This event, designed to foster learning and innovation among teams, provides an opportunity to build custom agents using Copilot Studio for your business use cases, with direct guidance from Copilot Studio experts. 

The key aspects your team should keep in mind when building your custom agent include the following:

• Innovative use of generative AI
• Business value
• Technical feasibility
• Enterprise readiness (including data security and compliance)

Participants will receive support through various learning sessions to envision their use cases, hands-on labs, inspirational demos, and office hours with tech experts. Additionally, your team will have access to a Teams channel with daily tips and async Q&A support from experts throughout the length of the hackathon.

All hackathon submissions will have an opportunity to win Credly digital badges and certificates, branded swag, and a chance to be featured in a customer story for their team and project.  

Recent success story

The Power CAT team recently wrapped the pilot Enterprise Hackathon, which invited teams from 13 enterprise organizations to build impactful and compliant enterprise agents using Copilot Studio to address real business use cases. We received incredible submissions from the enterprise teams throughout the hackathon. Here’s what some of the participants had to say:  

“Hearing all the new ideas from everyone is really inspiring and helped us think about our next step and implementing those ideas into our ideas as well.”

“One part of the hackathon was asking questions in the community chat. The interaction & the experience of the other people was amazing to understand how we can fix it and continue building.”

“Copilot Studio is very user-friendly. It helps innovate and streamline development process, so it can make time to delivery very fast and efficient.”

“Go for Copilot Studio so you can have a more robust solution with your use case.”

Registration is now open

Ready to innovate and transform your business? Gather your team and your proposed use cases and sign up today! We look forward to your team’s participation, engagement, and innovation at the hackathon. 

Questions? Email Enterprise Agent Challenge Support at EACSupport@microsoft.com.

The post Register now for the upcoming Copilot Studio Enterprise Agent Challenge! appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Expanding Copilot capabilities with UiPath Agent Builder

Last year, we showcased how UiPath Autopilot could be seamlessly integrated into Teams and Copilot conversations (here). Now, this bi-directional integration between Microsoft Copilot Studio and UiPath Studio unlocks new use cases and scenarios and helps our mutual customers solve unique business challenges.

Graham Sheldon, UiPath Chief Product Officer, highlighted the significance of this partnership: “We believe in the power of people, agents, and robots working together to solve tough, ambiguous business problems,” he said. “This collaboration with Microsoft brings the promise of agentic automation and orchestration to life for our customers, offering unparalleled capabilities and flexibility.”

UiPath has enhanced their Power Platform connector to enable the integration of UiPath agents and automations directly into Copilot Studio. Developers can build actions, topics, or agent flows that include UiPath agents and automations with ease.

Once the delegated task is complete, the UiPath agent closes the loop using an API trigger to hand back to Copilot and continue the process. This enables Copilot Studio agents to work across Microsoft 365 and activity in UiPath Studio, including applications such as Outlook and SharePoint.

Real-world business processes are complex, spanning IT systems, offline documents and user actions. This integration, built with close collaboration between the engineering teams, facilitates seamless interaction between UiPath and Microsoft agents and supports orchestration across both platforms.

Joint customers can now automate and orchestrate tasks that span multiple applications, semi-structured and unstructured documents, and User actions. The bi-directional connectivity unlocks several scenarios:

• Invoke UiPath agents & automations from Copilot Studio agents: Dynamic input parameters in the connector enable Copilot Studio agents to hand off processes to UiPath agents with the necessary data required to complete the task.

• Invoke Microsoft agents from UiPath Studio: UiPath Studio activities enable the ability to use Copilot Studio agents as tools/functions in UiPath Studio, enabling UiPath agents in turn, to handoff process to Copilot Studio agents. 

• Automate long-running and asynchronous processes: UiPath agents can now hand off a process back to the Copilot Studio agent to resume processing and trigger flows. This allows a Copilot Studio agent to delegate a task to a UiPath agent and wait for task completion before resuming the next steps.

Real-world applications

The UiPath Connector helps customers tap into UiPath agentic capabilities in the Microsoft platform, third-party systems, documents, and desktop applications. For example, a Copilot Studio agent monitoring a shared Outlook inbox for customers can perform email generation, intelligent case assignments, and record updates based on emails.

For specialized tasks like claims processing, it delegates to a UiPath claims agent, which leverages their Intelligent Document Processing to extract information, validate against existing data in systems of record, and input into the claims administration platform for handoff to the claims adjuster.

If an escalation is required, UiPath agents can identify the right user using Microsoft Graph and raise the exception in UiPath Action Center. Once the claim is processed, confirmation is passed back to the Copilot Studio agent for post-processing steps.

Get started today

Sangya Singh, Microsoft VP of Power Platform Intelligent Automations, noted that this integration will help makers solve complex workflows and optimize business processes. “As we expand the surface area of what agents can do in the enterprise,” she said, “we are making it easier for customers to achieve their agentic goals.”

Customers have also expressed excitement about this partnership, especially as it helps with business process automation across an organization:

You cannot automate a process in isolation; integrating across technology boundaries is necessary for real business impact. This bi-directional integration harnesses the combined strengths of Microsoft Copilot and UiPath agents to fully automate complex workflows across documents, emails, PowerApps, and enterprise systems.” 

– Ramnath Natarajan, Director of Global Intelligent Automation & Integration
Johnson Controls

We look forward to seeing the many ways Microsoft and UiPath customers will leverage these new capabilities to drive their business forward. Try UiPath Connector actions in Copilot Studio today.

The post Announcing Agentic Automation with Bidirectional Integration between Microsoft Copilot Studio & UiPath appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

What’s new: Model Context Protocol integration

Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables makers to connect to existing knowledge servers and APIs directly from Copilot Studio. When connecting to an MCP server, actions and knowledge are automatically added to the agent and updated as functionality evolves. This simplifies the process of building agents and reduces time spent maintaining the agents.

MCP servers are made available to Copilot Studio using connector infrastructure. This means they can employ enterprise security and governance controls such as Virtual Network integration, Data Loss Prevention controls, multiple authentication methods—all of which are available in this release—while supporting real-time data access for AI-powered agents.

MCP enables our customers to:

• Easily connect to data sources: Whether you have a custom internal API or external data providers, the MCP protocol enables smooth and reliable integration into Copilot Studio.
• Access the marketplace of existing servers: In addition to custom connectors and integrations, users can now tap into a growing library of pre-built, MCP-enabled connectors available in the marketplace. This capability gives you more ways to connect with other tools and makes using them faster and easier.
• Flexible action capabilities: MCP servers can dynamically provide tools and data to agents. This enables greater flexibility while reducing maintenance and integration costs.

To get started, access your agent in Copilot Studio, select ‘Add an action,’ and search for your MCP server! (Note: generative orchestration must be enabled to use MCP.)

Each tool published by the MCP server is automatically added as an action in Copilot Studio and inherits the name, description, inputs, and outputs. As tools are updated or removed on the MCP server, Copilot Studio automatically reflects these changes, ensuring users always have the latest versions and that obsolete tools are removed. A single MCP server can integrate and manage multiple tools, each accessible as an action within Copilot Studio. This streamlined process not only reduces manual effort, it means less risk of errors from outdated tools.

This offering additionally includes Software Development Kit (SDK) support, enabling further customization and flexibility for your integrations. To create your own Model Context Protocol server, the process can be broken down into three key steps:

1. Create the server: The first step in integrating Copilot Studio with the MCP is to create a server via one of the SDKs that will serve as the foundation for handling your data, models, and interactions. You can tailor the server to your specific needs, such as enabling it to handle custom model types and data formats or to support specific workflows.   
2. Publish through a connector: Once the server is in place, the next step involves creating a custom connector that links your Copilot Studio environment to the model or data source.
3. Consume the data via Copilot Studio: Finally, once the server is set up and the connector is defined, you can begin consuming the data and interacting with the models via Copilot Studio.

By following these three steps, you create a streamlined, adaptable integration with Copilot Studio that not only connects systems but also enhances your ability to maintain and scale that integration according to your needs.

We support Server-Sent Events (SSE) as the transport mechanism; this feature is currently in environments in preview regions and will be available across all environments shortly.

Learn more about these new capabilities here: Extend your agent with Model Context Protocol (preview) – Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn.

What’s next?

We’re excited about the potential of Model Context Protocol and its ability to transform the way users interact with Copilot Studio. But this is just the beginning. Our team is actively working on additional features and improvements to further enhance the integration experience. Stay tuned for more updates, as we plan to introduce even more ways to connect your data and tools effortlessly into Copilot Studio.

We look forward to your feedback and learning more on how this new capability enhances your experience and helps you unlock the full power of Copilot Studio.

The post Introducing Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Copilot Studio: Simplified Integration with AI Apps and Agents 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.

Whether you’re a user, developer, or IT professional, Microsoft Copilot Studio offers a comprehensive platform for creating, managing, and deploying Copilot agents.

Broadly, an agent uses AI to automate and execute business processes, working with you and on your behalf. Agents can build capacity for every individual, team, and organization—from sales to marketing to customer service, and more—enabling you to scale impact like never before.

Agents come in all shapes and sizes. They help you retrieve information from grounding data and reason over it to summarize or answer questions. More capable agents take actions when asked and the most advanced agents are autonomous, operating independently to create and perform plans, orchestrate other agents, and learn when to escalate to an employee for help.

With Copilot Studio, you can create and publish Copilot agents to all kinds of channels, including Microsoft Teams, websites, or mobile apps. We have already seen incredible customer adoption, with over 50,000 organizations having used Copilot Studio to-date.

We are excited to announce two new capabilities for Copilot Studio:

• First, Copilot agents built in Copilot Studio can now be published directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot, surfacing right in the user’s flow of work.
• Second, we’re unveiling a new Copilot Studio experience that empowers users of any skill level to create Copilot agents from within SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat (BizChat).

These new features will be rolling out in general availability to all Microsoft 365 Copilot customers over the coming weeks. 

Publish Copilot agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot agents enable you to enhance Copilot’s capabilities by connecting to your organization’s knowledge and data sources. These agents can draw from valuable data in SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics 365, or your line of business systems, and help Copilot become significantly smarter about your business and its processes. You can also expand the capabilities of agents by equipping them with new skills, such as sending emails, updating records, or creating support tickets. And Copilot agents can integrate with your existing line of business systems, enabling your employees and customers to easily take action in their flow of work. 

Users can find Copilot agents in a new store in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat, Teams, and the Microsoft 365 app, and they can use them by @ mention in a chat or by interacting directly with them. IT admins can curate the store catalog from the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Empower users of any skill level to create Copilot agents

When it comes to building Copilot agents, we are introducing a new, lightweight Copilot Studio experience that makes it simple for users of any skill level to build Copilot agents directly within BizChat and SharePoint. We think everyone will need to be able to create agents in the future, much like how everyone can create spreadsheets or presentations in Microsoft 365. This new experience will roll out in general availability to all customers through October.

With the new experience, you can tell Copilot Studio what you want your Copilot agent to do using natural language, and easily choose which knowledge sources you’d like to integrate from across your organization’s data, whether it’s specific documents or entire databases. When you are ready, the Copilot agent can be used by you, shared with a select group, or deployed to an entire organization. Building a Copilot agent in SharePoint is even easier with a few clicks and no coding skills required.

You can continue to customize any Copilot agent in the full Copilot Studio editor, adding more advanced capabilities including autonomy. As we announced at Build 2024, we believe autonomous agents will fundamentally change business processes. We’re actively working with enterprise customers who are aleady building autonomous agents in Copilot Studio as part of our early access program, and and we look forward to sharing more later this year.

Manage Copilot agents with centralized controls

We believe organizations that embrace AI will create and use many Copilot agents. There will be as many agents as there are documents or SharePoint sites in an organization. Copilot Studio provides a trusted environment that delivers confidence through comprehensive policies, access controls, and agent management, all available within a centralized admin center. This includes the ability to control agent creation, sharing, and use, which allows organizations to meet their security, compliance and governance goals.

Furthermore, the data used to ground agents remains securely within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary, adhering to your organization’s labeling and policy guidelines. When extending your agents through Copilot Studio, your data remains in the Microsoft Azure tenant boundary with security layers to prevent invalid authentication and authorization and data loss prevention (DLP) policies for additional control. And all of this is built on Microsoft’s Responsible AI and Enterprise Data Protection standards.

Ultimately, in a world where AI is rapidly transforming how we work, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio offer new opportunities for applying AI to your unique business needs. By empowering users to create, tailor, and deploy Copilot agents of all types, Microsoft is making advanced AI accessible and valuable to everyone.

• Learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio governance.
• Read the Microsoft 365 blog post about Copilot Wave 2.
• Join us at the Power Platform Community Conference to see how Microsoft is transforming the developer experience. 
• Get in touch with a Microsoft representative today.

The post Unveiling Copilot agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio to supercharge your business 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.

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.

The post Microsoft Named a Leader in the 2023 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide General Purpose Conversational AI Software appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Following this feedback, we’re thrilled to announce the Copilot Studio implementation guide. This detailed guide is designed to help customers, partners, and Microsoft teams review copilot projects and architectures for a smooth and effective implementation journey.

Get ready for a comprehensive review of your Copilot Studio project

The Copilot Studio implementation guide provides a framework to do a 360-degree review of your project. Through probing questions, it highlights potential risks and gaps, aims at aligning the project with the product roadmap, and shares guidance, best practices and reference architecture examples.

Users of the implementation review are guided at each step of the journey with the side pane that provides more context on the questions or features, shares best practices, and includes links to additional resources.

Inspired by the Success by Design framework – a tried and tested Microsoft methodology used for Business Applications implementations – this review aims to detect bad patterns, identify risks, share best practices, and showcase example implementations.

Key principles behind the review

The Success by Design framework, the backbone of this review process, is centered around three critical principles:

1. Early Discovery: Identifying and dealing with potential issues at the earliest stage.
2. Proactive Guidance: Giving robust advice ahead of issues emerging, preventing potential problems.
3. Predictable Success: Providing a roadmap for success, using tested strategies and methods, and avoiding common pitfalls and anti-patterns.

Areas covered by the review

The Copilot Studio implementation guide covers these chapters:

• An overview of the project
• Architecture overview
• Language
• AI functionalities
• Integrations & channels
• Security, monitoring & governance specifications
• Application lifecycle management
• Analytics & KPIs
• Gaps & top requests
• Dynamics 365 Omnichannel (optional)

How is the implementation review typically delivered?

While it was initially delivered by Microsoft, the Copilot Studio implementation guide can now be used autonomously by customers and partners. It is designed to be a living document that can be updated throughout the project lifecycle.

Get the Copilot Studio implementation review today!

Download the Copilot Studio implementation review and provide feedback directly on GitHub, using this issue template.

We are confident that this tool will be beneficial to those implementing Copilot Studio and eagerly anticipate your feedback. Here’s to empowering more successful transformations with Microsoft Copilot Studio!

The post New Microsoft Copilot Studio implementation guide appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

The excitement and anticipation soared as we unveiled new generative AI features which changed how you both create copilots and respond with them. However, organizations worldwide have been eagerly awaiting harnessing these powerful AI capabilities in their own regions.

Today, we are pleased to share that we have expanded Copilot Studio’s designated region availability for generative AI capabilities beyond the United States, complete with robust admin controls.

This expansion brings these cutting-edge capabilities to various locations, including:

• Europe
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• France
• Australia
• India
• Japan
• Asia Pacific
• South America
• Switzerland

What’s more, in the coming months we’re poised to introduce additional generative AI features across even more geographical areas, empowering users worldwide to fully leverage Copilot Studio’s potential.

You can keep up to date with the latest availability here: Enable copilots and generative AI features.

To build your own copilot with these latest generative AI capabilities, read this guide.

Admins have newfound control over data movement in non-US geographical environments through the Power Platform admin center controls. Learn more.

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio, visit these resources:

• Copilot Studio website
• Start a trial
• Try a demo
• Watch the video
• Product documentation
• Catch up on the Ignite on-demand session
• Join the community

I am looking forward to seeing your innovations come to life with Copilot Studio, which is available worldwide.

Thank you once again from the entire Copilot Studio team for your continued support and enthusiasm.

The post Microsoft Copilot Studio Expands Region Availability For Generative AI 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.