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

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

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

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

End-user improvements

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

What’s new in Microsoft 365 Copilot

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

Maker improvements

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

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

Admin improvements

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

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

Agent 365 and Copilot Studio: Unified control for agents

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

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

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

Scale to the Frontier Firm with control

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

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

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

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

—Paula Korczak, Product Manager for General Ledger, EY

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

Get started today

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

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

¹ EY redesigns its global finance process with Microsoft Power Platform

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

Microsoft Build 2025 is here—our annual showcase of the most exciting innovations shaping the future of development and AI. For engineers, makers, and subject matter experts, it’s the moment to see what’s next across the Microsoft ecosystem. This year, Microsoft Copilot Studio has a number of powerful new agent-related features to show you. From multi-agent orchestration to more maker controls, computer use in agents to code interpreter, read on for a first look at Copilot Studio’s exciting announcements.

Recap of major Microsoft Build 2025 announcements

Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft, announced some of the biggest news from the Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot agents teams. In case you missed it, here’s an overview of a few features we’re particularly excited about.

Multi-agent orchestration

Rather than relying on a single agent to do everything—or managing disconnected agents in silos—organizations can now build multi-agent systems in Copilot Studio (preview), where agents delegate tasks to one another. This includes those built with the Microsoft 365 agent builder, Microsoft Azure AI Agents Service, and Microsoft Fabric. These agents can now all work together to achieve a shared goal: completing complex, business-critical tasks that span systems, teams, and workflows.

This evolution reflects a broader shift in how organizations are scaling their use of agents across Microsoft. Imagine a Copilot Studio agent pulling sales data from a customer relationship management (CRM) system, handing it off to a Microsoft 365 agent to draft a proposal in Word, and then triggering another to schedule follow-ups in Outlook. Or, envision agents coordinating across IT, communications, and vendor systems to manage an incident from detection to resolution. Whether it’s executive briefings, customer onboarding, or product launches, agents can now operate in sync—bringing greater connectedness, intelligence, and scale to every step. This feature is currently in private preview with a public preview coming soon.

See how different organizations are employing their agent ecosystems and get inspired for how you could connect yours in Microsoft Corporate Vice President Srini Raghavan’s blog post.

Computer use in Copilot Studio agents

Computer use moves us closer to a more connected, intelligent world where agents collaborate seamlessly with people and systems. Agents can now interact with desktop apps and websites like a person would—clicking buttons, navigating menus, typing in fields, and adapting automatically as the interface changes. This opens the door to automating complex, user interface (UI)-based tasks like data entry, invoice processing, and market research, with built-in reasoning and full visibility into every step. Computer use is currently available through the Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier program for eligible customers with at least 500,000 Copilot Studio messages and an environment in the United States.

Bring your own model and model fine-tuning

Copilot Studio continues to integrate deeply with Microsoft Foundry, and now you can bring your own model for prompts and generative answers. Makers can access more than 11,000 models in Microsoft Foundry, including the latest models available in OpenAI GPT-4.1, Llama, DeepSeek, and custom models, and fine-tune them using enterprise data. This fine-tuning helps agents generate even more domain-specific, high-value responses.

Model Context Protocol

Now generally available, Model Context Protocol (MCP) makes it easier to connect Copilot Studio to your enterprise knowledge systems. With growing connector support, better tool rendering, evolving scalability, and faster troubleshooting, it’s never been simpler to bring external knowledge into agent conversations.

Developer tools to build agents your way

Microsoft empowers developers to build agents with the tools they prefer—Copilot Studio, GitHub, Visual Studio, and more. With Microsoft 365 Copilot APIs, developers can securely access Microsoft 365 data and capabilities to create custom agents or embed Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat into apps, all while respecting organization-wide permissions.

The Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit and Software Development Kit (SDK) make it easier to build, test, and evolve agents over time. Developers can swap models or orchestrators without starting from scratch, use SDK templates to jumpstart projects, and deploy to Azure with smart defaults—all now generally available.

Copilot Studio enhancements

New agent publishing channels: SharePoint and WhatsApp

Copilot Studio has exciting updates to available channels, including that publishing agents to Copilot is now generally available. In addition to this highly anticipated update, we’re also adding two additional channels: SharePoint and WhatsApp. These key channels make it easier than ever to bring custom agents to the places where your users already work and communicate. This helps you extend the reach and value of your agents, from serving your teams inside Copilot and SharePoint to engaging customers around the world.

The SharePoint channel, now generally available, lets makers deploy custom agents directly to a SharePoint site with a single click. With authentication and permissions handled automatically, anyone with access to the site can immediately start using the agent. This extends the full capabilities of custom agents into one of the most widely used collaboration hubs in the world.

Starting in early July 2025, makers will also be able to publish Copilot Studio to WhatsApp. This will allow organizations to provide conversational support and engage global users directly within the familiar, mobile-first platform—no separate website or app required.

Additional maker controls for knowledge

Now in public preview, new controls in the Generative AI agent settings give makers more ways to shape how agents respond, reason, and interact with users. In addition to toggles for generative orchestration and deep reasoning, you’ll see multiple categories to further ground and tune your agents.

First, in response to maker feedback, we’re pleased to announce that you can now upload multiple related files into a file collection and use the collection as a single knowledge source for an agent. You can also include natural language instructions to help your agent find the most relevant document in the collection to ground each response.

In the Responses section of the Generative AI tab, you can now choose your agent’s primary response model, provide response instructions, adjust response length, and turn on advanced options like code interpreter (see below) and Tenant graph grounding with semantic search.

Moderation settings control how flagged responses—that is, generated responses detected to possibly have harmful content—are handled. These controls allow you to set a custom response to send when potential responses get flagged. A User feedback section, meanwhile, gives you the option to allow users to provide feedback on the agent, along with a custom disclaimer. This provides you a qualitative assessment of how users perceive your feature—enormously valuable in planning and honing your agent roadmap.

In the Knowledge and User input sections, you decide what the agent draws from: your specific knowledge sources only, foundational model knowledge, or even Bing web search. You can also choose to let users add images during agent interactions.

These new controls, along with improved analytics and testing tools, empower makers to deliver more relevant, responsible, and high-quality agents—leading to greater impact and better user experiences across the board.

Additional knowledge sources for agents

Copilot Studio now supports several new knowledge sources, providing an even broader range of enterprise content for custom agents to access and reference. OneDrive files and folders, SharePoint lists, and Microsoft Teams chats and channels are all supported. Outside this internal data, agents can now employ unstructured data from platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk, as well as structured data from platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and SAP.

Knowledge from Microsoft Azure AI Search is also generally available. Agents can now reference this data more effectively, whether the goal is analyzing sales pipeline trends, identifying churn risks, or supporting role-specific insights across business systems.

As you connect these new sources, note that Microsoft Graph connectors are now called Copilot connectors, a name that better reflects their role in powering the Copilot experience. More than 65 Copilot connectors are already generally available or in public preview in the Microsoft 365 admin center, including Gong, PagerDuty, and Unily. Read more about building Copilot connectors on Microsoft Learn.

Code interpreter

Bring Python-powered logic to your Copilot Studio agents using natural language. Now in preview, code interpreter lets developers extend Copilot Studio agents with Python—enabling advanced logic, dynamic visualizations, and structured data operations directly within runtime or prompt workflows.

There are two ways to use code interpreter. The first, with agents, is dynamic: Python code is generated and executed live at runtime. Agents can analyze uploaded CSV or Excel files, generate pie, line, or bar charts with downloadable outputs, and solve complex math problems in context.

The second, with Prompt Builder, is more static—makers define and edit Python code at design time. When the prompt runs, it executes the same preconfigured logic—ideal for repeatable tasks like Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations on Dataverse tables.

This feature unlocks new abilities in data analysis, reporting, and visualization within agents. Users can get richer and more insightful agent responses, automate calculations, and streamline repetitive processes. By bridging natural language prompts with real code execution, code interpreter helps teams improve quality, reduce turnaround time, and support innovation—while staying inside Copilot Studio’s managed environment.

Pro-developer enhancements

Visual Studio Code extension for Copilot Studio

The Copilot Studio Visual Studio Code extension is designed with professional developers in mind, bringing familiar tooling and workflows to the world of agent development. Now available in the Visual Studio Marketplace, this extension lets you connect directly to Copilot Studio and edit agents from within Visual Studio Code, enabling a modern experience outside the web UI.

For developers and teams, this means you now have new get IntelliSense color-formatting, “find all references,” and the structured clarity of working over a file system—all while building on a fully managed software as a service (SaaS) platform. Copilot Studio handles the infrastructure, compliance, and runtime complexity, so your team can stay focused on delivering value.

The Copilot Studio Visual Studio Code extension is about meeting developers where they are. Whether you’re integrating agents into your broader developer ecosystem or scaling collaboration with GitHub, the Copilot Studio Visual Studio Code extension brings the control and confidence developers expect. No new tools to learn, and no trade-offs.

Embedded agent builder enhancements

Share agents instantly across your organization

The new agent sharing experience in Copilot Chat makes it easier than ever to share agents across your organization. Makers and developers worldwide can now generate and distribute shareable links directly from the right sidebar in Copilot Chat, which streamlines collaboration and increases the discovery of your agents. Once you’ve shared your agent, others can then start using it instantly.

This feature eliminates the extra steps previously required to find and share an agent—no switching tools or hunting for links. Agent sharing reduces friction, speeds up internal adoption, and helps teams get more value from the agents already in use. Easier sharing allows for consistent, cross-platform experiences, whether you’re building with Copilot Studio, the embedded agent builder in Microsoft 365, or Teams Toolkit.

In-conversation agent recommendations

As makers and developers build more specialized agents, it becomes harder for users to know which one to use and when. With in-conversation agent recommendations, Copilot bridges that gap by dynamically suggesting the most relevant agent based on what the user is trying to do.

As the user describes their need in natural language, Copilot determines if an installed agent is better suited to handle a request. It recommends a handoff and carries over the full conversation context so the agent can respond intelligently, access enterprise data, or take action in downstream systems. From the user’s perspective, this process is seamless, effortless, and improves the quality of their experience using AI tools to assist with or accomplish their work.

For developers and makers, this means your agents no longer sit idle, waiting to be discovered. They’re surfaced at the right time, in the right context, driving impact without the user needing to go search for them. It’s a lightweight way to boost discoverability, increase usage, and demonstrate value without changing how agents are built.

Security and governance enhancements

Copilot Studio continues to enhance and improve governance and security capabilities, giving IT teams and security admins control and clarity over every stage of agent creation and operation. Here are some recent updates in agent and platform-level controls as well as data and infrastructure protections.

Agent and platform-level controls

• Privacy controls to disable transcript recording and session downloads, apply real-time sensitive data masking and audio suppression in agent chats, and present a custom privacy notice.
• Automatically assigned identities for agents created through Copilot Studio, automatically listed in the centralized AI agents directory in the Microsoft Entra admin center.
• A separate shared environment for agents built in the Microsoft 365 agent builder, simplifying tracking and paving the way for more granular policies.
• Additional safeguards to prevent unauthorized use of Copilot Maker authentication, enforce Microsoft Entra ID (in public preview) for all interactions, and require explicit consent before agents are shared.
• Blocked role escalation in personal development environments.

Data and infrastructure protections

• Ability for admins to apply Data Loss Prevention to agents in Copilot (to prevent misuse of labeled content) and enforce auto-labeling with downstream inheritance in Dataverse.
• New Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI-focused views, allowing security teams to track how sensitive data moves through apps and agents (including interactions from employees, partners, and anonymous users).
• Automatic connector management enforcement that aligns Copilot Studio with the rest of Microsoft Power Platform—no PowerShell scripts required.
• Network isolation (public preview) to help lock down connectors and App Insights through firewalls and virtual networks (VNETs).
• Federated Identity Credentials to remove stored secrets or certificates from registration.

Together, these enhancements help keep Copilot Studio secure, compliant, and enterprise-ready without slowing down innovation. Learn more about these announcements in Microsoft Corporate Vice President Vasu Jakkal’s blog post.

To dive deeper into these new capabilities, join us for some of our relevant sessions at Microsoft Build 2025:

• What’s new in Copilot Studio
• Architecting your multi agent solutions with Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Agents SDK
• Build Microsoft Teams collaborative agents as virtual colleagues with Visual Studio Code​
• Building secure business apps: Best practices from design to deployment
• Fine-tune models for task-specific agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot​
• Building agents in Copilot Studio using Model Context Protocol, open standards and more​

The post Multi-agent orchestration, maker controls, and more: Microsoft Copilot Studio announcements at Microsoft Build 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

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.

How to attend? If you’re interested in participating at one or more locations alongside peers from your organization, please register at no cost for these events using the links below. Seats are limited and exclusive to qualified customers. Register now to secure your spot!

👉 Register for Power Platform Events (three days each):

• Dallas: February 11–13
• Chicago February 18–20
• Redmond March 4–6
• Toronto March 11–13
• New York March 11–13

👉 Register for Copilot Studio Events (two days each):

• Redmond: February 25–26
• Atlanta: March 4–5
• Houston: March 19–20

These exclusive Kickstarter workshops are delivered to qualified customers at no cost as multi-day in-person events at local Microsoft offices. The sessions will be delivered by our expert Kickstarter delivery partners with members from Power CAT joining in select locations.

The three-day Power Platform events focus on Enterprise Grade Governance and Scale Workloads pillars. These include governance, security, and architecture workshops that are based on Power CAT best practices and the guidance found at Power Well-Architected.

The two-day Copilot Studio events focus on the Conversational AI and Agents pillar – you will be introduced to agent building capabilities in Microsoft Copilot Studio and participate in envisioning exercises to identify relevant use cases for your organization.

Why Participate? Engaging in these deep dive workshops as a team will enable your organization to learn about the latest capabilities, understand best practices for scalable adoption, and envision relevant agentic scenarios for your business. You will leave feeling empowered to drive a meaningful Power Platform and AI adoption strategy catered to the needs of your organization.

Our workshops are more than just events – they’re a launchpad for a transformative change! Check out the full catalog of the eight Kickstarter workshops that are aligned to pillars and the respective personas:

Power Platform: Three Days to Secure, Scalable, High-Performing Solutions

Transform your organization with this value-packed, three-day workshop series, offering best practices and actionable insights to design and optimize secure, enterprise-ready Power Platform solutions:

• Day 1: Designing Secure and Compliant Governance – Tailor strategies to safeguard and scale Power Platform adoption.
• Day 2: Power Platform Security – Tackle compliance, monitoring, and data protection challenges with expert guidance.
• Day 3: Building Well-Architected Solutions – Create reliable, scalable solutions using proven Microsoft practices.

Leading with AI: Two Days to Build Secure and Scalable AI Solutions

Unlock the power of Generative AI and Microsoft Copilot Studio with this immersive, two-day workshop designed to transform your business:

• Day 1: Introduction to Copilot Studio, Transforming IT Operations with Conversational AI, Autonomous Agents and AI Builder, Discover High-ROI use cases for Agentic Solutions
• Day 2: Developing an AI-Powered HR Helpdesk, creating an autonomous Employee Onboarding Solution, Envisioning and Building with Copilot Studio.

Hope to see you at a city near you. We plan to add additional cities and virtual options in the coming weeks! For additional information or questions, please contact: KSEvents@microsoft.com.

The post Register Now for Power Platform and AI workshops in a city near you! 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.

At our AI Tour in London, we’re excited to announce a new set of capabilities that enable you to build autonomous agents, which will be in public preview at Microsoft Ignite 2024. These agents understand the nature of your work and act on your behalf—providing support across business roles, teams, and functions.

Since the introduction of generative AI and Microsoft Copilot, our work has rapidly evolved. In our Business Applications, 2.1 million users engage with Copilot monthly, benefiting from AI-driven experiences and workflows with Microsoft’s commitment to privacy, security, and compliance.

Companies like McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home, Thomson Reuters, Clifford Chance, and more around the world, are seeing an incredible impact from the use of Microsoft Copilot Studio and our modern business applications. They’re becoming true AI-first companies. AI-first companies leverage a combination of people, Copilot, and agents to be more efficient, improve customer engagement, and improve employee experience.

Copilot is your personal, private assistant that works solely for you, enhancing your capabilities. And agents are expert systems that operate autonomously on behalf of a process or company. You configure, secure, and test your agent, and then it automates for you and your team across apps and data sources. We expect every employee will have Copilot and will be supported by many agents.

Every organization is unique, and this uniqueness is a competitive advantage. Organizations need a platform that empowers users to create their own agents for specific processes. Copilot Studio plays that crucial role by customizing Copilot and creating agents for your entire company.

Where agents thrive in the AI world

Organizations are always looking for ways to enhance efficiency, improve customer experience, and drive growth, but identifying the starting point is crucial. Copilot Studio can help you modernize existing processes or create new ones, paving the way for innovation and unlocking additional business value.

Organizations like Pets at Home have created autonomous agents for specific business workflows in Copilot Studio. Pets at Home, the UK’s leading pet care business, created an agent for its profit protection team to more efficiently compile cases for skilled human review, which could have the potential to drive a seven-figure annual savings.

We’re using AI to do the time-consuming work so our colleagues can use all resource and expertise to make decisions quickly based on large amounts of data. It’s truly helped empower colleagues through both the level of information at their fingertips, and in time spent on more nuanced and insightful work. The agents solution allows the profit protection team to more effectively assess cases for potential profit loss and dedicate more of their time to skilled analysis, rather than simply information gathering.

—William Hewish, CIO, Pets at Home

In collaboration with Microsoft, and as part of a broader AI transformation playbook for itself and its clients, McKinsey & Company is creating an agent that will speed up the client onboarding process. The pilot showed lead time could be reduced by 90 percent and administrative work reduced by 30 percent. The agent automates complex processes, such as identifying the right expert capabilities and staffing teams, and acts as a single place where colleagues can ask questions and request follow-ups. Streamlining tasks and reducing manual inputs, this agent could potentially save consultants many hours, allowing them to spend more time with clients.

“We are excited about the power of copilot agents in taking AI transformations to the next level. We’ve seen early success of our pilot agent that was built for our own organization, in collaboration with Microsoft. And we see tremendous potential for agents to help our clients rewire the way their businesses operate.“

—Rodney Zemmel, senior partner at McKinsey & Company

In continuation of Thomson Reuters’ collaboration with Microsoft, the company built a professional grade agentic solution for legal due diligence. This complex workflow requires significant legal expertise and specialist content, and the ambition was to make this process more efficient. The agentic solution combines the knowledge, skills, and advanced reasoning of Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, and integrates into Microsoft’s productivity tools to take on key tasks in this workflow. By significantly transforming the way work happens, the solution helped lawyers close deals more quickly and efficiently for their clients. Initial tests indicate that several tasks in the due diligence workflow could be cut by at least 50%.

Autonomous agents are positioned to create AI-first business processes across various departments like IT, marketing, sales, customer success, and finance in industries such as travel, retail, and financial services.

On top of being able to build and manage agents from scratch with Copilot Studio, we’re introducing ten new autonomous agents in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to build capacity for sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams.

New capabilities coming to Copilot Studio

Autonomous triggers

Agents can automatically respond to signals across your business and initiate tasks. They can be configured to react to events or triggers without human input that instead originate from various tools, systems, and databases, or are even scheduled to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

Dynamic agent plan

Each business process can have different paths since agents create dynamic plans on the fly to handle and complete tasks. Users can view the underlying logic for each of the agents’ paths, which includes key details, steps, and systems involved. This provides insight into why the agent chose a particular method, its decision process, and context, along with detailed steps, including variables and outputs, which are crucial for debugging.

Activity overview

Trust, dependability, and precision are at the core of establishing agent autonomy in organizations. The true strength of these agents is their ability to monitor activities across real-world scenarios, which in turn enhances business outcomes. To further transparency and accountability, we’re launching an “Activity” tab that enables makers to access a complete log of past agent runs, including progress tracking, identification of blocks, trend analysis, and review of earlier decisions.

New models like the OpenAI o1 series

Copilot Studio agents use the latest models, including the OpenAI o1 series, which is being used in the limited private preview for autonomous agents. These models are optimized for advanced reasoning tasks, enhancing the ability to solve complex problems.

Secure and trusted platform

Microsoft is committed to the advancement of AI driven by responsible AI principles that put people first.

Organizations are equipped with enterprise data protection including a comprehensive set of features to secure agents, including encryption, data loss prevention measures, and a responsible AI strategy to mitigate AI-related risks such as prompt injection. The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls, managed through the admin center, including robust authentication protocols.

Agent guardrails and controls are established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions. You can implement access controls for creating, sharing, and using agents. And you can establish policies and information labels to safeguard data and monitor agent usage.

You can also oversee the lifecycle management of agents efficiently with process governance, from creation to retirement. You can establish policies regarding resource utilization, access permissions, and publishing. And you can audit events and obtain insights into application performance to ensure continuous improvement and compliance.

With the comprehensive tooling provided by Copilot Studio, businesses can build, secure, and deploy agents tailored to their organizational needs. Read more about agent security here.

Becoming an AI-first company

Copilot is emerging as the new user experience, acting as your UI for AI, making workflows smarter and more resilient through agents. Powered by your data, converted into knowledge, it’s organized and reasoned over in a secure environment to fuel Copilot and all your agents. This shift empowers organizations to leverage and create sophisticated, intelligent applications.

With Copilot Studio, everyone can become an AI-first company

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 to experience the public preview of these autonomous agents. Discover how they can empower your organization to not only adapt but to lead in this exciting new era of AI innovation, truly embodying the principles of an AI-first approach.

• Learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio governance.
• Join us at Microsoft Ignite to learn about Microsoft’s latest innovations for AI transformation. 
• Get in touch with a Microsoft representative today.
• Read the Official Microsoft blog from Jared Spataro.

The post Unlocking autonomous agent capabilities with Microsoft Copilot Studio 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.

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

Discover the next generation of intelligent business applications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI innovations

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

Brand-new insights from the experts

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

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

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

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

9:00 AM–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC–7)

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

The first annual Power Platform Conference sponsored by Microsoft is coming to Orlando for an amazing in-person event this September, with keynotes, sessions, breakouts, and more—all dedicated to Microsoft Power Platform products: Power Automate, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Pages, and Power Virtual Agents.

Gain insights and understanding on the latest features and benefits of Power Platform from Microsoft’s senior thought leaders, software engineers, and community experts, all focused on uniting humanity and technology. Learn and connect with key innovators as they incorporate human-centered design and use discovery-based solutions to solve ever-changing business challenges.

This year features over 100 speakers and more than 150 sessions. Conference-goers will have the opportunity to connect—and reconnect—with users from around the world, building their personal and professional relationships, while gaining valuable insight into what’s new and next for Microsoft’s business applications.

Capping off the week is a conference-exclusive night at Universal Orlando, home to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter® and Islands of Adventure™!

Don’t delay—sign up for the Microsoft Power Platform Conference today! We can’t wait to see you in Orlando!

Unmissable Power Virtual Agents sessions

Power Virtual Agents will have its own track at the conference providing many opportunities for you to begin your Conversational AI journey. There will be a variety of topics including 101s, product deep dives, and hands-on workshops to suit your learning needs.

Check out this one-pager and all the links below to learn more about Power Virtual Agents.

Power Virtual Agents Sessions:

• Power Virtual Agents 101
• The Power Virtual Agents Cookbook!
• Best Practices for Envisioning and Designing Power Virtual Agents
• Building Bots Using the New Power Virtual Agents Unified Authoring Canvas
• Building IVRs and Telephony Experiences with Power Virtual Agents
• Tuning your NLU Within Power Virtual Agents
• Inclusive and Accessible Design in the Power Platform – Starter Pack!
• Successfully Roll Out Virtual Agents in the Enterprise Space : Notes From the Field Conference
• Using Custom Connectors with Power Virtual Agents and Share Your Connector with the Community
• How Conversational AI is Helping the Helpdesks in the Post-Covid-19 Pandemic World?

Hands-on Workshop: Build Your Own Intelligent Bot Using Power Virtual Agents!
Power Platform sessions including Power Virtual Agents

• Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Bi, Power Virtual Agents…What Should I Use, and When?
• Empowering Business Enablers with the Power Platform
• Governance Is Not a Dirty Word
• Governance Vision Roadmap
• Governance at Scale
• Managing the Power Platform at Scale
• Power Platform for Code First Developers & ISVs

Featured Microsoft Power Virtual Agents speakers include

• Dewain Robinson (Principal Product Manager in PVA Engineering)
• Gary Robinson (Principal Product Manager in PVA Engineering)
• Michael Vakoc (Senior Product Manager, PVA Engineering)
• Kendra Springer (Principal Design Manager, Power Virtual Agents)
• Henry Jammes (Principal Program Manager | Power CAT | PVA)
• Jack Rowbotham (Product Marketing Manager, PVA)

Featured Power Virtual Agents Community speakers include

• Dian Taylor (Business Applications MVP, Dynamics 365 | RSM)
• Gokan Ozcifi (Business Applications MVP, Microsoft Regional Director)
• Lisa Crosbie (Business Applications MVP)
• Prashant G Bhoyar (Business Applications MVP, Microsoft AI MVP, MCT, Cloud Solution Architect)
• Troy Taylor (Business Applications MVP, Senior Power Platform Consultant, Hitachi Solutions)

We are looking forward to seeing you at the first in-person annual conference for the Microsoft Power Platform!

The post Don’t miss Power Virtual Agents at the first Microsoft Power Platform Conference! appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Make sure you sign up to hear the latest and greatest for Power Virtual Agents and how we are enabling fusion bot building teams to achieve more.

Main sessions: 

Breakout: How to accelerate cloud automation and conversational bot development for developers (Wednesday, May 25th, 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM PDT))

Ask the Experts: Accelerate cloud automation and conversational bot development
On-demand: What’s new for Microsoft’s Conversational AI and Power Virtual Agents

Get involved! 

Customer Roundtable: Managing Conversational Bots in an Enterprise (Tuesday, May 24th, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM PDT)
Join the customer roundtable and share your thoughts to help shape Power Virtual Agents roadmap.

One-to-One Consultations on Power Virtual Agents
Sign up to speak with some of our product managers in engineering about your conversational bot projects.

Other Power Platform sessions: 

Keynote: Innovate with collaborative apps and low code (Tuesday, May 24th,  10:50 AM – 11:10 AM PDT)

Into Focus: Low Code solutions using Microsoft Power Platform  (Wednesday, May 25th, 11:15 AM – 12:00 PM PDT)

Breakout: Power up your development efforts with the latest low code innovations (Tuesday, May 24th, 12:30 PM – 1:15 PM PDT)

On demand: Implement Power Platform with Architecture Best Practices and Fusion Development
On demand: Exciting innovations in Power Automate

Learn. Connect. Discover. Let’s innovate without compromise, develop creatively, and find out what more you can do with Power Virtual Agents.

Get started

If you want to learn more about Power Virtual Agents prior to Microsoft Build, be sure to visit aka.ms/LearnPVA.

Don’t forget to use #PowerVirtualAgents to share what excites you about the announcements.

The post Sign up now – Power Virtual Agents at Microsoft Build (May 24-26) appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.