expense Agent: Autonomously manages time entry, expense tracking, and approval workflows. Usable in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Customer Intent Agent: Enables evergreen self-service by continuously discovering new intents from past and current customer conversations across all channels, mapping issues and corresponding resolutions maintained by the agent in a library. Usable in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Customer Knowledge Management Agent: Helps ensure knowledge articles are kept perpetually up to date by analyzing case notes, transcripts, summaries, and other artifacts from human-assisted cases to uncover insights. Usable in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Case Management Agent: Automates key tasks throughout the case life cycle—creation, resolution, follow up, closure—to reduce handling time and alleviate the burden on service representatives. Usable in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Scheduling Operations Agent: Enables dispatchers to provide optimized schedules for technicians, even as conditions change throughout the workday. Usable in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service. Get started in Copilot Studio. (Private preview) 

Get started in Copilot Studio agent builder 

Employee Self-Service Agent: Expedites answers to common workplace policy questions and takes action on key HR and IT related tasks. Can be customized in Copilot Studio using pre-configured templates, workflows, and connectors to knowledge sources like SharePoint, and third-party systems like Workday, SAP, and ServiceNow. Usable in BizChat. Get started in Copilot Studio agent builder. (Private preview)

Career Coach: Offers personalized career advice, goals, and action plans. Usable in Teams and Business Chat (BizChat). Get started in Copilot Studio agent builder. (Generally available)

Prompt Coach: Helps create effective, accurate, and compliant Copilot prompts. Usable in Teams and BizChat. Get started in Copilot Studio agent builder. (Generally available)

Writing Coach: Boosts effectiveness and supports refining writing. Usable in Teams and BizChat. Get started in Copilot Studio agent builder. (Generally available)

Get started in Microsoft 365 applications 

Agents in SharePoint: Every SharePoint site is now equipped with its own agent, or employees can create their own agents tailored to specific files, folders, or sites. SharePoint agents can be shared via email or Teams. Usable in SharePoint and Teams. Get started in SharePoint. (Generally available)

Facilitator: Starts taking real-time notes during Teams meetings, allowing everyone to co-author and collaborate seamlessly. Also generates an up-to-date summary of important information in Teams chats including key decisions, action items, and open questions to resolve. Usable in Teams. Get started in Teams. (Public preview)

Interpreter: Enables real-time speech-to-speech interpretation in Teams meetings so each participant can speak and listen in the language of their choice. Usable in Teams. Get started in Teams. (Public preview in early 2025)

Project Manager: Automates project management in Planner, from plan creation to task execution, tracking progress, and reporting. Usable in Microsoft Planner. Get started in Planner. (Public preview)

Learn more about agents

Learn more about the Microsoft 365 agents released at Ignite, agents in Dynamics 365, and agents in Copilot Studio; and get in touch with a Microsoft representative today.

¹Please note, admin approval may be needed to enable these agents

The post Explore agents pre-built for you in Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

In November, we introduced Microsoft Copilot Studio, a conversational AI platform that allows you to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build your own copilot.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 offers AI assistance to create, find, and ask for information across Microsoft 365 apps and provides a Copilot chat available across several employee experiences like Microsoft Teams, Windows, and Bing. However, sometimes you may want generative AI assistants that can reach users on multiple channels outside of those, like embedding on your internal websites, mobile apps, and social channels. You may want to design individual AI assistants that can serve employees, customers, and partners. Or you might want a custom copilot that you can tailor to specific roles and functions, where you can control the orchestration of your large language model using the dialog manager for managed topics with specific workflows.

When you create your own copilot with Copilot Studio, you are building intelligent chat experiences using ready-made large language models, a dialog manager, 1200+ data connectors, and more within a low code SaaS. These custom copilots are AI assistants that help humans with complex cognitive tasks using your organization’s knowledge, connectors to LOB applications, and your own custom topics. For example, a copilot for IT support, a copilot to help your customers choose the right product, or even help your suppliers track the status of orders.

How Copilot Studio works

Let’s talk through the steps to building your own copilot. You can start by logging in to Copilot Studio which will spin up all of the required services for you so it’s ready for building in a matter of minutes.

Imagine you wanted to create a custom copilot to serve customers on your website, for example assisting with product knowledge questions and order management.

First, start by grounding your copilot in your data. Using generative answers, you can enable multi-turn chat over your organizations real-time data—from local files to SharePoint sites, from public websites to data in your own custom backends creating the ability to chat over a wide set of topics within minutes. For this scenario, you would use your public website including your product information.

For critical topics such as account management, which involves handling customer details, you can design the specific conversational flow that you want Copilot to follow. You have the option to use visual authoring or natural language to design these prioritized topics before proceeding to generative AI. For instance, consider a topic that collects user details, authenticates the user, and interacts with your order management systems following a specific sequence of steps. Another example of a managed topic is discounting, where responses may involve legal and compliance matters, and therefore, you provide the managed response.

With generative actions, you can now provide a list of plugins to the copilot, selecting from 1200+ data connectors like SAP, Workday, Salesforce etc, and these will be dynamically executed to help the copilot take action. This allows copilot to effortlessly handle complex queries that were unforeseen or not previously constructed.

For developers that want more custom development, you can use Azure models and services with Copilot Studio. This hybrid approach of low code with custom pro code integration allows you to bring custom language models, Azure OpenAI on your data, knowledge bases, image generation with DALL-E, telemetry, and more into your Copilot Studio copilot.

When you’re ready, you can publish your copilot to multiple channels which can be internal or external facing to interact with users across different platforms, such as websites, Microsoft Teams, social apps, mobile apps, Azure Bot Service channels and more. You can also escalate the conversation to 1st party Dynamics 365 and 3rd party tools like Genesys, LivePerson, Salesforce and ServiceNow when the copilot requires human assistance.

Once the copilot is live, be sure to review the copilot performance with the built-in analytics dashboard that helps makers monitor key metrics, evaluate performance, and find new copilot topics. Secure and manage your copilot with governance and control features with the central admin center to protect copilot data with data loss prevention policies, role-based access control, environment management and more.

These are just some of the foundational steps to getting started, but there are many other features you can include in your copilot.

How Copilot Studio will evolve in the future

When you build custom copilots using Copilot Studio today, you are designing chat-based experiences to support users with knowledge discovery, such as finding answers to their queries, and task/business process completion, such as calling APIs and following workflows.

We are continuously enhancing the capabilities of Copilot Studio in the upcoming months through several key areas of focus:

• Generative AI knowledge sources– Generative Answers currently supports several data sources to ground your Copilot. Today, you can chat over unstructured data by providing your URLs and data sources. We are expanding both the number of sources and sizes over time. Learn about the existing capabilities today.
• Multi-modality – You can design powerful text-based Copilots today, and even create copilots optimized for speech, which can be used with Dynamics 365 or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) ISVs. Over time, we will provide even more ways to interact with your chat-based experiences.
• Generative AI availability – Copilot Studio is available across several regions, languages, and data centers which we are expanding here.

Be sure to read the Copilot Studio in Copilot for Microsoft 365 blog for information on plugins.

We appreciate your ongoing feedback and suggestions as we continue to improve the experience. Stay tuned for more updates at Microsoft Build.

What else can you do with Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio offers features that can be consumed both within your custom copilots and Copilot for Microsoft 365 via plugins, such as 1200+ data connectors, workflow design, and generative answers all through the low code authoring canvas. The difference is in the channel and audience in which the copilot/plugin is consumed.

If you have invested in Copilot for Microsoft 365 today, you may look to use Copilot Studio to bring in your data outside of Copilot for Microsoft 365 into the Copilot chat, design custom workflows or help control the conversation for specific topics. You would achieve this by designing plugins in Copilot Studio which is included in the Copilot for Microsoft 365 user license for customization of Copilot for Microsoft 365 only. Custom copilot development requires a standalone license. There is no dependency to purchase Copilot for Microsoft 365 to make your own custom copilot.

With Copilot Studio in Copilot for Microsoft 365, you can create plugins for various transactional scenarios. For example, if you want to know how much travel budget is left for the rest of the quarter, you can design a plugin to query a SAP connector to retrieve the information. For sales data, you could ask “What are the sales targets for the fiscal?” querying a data source like Salesforce or Dynamics 365, or even query HR data in Workday and ask questions like “How many vacation days do I have left?”.

And the best part is, you only need to build your plugin once, and it can be reused across your organization after being approved by IT in the admin center.

Get inspired with use cases

Copilot Studio provides you with the platform to build a copilot for your specific needs, for your industry, department, with your data. These custom copilots can cover Business to Employee (B2E) Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C).

• Copilot for IT Service Management: “Check the progress of my current IT ticket” or “Initiate a request for device upgrades” connected to ServiceNow.
• Copilot for Human Resources: “Start the onboarding sequence for our new team member” or “Show me the remaining training budget for this quarter.” Using your HRM systems like Workday.
• Copilot for Frontline workers: “How do I find the manual for Contoso Blender” or “How do I fix the printing machine model XB100”
• Copilot for Legal and Compliance: “Summarize the latest updates to our brand usage guidelines” or “Explain the company’s stance on intellectual property rights.”

Business to business examples:

• Copilot for Project Management: “Give me a summary of completed tasks for Project X’s second phase” or “List the pending deliverables for phase two.”
• Copilot for Supplier Management: “Show the fulfillment status of purchase order #452” or “Track the shipment of our recent bulk order.”
• Copilot for Sales Enablement: “Generate a quote for a large-scale supply of office essentials” helping your business assess the lead potential for a prospective client.

Business to consumer examples:

• Copilot for Customer Support: Guide a customer through the product return process or requests like “Help me with account recovery.”
• Copilot for Product Consultation: “Recommend the best laptop for travel-intensive users” or “Compare the latest smartphone models for photography enthusiasts.”
• Copilot for Service Booking: Navigate a customer through scheduling a service appointment with queries like “Check availability for in-store consultations next Thursday.”
• Copilot for Travel Assistance: “Help me book a trip for a family of four with top-rated family resorts for this summer” connected to your travel booking system.

Check out some of the use cases from customers such as Paypal, AnPost, HP and more.

Get started with Copilot Studio today

We are eager to keep delivering the newest advances to Copilot Studio and we can’t wait to see the amazing solutions you create. Be sure to take advantage of the training content like Copilot Studio in a day and the learning paths to begin your skilling journey.

To learn more about Copilot Studio, visit aka.ms/copilotstudio. To try it for yourself, go to aka.ms/trycopilotstudio. And don’t miss out Microsoft Build, where we’ll share more announcements and demos.

Additional Resources:

• Copilot Studio website: https://aka.ms/copilotstudio
• Blog: https://aka.ms/copilotstudioblog
• Demo: https://aka.ms/copilotstudiodemo
• Product documentation: https://aka.ms/copilotstudiodocs
• Community page: https://aka.ms/copilotstudiocommunity
• Implementation guide: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioImplement
• Responsible AI: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioResponsibleAI
• Analyst report: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioIDC
• Learning resources: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioLearn

The post Building your own copilot with Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

SOURCE: “IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General Purpose Conversational AI Software 2023 Vendor Assessment”, by Hayley Sutherland, Andrew Gens, and David Schubmehl; November 2023, IDC #US49988023.

Since its launch in November, Copilot Studio has introduced an enhanced conversational AI solution that includes the evolution of Power Virtual Agents, a new prompt and plugin designer, and several new generative AI capabilities, all integrated into a single SaaS experience.

Copilot Studio empowers IT teams to tailor copilots to the unique needs of their organizations, enabling the intuitive creation of generative AI experiences, manual topics, plugins, and custom GPTs, while offering flexibility and visibility throughout the process. Users can build, deploy, analyze, and manage Copilots all from within the same web experience. And users can even integrate Copilot Studio with Azure AI Studio, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Bot Service, and other Microsoft conversational AI technologies.

Copilot Studio is already being used across entire organizations to enhance employee experiences with dedicated intelligent employee and HR copilots; to boost productivity with customized marketing and sales readiness copilots and to provide customer service at scale with customer facing copilots across websites and social media.

Thank you for the engagement and feedback from the community, customers, and partners. Your fresh ideas and feedback made Copilot Studio the transformational product it is today. We could not have done this without you.

We can’t wait to see what you create next!

Read the IDC MarketScape excerpt here
Copilot Studio resources to learn more:

• Website
• Product documentation
• Learning resources
• Ignite on-demand session
• Implementation guide
• Community page

 
IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of suppliers in a given market.  The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor’s name.

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