Welcome to What’s new in Copilot Studio. This is your go-to series for all the exciting announcements and updates from Microsoft Copilot Studio. Since Copilot Studio is a software as a service (SaaS) product, we seek to deliver new features and capabilities every month, and this blog series will feature some of these capabilities.
For this edition, we’ll talk about:
- Copilot Chat recap
- PAYGO meter for Microsoft Copilot Studio
- Enhanced Answers with Semantic Search
- Knowledge tuning public preview
- Image upload
- Security data loss prevention (DLP) updates
- Arabic (ar-SA) language support
Copilot Studio in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
As a part of our continued mission to empower every person with a Copilot and transform their business with agents, we announced Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, a free and secure AI chat experience powered by GPT-4. With Copilot Chat, your entire organization can start using Copilot and agents today. These agents are easy to create directly in Copilot, highly discoverable, and can be published to Copilot Chat. This enables org-wide agents to be used in a common UI for all employees, regardless of Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing, making agents more accessible for all.
For example, a team could build a Budget Agent that is equipped with knowledge about the team and helps submit expense reports, provide financial insights, and check policy compliance—and everyone on the team could use this agent through Copilot Chat, even if they don’t have an individual Copilot license.
This experience is designed to be enterprise-grade, providing security, privacy, and compliance features for all users. Additionally, IT controls are available to manage and monitor the usage within the organization.
Read the full announcement of agents experienced in Copilot Chat.
Shared consumption meter for Copilot Studio
In December 2024, we introduced consumption-based pricing for agents built in Copilot Studio. This new billing model offers greater flexibility and scalability for organizations looking to easily use natural language to build agents, without committing to upfront license purchases.
The PAYGO meter allows customers to pay only for the messages they consume, providing a cost-effective alternative to the traditional prepaid message packs. This model is designed to accommodate varying usage patterns, making it ideal for businesses with fluctuating demands.
Under the PAYGO model, customers are billed $0.01 per message. This includes both classic (non-generative AI) and generative answers. Agent responses generated from grounded knowledge, outside of the Microsoft Graph, will cost two messages. The consumption rate for autonomous agents and agents with generative orchestration will scale based on the complexity of the task completed. The PAYGO meter uses your Azure subscription as the payment instrument, ensuring seamless integration with existing billing processes. This meter is available in regions where Copilot Studio’s generative AI capabilities are also available.
Following is a list of Copilot Studio events and their respective billing rates:
- Classic answer: 1 message
- Generative answer: 2 messages
- Autonomous action: 25 messages
- Tenant Microsoft Graph grounding for messages: 30 messages
By paying only for the messages consumed, organizations can optimize their spending and avoid overpaying for unused capacity. There are no in-product feature differences between the PAYGO meter and the prepaid message packs. Customers can have the same capabilities and benefits, regardless of the billing model they choose. However, if the purchased capacity of message packs is reached with the pre-paid packs, makers will be restricted from creating, editing, or publishing agents for the duration of the month in which capacity was reached.
We recommend signing up for the meter even if you purchase message packs to handle these scenarios without disruption. The meter won’t count utilization in any month until purchased message packs have been fully exhausted. If capacity is reached, agents that are already published will remain functional without interruption, but updates to the agent cannot be published during that time. Learn more about message allocation.
Setting up the PAYGO meter for Copilot Studio is a straightforward process. Administrators can manage their message capacity and monitor consumption through the Microsoft Power Platform admin center (PPAC). The capacity management features provide detailed, daily usage data, helping organizations plan and budget effectively.
See more information on setting up consumption billing.
Improved SharePoint responses with semantic search
We’re excited to announce enhanced search capabilities in Copilot Studio, which enables semantic search over your SharePoint knowledge.
By enabling the new “Enhanced search” results, your agent can leverage the semantic index for Copilot feature to semantically index the data you have stored in SharePoint and yield more relevant search results. You can easily control the “Enhanced search” results setting from the “Generative AI” settings page.
This feature is turned on by default, so you can get immediate benefits without additional setup. Tenants with Microsoft 365 Copilot can create custom agents and leverage the same index used by Microsoft 365 Copilot. These same tenants can also use SharePoint and Microsoft Graph connectors containing files up to 200 MB, resulting in answers that are more relevant for you.
To benefit from this more robust indexing capability, agents must share a tenant with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Learn more about billing for tenant Graph grounding for messages.
Learn more about enhanced search.
Knowledge tuning in public preview
The ability to make data-driven decisions and fine-tune your knowledge accordingly is now available to all in public preview. Adding knowledge to agents equips them with your enterprise-specific data and enables agents to generate responses grounded on that information. However, agents can still face challenges in identifying the correct data. By leveraging these new advancements for knowledge tuning and knowledge analytics, makers can get recommendations and insights into how their knowledge sources are utilized by their agents and ensure their knowledge is more robust and effective.
The “Knowledge” page now includes relevant analytics such as knowledge usage, errors, and answer rates. Makers will also have access to suggestions for how to improve their knowledge, including Microsoft Dataverse tables, SharePoint libraries, or public websites that may be relevant to their agents.
Additionally, makers can designate verified and trusted knowledge sources as official sources so that these specific sources are prioritized and highlighted in responses provided by the agent.
We hope that these improvements will help makers derive even greater value from their data sources. We’re not stopping here though, additional capabilities coming soon include further recommendations on relevant Microsoft Graph files or SharePoint libraries, and the ability to define custom instructions for connectors or SharePoint data sources.
Learn more about the advanced knowledge tuning capabilities.
Let agents analyze images for you
Today, employees and customers who chat with agents for support are limited to sending and receiving messages only. However, many scenarios require sending an image for the agent to analyze and respond appropriately. This capability is now available in public preview.
When end-users upload images to the chat, agents can seamlessly analyze both text and visuals, ensuring a smooth conversation flow and expanding the range of supported scenarios. Whether you’re a field technician attaching a photo of a faulty part for troubleshooting or an analyst sharing a chart for insights on emerging trends, this feature enhances how agents can support your needs. Users can upload a wide range of images, including products, blueprints, maps, and charts.
To try out this feature, head to Copilot Studio and enable “Image input” under the “Generative AI” section of the agent’s settings. Keep in mind that enabling end-user image uploads requires “Generative mode” to be turned on. Once enabled, see how your agent can analyze and respond to the images you send.
Learn more about image input from users.
Security and data loss prevention (DLP) updates
We believe it’s critical to secure agents built in Copilot Studio and are always investing in ways to improve security and governance features in this pursuit. Currently, DLP enforcement is disabled by default. The process to enable and enforce these DLP policies is a two-step process, resulting in many agents published without sufficient DLP configured.
Starting January 2025, the default mode for all tenants has been changed to be Soft-Enabled. The Soft-Enabled DLP state allows published agents to continue to run without enforcing any DLP policies. However, it blocks any further updates to agents that are affected by DLP blocks. In addition, the option to toggle to Disabled mode in the PowerShell module will be disabled.
Furthermore, in February 2025 the default mode for all tenants will be changed to Enabled. Enabled mode enforces DLP checks completely for running agents and updates to existing agents. All published agents and updates will be subject to the DLP policies that apply as defined by the tenant.
These changes will help ensure all agents built and published through Copilot Studio are safe and secure, and follow the DLP policies defined by the tenant.
Learn more about DLP and other best practices.
Arabic support is now available
We now have 27 languages in Copilot Studio, with the addition of Arabic. This exciting update brings enhanced accessibility and usability for our Arabic-speaking users.
Users can now chat in Arabic to ask questions or seek support, with responses also generated in Arabic. Agents grounded in knowledge can provide accurate and relevant answers in Arabic, ensuring seamless communication. Additionally, Arabic is available for interactive voice response agents, making voice interactions more inclusive and effective.
However, there are some important limitations. Arabic is not currently available in the UI of the authoring canvas or maker experiences within Copilot Studio. Additionally, Arabic is not yet supported for “Generative mode,” which enables agents to leverage large language models to dynamically select the best combination of topics, actions, and knowledge sources during conversations.
We’re committed to continuously improving our platform and expanding language support to better serve our user base. Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements.
Learn more about all the supported languages.
More ways to stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio
Bookmark this page to learn about features as we ship them, as well as upcoming releases: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio – Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn.
Watch monthly episodes highlighting Copilot Studio news and feature deep dives in “This Month in Copilot Studio” with Dona Sarkar, Microsoft Principal Cloud Advocate, and Kendra Springer, Principal Group Product Manager with Copilot Studio: This Month in Copilot Studio.
Get started today
To learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio and how it can transform your organization’s productivity, visit the Copilot Studio website or sign up for our free trial today.
