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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

HR processes cover the following main verticals: 

• Recruitment encompasses attracting and selecting suitable candidates for jobs within an organization and includes job posting, screening, interviewing, and hiring. It requires coordination among hiring managers, interviewers, and HR, and involves extensive content review cycles. On average, it can take about 42 days to fill a position¹, and some tech positions, such as data scientist roles, can take over two months to hire.² 

• Employee onboarding involves integrating a new hire into the organization and providing them with the necessary resources, connections, and training to help ensure they can confidently make an impact. Two out of five HR managers spend at least three hours manually gathering onboarding details.³ Additionally, 34% of employees report that their organization does not have a formal onboarding program,⁴ which can affect employee satisfaction. An additional challenge lies in ramping up employees to their full productivity. The goal is to achieve faster productivity from new hires.

• Employee life cycle management covers every phase of an employee’s journey within a company, including recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, and offboarding. Currently, this involves significant overhead due to the need to manage multiple disparate systems, yet 47% of HR leaders report that improving the employee experience is a top priority.⁵

To address these challenges, Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code tool, enables organizations to create and customize agents where they want, including Microsoft 365. The intuitive building experience is enhanced with large language models and generative AI, making it easier for HR professionals to streamline their processes and improve efficiency. From recruitment and employee onboarding to employee lifecycle management, Copilot Studio allows HR departments to create agents that improve HR processes, helping businesses stay competitive and build a talented workforce.

Streamline HR processes with Copilot Studio

By leveraging the agents in Copilot Studio, HR managers can remove the friction of getting started and quickly address specific pain points within their organization. Copilot Studio offers ready-to-use configurable agents that can be tailored to fit the specific needs of an organization, allowing HR teams to create agents for their unique requirements.

This flexibility ensures that the agents can be adapted to different HR scenarios, making them versatile tools for managing various HR functions as a company’s strategy evolves. Designed to help HR professionals automate repetitive tasks, such as payroll processing, benefits enrollment, and employee onboarding, agents can save time and reduce manual effort. Scalable and user friendly, agents can work for organizations of all sizes and can be seamlessly integrated with existing HR systems, offering a practical and efficient way for HR departments to manage their workloads, improve productivity, and enhance the overall employee experience.

Optimize your workflow

We’re excited to announce that multiple agents are scheduled for release. HR professionals can promote healthy habits and streamline key initiatives leveraging these tools.

Leave management agent

The leave management agent enables organizations to streamline the time-off process for employees. It simplifies absence requests, offers a history summary, and provides easy access to time-off policies. This reduces administrative work for HR and managers while ensuring accurate leave tracking.

Wellness check template

Employee physical and mental health is crucial because it directly impacts productivity, engagement, and overall job satisfaction. Employers care about their employees’ well-being as it often leads to reduced absenteeism, lower healthcare costs, and a more positive work environment. The wellness check agent aims to assist employees in incorporating healthy habits into their workday through Microsoft Teams. It utilizes data from reliable sources such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institute of Health (NIH), or from customized knowledge bases, to deliver tailored recommendations on different wellness activities, including breathing exercises, journaling suggestions, or reminders to take breaks.

Awards and recognition agent

Recognition plays a vital role in reinforcing company values and cultivating a culture of respect and appreciation. It helps create an environment where employees feel supported and valued. Additionally, recognition boosts employee morale and performance, which often leads to higher productivity and a greater sense of ownership and pride in their work. The awards and recognition agent is a powerful tool designed to streamline the process of nominating and recognizing employees for their contributions and achievements. The agent assists the nominators in drafting compelling proposals that highlight their coworker’s contributions. For the admins, the agent also supports award ratings, assessing behaviors and accomplishments relevant to each award.

Inclusivity agent

The inclusivity agent is designed to foster a more inclusive and welcoming workplace. By integrating this tool, employees can grow their awareness and practice of inclusive and respectful behaviors, such as understanding by which pronouns members of a meeting should be addressed—contributing to supportive and equitable workplace culture.

Job craft agent 

Coming later this year, the job craft agent is a versatile tool that streamlines job description creation, interview preparation, and specifying role requirements. Organizations can use it to generate job descriptions and interview questions from user input, and more. This solution is perfect for HR managers, hiring managers, project managers, talent acquisition specialists, and recruiting coordinators looking to optimize their workflows and enhance their hiring processes. By ensuring that job descriptions are clear, detailed, and aligned with the role requirements, recruiters can reduce the time spent on screening unsuitable candidates and improve the overall quality of hires. This not only enhances the efficiency of the hiring process but also helps in building a strong and capable workforce.

Get started with your own agent

HR agents enable businesses to concentrate on strategic projects that promote a positive and efficient work environment. Implementing AI-driven HR agents help boost efficiency and offer employee support, increasing satisfaction and retention.

Get started and create your own agent today.

Sources:

¹ Key HR Statistics and Trends In 2024 – Forbes Advisor

² Key hiring metrics: Useful benchmarks by location for tech roles – Workable

³ 50+ Employee Onboarding Statistics You Must Know in 2024 (g2.com)

⁴ 25 Employee Onboarding Statistics You Must Know in 2024 – AIHR

⁵ Key HR Statistics and Trends In 2024 – Forbes Advisor

The post Transform HR with AI-powered agents appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.