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 30 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 25 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 6,400 messages or $64 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 23,200 messages or $232 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.

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.

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

Copilot Studio provides an all-in-one platform for building agents, with managed software as a service (SaaS) infrastructure, AI models, a low-code design interface, and thousands of prebuilt connectors. It integrates personal, business, and analytical data, and enables publishing to Copilot, web, and your apps. These new capabilities allow agents to act independently, initiate events, and automate complex business tasks. Let’s explore how this works.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publish Copilot agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot

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

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

Empower users of any skill level to create Copilot agents

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

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

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

Manage Copilot agents with centralized controls

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

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

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

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

The post Unveiling Copilot agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio to supercharge your business appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

With AI and low-code development tools, IT teams can tackle the problems they know best on their own, without additional assistance from outsider developers. Putting AI-powered low-code development tools in the hands of pro developers is like handing over the keys to a solution machine. With vast, built-in app-building knowledge and conversational language prompts that guide beginners and turbo-boost pros, AI can speed the time to build solutions for the unique needs of your IT department.

By using AI and low-code development, IT teams can build smart, fast solutions to their own problems—problems exacerbated by growing demands on data. CIOs who can bring AI-powered low-code and no-code solutions to their employees are putting their organizations in prime position to drive innovation.

Use cases for an AI-powered, low-code development platform abound, especially in an organization’s IT department, but we’ll focus on the five things we’d imagine IT teams would want to start doing if they were empowered with those tools today.

1. Offloading boring, repetitive, and mundane tasks to custom AI assistants

Imagine getting your team to use a low-code development platform to build a self-service assistant capable of handling the most common IT support requests in real time.

Instead of writing code, beginner and pro developers on the team can use simple, everyday English to guide the development process, speeding things along. And if your platform can connect with knowledge base systems like Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio do, then they can build a tool that automates the retrieval of documentation, FAQs, and previous support tickets so employees who need help can get accurate support without the need for human intervention.

Even if your organization still relies on legacy IT systems, AI and low-code can build bridges to older tools with UI, API, DPA, and RPA automation capabilities that can help automate tasks like data entry, report generation, and system monitoring that would otherwise dominate time and tie up people.

To find out how Copilot Studio can help your organization’s IT department, try a demo today.

2. Providing a secure, streamlined process for resetting employee passwords

To dig deeper into AI and low-code development to build tools that automate mundane tasks, consider the process for resetting employee passwords—something that comes with considerable security implications.

With AI-powered low-code development tools, an IT team can create a secure, streamlined process for resetting employee passwords that gets employees back online while enhancing overall identity management.

For instance, a system could be built that verifies user identity through multi-factor authentication (MFA) and biometric checks. Once the requester has been reviewed and approved as authorized, reset instructions could be passed along automatically, minimizing downtime for the employee requesting the reset while allowing IT support staff to focus on other tasks.

The system could also analyze user patterns to detect and flag suspicious activity, like too many reset attempts or reset requests originating from an unusual location, adding an extra layer of protection. With low-code platforms, these complex identity verification processes can be implemented quickly and efficiently, reducing the burden on IT staff while maintaining high security standards.

3. Empowering employees to troubleshoot technical issues through self-service

Some technical issues require human intervention, but many don’t. To free your human experts for your organization’s most challenging problems, help them design the self-service solution that could handle the most common requests that dominate their time.

For example, consider a complaint about a slow computer.

A generative AI-enabled self-service tool developed with AI on a low-code platform hears the user’s “slow computer” complaint, and then runs a series of diagnostic tests to determine the issue. Once the issue has been identified, the tool can generate instructions on what to do next.

This allows your IT experts to focus on more complex and critical problems, improving overall productivity and support quality within the organization.

To see how your IT department can use AI-powered low-code development to build a self-service help desk assistant with Copilot Studio, try a demo today

4. Making sure the right human beings get assigned the right tasks

About those complex and critical problems requiring human intervention—AI can actually help with making sure incoming helpdesk requests get to the right human agents.

Take the self-service tool we described above. Through the process of scanning incoming helpdesk requests, it can identify details that could help with prioritization and delegation. Once an issue’s urgency, complexity, and possible impact on the organization has been considered, the tool can direct tasks requiring human assistance to the teams or individuals best suited to help.

That way, team members can focus on what they do best, swiftly resolving critical issues and timely handling of less urgent tasks. This not only optimizes resource allocation, but also enhances overall service quality and response times within the IT department.

5. Logging service tickets and providing automatic status updates

Finally, instead of having to field status questions from waiting users, the IT team can build itself a tool for handling the task automatically.

On low-code platforms like Microsoft Power Platform and Copilot Studio, for example, the process would be easy. Without extensive coding knowledge, an IT team member could build an AI assistant that connects to whatever IT service management (ITSM) platform the company uses, and runs through the steps of creating, assigning, and updating tickets automatically, providing update notifications to employees via email, Teams, or other communication platforms.

If the team integrates its assistant with a network monitoring tool, it could even detect some likely issues before they have a chance to impact users. For example, if a connected monitoring tool detects an issue, the helpdesk assistant can create a ticket in the ITSM system that includes details from the monitoring tool alert, assigns an accurate priority level, and enables swift resolution of the issue.

Integrating AI and low-code can transform your IT strategy

We’ve walked through just a few examples of how IT departments can begin with AI-powered low-code development right away, but many more use cases, workflows, and connections are possible.

Integrating AI and low-code development tools revolutionizes IT departments by streamlining processes, enhancing productivity, and enabling rapid innovation. From automating repetitive tasks to improving ticket resolution times and empowering self-service troubleshooting, AI-powered low-code solutions unlock immense potential for IT teams.

By adopting these tools, organizations can optimize resource allocation, facilitate timely responses, and drive continuous improvement.

Start using AI-powered low-code development today to transform your IT strategy and stay ahead in the digital landscape. To find out how Copilot Studio can help your organization’s IT department, try a demo today.

The post 5 ways IT departments can get started with low-code and AI  appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

For executives, understanding the role of conversational AI within the broader low-code strategy is critical to staying competitive. This technology is not just about keeping pace—it’s about setting the pace and meeting human beings, customers, and employees alike, where they are. And human beings are becoming harder to please. In a recent article, McKinsey & Company observes that two-thirds of millennials expect real-time customer service, and “three-quarters of all customers expect consistent cross-channel service experience.”¹ AI-enabled customer service tools can help deliver those experiences for both customers and employees.  

In this blog post, we’ll walk through how conversational AI can improve both customer and employee experiences. We’ll also examine how Microsoft Copilot Studio enables organizations to build, deploy, and scale custom copilots, which are pivotal for driving efficiencies and tackling unique business challenges, thereby allowing the creation of solutions that are precisely tailored to organizational needs. 

Improving customer satisfaction and engagement 

 According to the 2023 Gartner^® report How Generative AI Can Help Meet Customer Experience Expectations, “Customer retention and growth feature heavily in the plans of executives interested in generative AI. Thirty-eight percent of leaders see improving customer experience and retention as the primary purpose of initiatives to deploy applications trained on large language models, while 26% highlight revenue growth. Only 17% cite cost optimization”.² 

One example of a company using conversational AI and low-code to improve customer experiences is Nsure.com, a medium-sized organization of 900 employees. The company, which matches customers with insurance carriers, has been using Copilot Studio to create copilots—custom AI assistants that can take on mundane and repetitive tasks so employees can concentrate on higher-value responsibilities.  

Copilot Studio provides thousands of pre-built data connectors, which make it easy for organizations like Nsure.com to point their custom copilots to multiple first- and third-party data sources, tailor them for different applications, and extend capabilities from basic knowledge-based responses to complex task automation. 

Nsure.com builds its copilots to support sales activities (including up-selling and cross-selling) and streamline interactions with customers, with a goal of having as much as 90% of incoming customer requests handled automatically. With copilots processing insurance quotes, payments, renewals, and discounts, Nsure.com agents can focus on what they do best: providing high levels of attentive customer service. 

Improving the employee experience 

Copilots automate everyday business processes, which empowers employees to spend more time on complex tasks, strategic initiatives, innovation, and higher-value responsibilities, leading to more satisfying employee experiences and an overall increase in staff productivity. 

One company with an especially ambitious automation goal is Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), one of the largest combined natural gas and electric energy companies in the United States. In just four years, the company has used low-code and conversational AI to empower more than 4,300 makers, including advanced digital creators and new citizen developers, to realize more than 315 low-code/no-code solutions that save nearly 527,000 hours (almost $75 million in savings) each year.  

We felt there was a ton of value to be had throughout our organization in terms of streamlining and automating a lot of low-value work and re-dedicating people in the organization to doing high-value work.

Mark Seveska, Executive Sponsor, IT Products and Enterprise Solutions, PG&E

Thanks to a powerful new AI assistant built with Copilot Studio that now meets 25% to 40% of PG&E’s help desk demand, the company has optimized the workloads of its busy agents and provided sizeable labor savings and service-level improvements. In fact, the amount of time saved on just one process—automating end-to-end SAP account unlock requests—adds up to 840 saved hours per year. 

Low-code development can facilitate collaboration and communication among teams by providing real-time access to information, coordinating workflows, and fostering collaboration between different departments or team members, like business users and pro developers. 

According to Gartner Webinar, “By 2026, code written by developers/humans will be reduced by 50% due to generative AI code generation models.” ³

Further underlining the transformative power of AI, research presented in a Gartner webinar on generative AI’s practical applications suggests a significant shift in the development landscape. By 2026, human-written code could be reduced by up to 50% due to the advent of generative AI code generation models, reshaping the future role of developers and accelerating the pace of innovation.³ 

For instance, Africa’s largest bank—Standard Bank of South Africa—has adopted a low-code approach to automate processes, conduct analyses, and develop solutions for various business requirements. They have established a Center of Excellence (CoE) to support more than 1,500 citizen developers who utilize Microsoft Power Platform across the bank’s global network.   

Employees who had never dreamed of being developers were surprised at how easily they could build solutions with Power Platform to solve their business challenges.

Richard Blackwell, Standard Bank Infrastructure Management, Employee Experience, Head – Engineering Team, Standard Bank of South Africa

With strong governance, thanks to its CoE, the bank has been able to grow from productivity solutions for smaller teams to enterprise solutions, like an IT help desk bot built in Copilot Studio that now resolves 99% of all employee queries.

Discover how Microsoft Copilot Studio can help improve customer and employee experiences in your organization.

Get started with Copilot Studio today

As we wrap up our discussion, it’s clear that the transformative power of AI lies in its capacity to elevate both the customer and employee experience. By integrating conversational AI and crafting your own copilots with Copilot Studio, organizations can unlock unprecedented levels of efficiency, gain deeper customer insights, and chart new pathways for growth, truly embodying AI as a strategic asset.  

Whether you’re at the inception of your AI adoption journey or looking to scale existing capabilities, Copilot Studio offers a robust, low-code platform that simplifies the design, enhancement, and management of AI copilots, making it accessible for users of all expertise levels to deploy solutions across various channels swiftly. Begin your transformative journey with Copilot Studio today and extend the capabilities of copilots or create ones uniquely on your own.

Start a free trial of Copilot Studio.

Sources:

¹ The next frontier of customer engagement: AI-enabled customer service, McKinsey & Company, 2023.

2 Gartner, How Generative AI Can Help Meet Customer Experience Expectations, By Gene Alvarez, Uma Challa, Leah Leachman, 3 August 2023.

3 Gartner Webinar, Beyond the Hype: The Practical Applications & Use Cases of Generative AI, 2023.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Improving customer and employee experiences with Microsoft Copilot Studio   appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Conversational AI refers to a computer’s ability to understand human communication. Conversational AI solutions are based on conversational interactions between human users and AI agents. Custom AI assistants or copilots made possible by conversational AI have become essential for automating routine processes, providing valuable insights, and elevating customer and employee experiences.

And because conversational AI can simplify the development of new, custom AI assistants, choosing the right platform can empower organizations to innovate and quickly transform employee and customer interactions. In this blog, we explore what conversational AI can deliver for modern businesses and address the key factors that chief information officers (CIOs) should consider when incorporating conversational AI solutions into their organizations.

Driving digital transformation

Conversational AI lies at the forefront of digital transformation, and its ability to drive innovation and transform customer interactions makes it not just an asset but a necessity for maintaining competitive advantage. According to research cited from Forrester, 71% of business and technology professionals familiar with conversational AI have indicated their organizations were actively investing in it.¹

AI-enabled assistants are invaluable for automating routine tasks, freeing humans to take on more complex challenges. By integrating these assistants into digital touchpoints, organizations can enhance their digital presence and stay competitive.

At Microsoft, we’ve seen the impact of copilots, which are Microsoft’s AI assistants, on productivity first-hand with our own employees and early customers. In a study of 1,300 Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 users across different functions and industries, we learned that the impact of copilots on productivity can be profound. After just 11 weeks of usage, the average person reports saving 14 minutes per day for a time savings of almost five hours per month, and the most efficient users are saving up to 30 minutes per day—the equivalent of 10 hours per month.²

For organizations that want to build their custom copilots, there’s Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft’s next-generation conversational AI studio. Copilot Studio combines generative AI, large language models, and a rules-based engine to provide end-to-end low-code development and transform the way copilots are designed, enhanced, and managed. Users of all skill levels can easily create automated, connected copilots and publish them to any channel with a few clicks.

As a graphical low-code tool for creating and maintaining copilots, Copilot Studio makes it possible to design individual AI assistants that can serve employees, customers, and partners using an organization’s knowledge, connectors to line-of-business (LOB) applications, and its own custom topics.

Microsoft has been named as a “Leader” in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General Purpose Conversational AI Software 2023 Vendor Assessment. The report states, “Good Conversational AI solutions can improve productivity, increase customer satisfaction, and provide 24 x 7 support at a fraction of the cost of human agents.” The report went on to say, “Microsoft’s customers praised its overall engineering expertise and its industry and use case expertise in conversational AI, particularly the accuracy of its speech-to-text offerings.”³

Learn more about Copilot Studio.

Centralizing cloud management

Using conversational AI to create low-code AI assistants is just the first step—to ensure operational objectives across departments, it will be critical to maintain vigilant oversight of their performance throughout your organization.

Copilot Studio’s unified cloud control provides IT with centralized management, integrated analytics, and enterprise-grade security. It simplifies the monitoring and analysis of key performance metrics and uses AI-enhanced insights to track topic trends and usage patterns across every platform—from web interfaces to mobile apps—which helps ensure a consistent end-user experience.

Copilot Studio also simplifies the update process with a few simple clicks. No longer bogged down by complex coding, your team can swiftly implement updates, ensuring your conversational AI maintains peak performance.

One early Copilot Studio customer that has seen the benefit of easy updates is PayPal, which credits Copilot Studio for increasing employee loyalty and engagement by helping reduce workloads and costs for its support team.

Copilot Studio enables us to build and make quick updates to an employee-facing copilot that can reason over multiple knowledge sources and provide consistent and relevant answers. ⁴

Ramesh Murugan, Director, Employee Technology & Experiences, PayPal

Ensuring customer satisfaction

With its ability to understand and respond to questions and provide personalized, multi-channel interactions, conversational AI truly shines in enhancing customer experiences. In today’s customer service domain, where swift and efficient resolution of inquiries can significantly impact customer satisfaction and loyalty, reliability is essential.  

According to a recent Forrester report on conversational AI for customer service, “Customers reach out to brands for support when they have a question or a problem that needs to be solved. It is very important to customers in a support interaction that they get what they need quickly and efficiently, particularly with mundane tasks such as checking order status or a company’s hours of operation. A good self-service application makes things easy for the customer, which is what they want.” ⁵

Learn how Copilot Studio can help transform your organization’s customer interactions.

Managing IT governance and risk

One conversational AI challenge that CIOs grapple with is IT governance and risk management. AI assistants can be powerful assistants capable of transforming work processes, but only when users consider them reliable and trustworthy.

According to Gartner^®, “Customers expect effortless access to content, quick resolution of issues, and seamless product experiences. Churn rates can be high if the information provided by the company is inconsistent or even contradictory, resolving problems takes a lot of customer time, or the AI assistant experience is not intuitive or doesn’t meet expectations. Smoother encounters with your organization are the prize to pursue—not just cost cutting. Replacing service people with bots that annoy or frustrate those seeking help will not boost retention.” ⁶

Microsoft takes trust seriously, and we’re proud of our contributions as a leader in AI. Microsoft has been conducting critical research into generative AI (GAI), machine learning (ML), and related areas since 2014, and in 2019 we demonstrated our commitment to responsible AI by creating a dedicated Office of Responsible AI, which developed RAI Standard for translating principles into actionable guidance for our engineering teams. Furthermore, we require our teams to follow the Responsible AI Standard and complete a responsible AI impact assessment as part of our internal compliance review process before shipping any AI product.

Additionally, Copilot Studio’s compliance features ensure responsible AI practices and data security. Microsoft complies with data protection and privacy laws applicable to cloud services around the world. Our compliance with world-class industry standards is verified.

Self-service for employees

Of course, AI assistants can be used in nearly every dimension of a business, not just customer service. Internally, AI assistants offer self-service options for employees. From IT support to HR inquiries, conversational AI can help employees find answers instantly. CIOs should promote self-service adoption to empower employees and optimize resource allocation.

Organizations implementing Copilot Studio have created sophisticated copilots that alleviate the workload of helpdesk agents by automating mundane and repetitive tasks. This innovation has led to shorter wait times and enhanced productivity across the board.

These custom copilots are capable of addressing 25% to 40% of help desk inquiries, providing efficient self-service solutions that either resolve queries directly or navigate employees to specific resources. By automating functions such as system logins and account management, these organizations have realized substantial labor savings, amounting to an annual financial benefit of over $1 million.

To explore the transformative impact of Copilot Studio in streamlining operations and reallocating resources towards higher-value work, consider reading the customer story of Pacific Gas & Electric.

Start using Copilot Studio today

In conclusion, conversational AI is no longer a futuristic concept; it’s a strategic imperative. CIOs who embrace it as part of their technology roadmap will unlock value, enhance customer experiences, and position their organizations for success in the digital age.

Begin your conversational AI journey with a free trial of Copilot Studio today.

Sources:

¹ Design Better Chatbots, Forrester

² AI Data Drop: The 11 by 11 Tipping Point (microsoft.com)

³ IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General Purpose Conversational AI Software 2023 Vendor Assessment (doc #US49988023, November 2023) 

⁴ How early adopters are transforming their organizations with copilots | Microsoft Copilot Studio

⁵ The Conversational AI For Customer Service Landscape, Q4 2023

⁶ Gartner, How Generative AI Can Help Meet Customer Experience Expectations; By Gene Alvarez, Uma Challa, Leah Leachman, 3 August 2023

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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