In this edition of our monthly roundup, we’re recapping the most notable new Microsoft Copilot Studio features released in March 2025:
- Autonomous agents: now generally available
- Deep reasoning in agents
- Agent flows in Copilot Studio
- Generative orchestration: now generally available
- Model Context Protocol
- Tools and prompts inside Copilot Studio
- Open web search
- Find and install Microsoft-built agents inside Copilot Studio
- Private preview opportunity: try GPT-4.5 in Copilot Studio
1. Autonomous agents: now generally available
Responding instantly to critical events is more vital than ever, especially for organizations operating on a global scale. Whether it’s a finance team managing budget thresholds, a sales team seizing renewal opportunities early, or a frontline team addressing urgent low-supply alerts, timely action drives efficiency and impact.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of autonomous agents, designed to keep you proactive by automating responses to critical events. The need for manual checks, scheduled workflows, or complex custom API solutions is gone. Using triggers, you can configure your agents to wait for specific events and execute a set of actions when that event happens. The instructions you provide—written in natural language, not code—add autonomous capabilities to your agent which can then monitor, detect, and react to pertinent events to automatically carry out the workflow you defined.
These workflows can handle a wide variety of tasks, from simple actions, like notifying users of updates, to more complex automation, such as automatically ordering new equipment for your department when a new employee joins. While these agents run in the background, you’ll maintain full visibility into every action the agent takes through the Activity tab, ensuring transparency and control.
With triggers, agents evolve from working with you, to also working for you. Autonomous agents dramatically save time for individuals, teams, and entire organizations by automating business processes and getting tasks done across every department.
Learn more about getting started with triggers here.
2. Deep reasoning in agents
On March 25th, CVP Charles Lamanna announced the preview release of deep reasoning for agents, which enables agents to handle complex business processes more effectively. With this new release, agents can leverage advanced reasoning models like OpenAI o1, along with your enterprise data, to process information, analyze data, and help you take action in subjective, complex situations.
Deep reasoning can be applied in both declarative and autonomous agents—and, in fact, you can build your own deep reasoning agents to solve complex problems specific to your organization and data. There are many ways to use deep reasoning agents’ critical thinking skills, including analyzing intricate patterns in demand forecasting, qualifying and categorizing sales leads, identifying opportunities and providing smarter recommendations, and more.
Check out this video for an example demonstration of how deep reasoning can help a team create RFPs and respond to customers more quickly:
Copilot Studio agents with deep reasoning capabilities process information more thoroughly, analyze complex business data sets to uncover deeper insights, and help enterprises make better decisions. Employing these skills in autonomous agents, especially, can create a whole new world of opportunity to offload, streamline, or augment business processes throughout your organization.
Learn more about deep reasoning in autonomous agents here.
3. Agent flows in Copilot Studio
At the other end of the reasoning spectrum, agent flows in Copilot Studio enable you to execute repeatable business processes by automatically following a predefined sequence of actions. Generally available on March 31st, agent flows are structured, rules-based workflows that incorporate AI actions to quickly produce predictable results.
When do agent flows make sense over the use of a self-assembling agent? They’re ideal for business processes that require consistency and control, such as routing tasks or applying rules, and can be very helpful in maintaining compliance. Because they are designed to replicate a process every time—even hundreds or thousands of times a day—agent flows don’t require the reasoning or generative effort of a self-assembling agent, which makes them faster.
Note that agent flows can operate independently or integrate as actions within existing agents. Built using prebuilt or custom connectors, flows can also be reused across agents to reduce setup time and standardize efficiencies across your organization.
Watch this demo and see how you can build an agent flow inside Copilot Studio to manage customer feedback:
With options to add both deep reasoning and agent flows to your automated business processes, you can choose the right AI tool for the job at hand and enjoy a truly well-rounded agentic experience.
4. Generative orchestration: now generally available
Anticipating every possible question an end-user might ask agents is nearly impossible. With generative orchestration now available in general availability for English (en-US) agents, you no longer have to try. This powerful feature eliminates the need to manually define countless trigger phrases or delineate every conversation flow through topics.
Unlike classic orchestration, which relies on predefined, manually authored topics, generative orchestration enables agents to generate contextual intelligent responses on the fly based on your organizational knowledge sources, actions, and topics. Agents can even generate their own questions to collect information they need to solve the end-user’s problem, or ask for confirmation when needed before executing an action. This creates more natural conversations, decreases escalations and abandonment rates, and broadens the range of scenarios agents can successfully support.
Generative orchestration further enables your agents to handle multiple requests that come in a single query, such as an end-user asking to find their nearest store and get that store’s opening hours. By being able to comprehensively answer the end-user’s questions, the agents create a better experience and higher satisfaction during agent interactions.
To enable generative orchestration, simply toggle it on from your agent’s overview page. You can also find it in “Agent Settings” under the Generative AI tab. Try it out today and unlock more intuitive, more engaging, and more natural conversational agent experiences.
Learn more about generative orchestration here.
5. Model Context Protocol
In March, we announced the public preview of Model Context Protocol (MCP) support in Copilot Studio — a powerful new way to streamline how you connect AI apps, APIs, and data sources into your agents. MCP makes it easy for makers to integrate knowledge servers and external tools directly into Copilot Studio, helping you build and scale intelligent agents faster than ever.
MCP connectors automatically bring actions and knowledge from your server into your agent, including names, inputs, outputs, and descriptions, and keeps them in sync as updates happen on the backend. That means no more manually updating outdated tools. Even better, you now have access to a growing library of pre-built, MCP-enabled connectors in the marketplace, making it faster and easier to tap into existing systems while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance.
For makers, MCP unlocks a new level of flexibility and efficiency. With Software Development Kit (SDK) support, you can build your own MCP server, publish it through a connector, and instantly use those tools in your agents. Whether you’re working with internal APIs or third-party services, MCP empowers you to create more responsive intelligent agents with less complexity, and more time to focus on innovation.
Learn more about how to get started with MCP here.
6. Tools and prompts inside Copilot Studio
Copilot Studio has a new centralized place where makers can create, manage, and assign reusable functionality across agents: Tools. At the Copilot Studio application level, you’ll find Tools in the left-hand navigation. Click into it to try out the first tool available, Prompts.
In Copilot Studio, prompts instruct the GPT model to behave in a certain way or perform a specific task. A custom prompt can guide the model to answer a question, complete text, translate languages, summarize a document, and identify tasks, to-dos, and action items in text. The complexity of a custom prompt can range from a single sentence to something more intricate, depending on the task. When this prompt is assigned to an agent, the agent follows the prompt before responding, giving the maker more control over the responses the agent will generate and resulting in higher-quality answers or actions from the agent.
The Prompts tool allows makers to easily create custom prompts inside Copilot Studio, either at the app level—then assigning the prompts to agents—or within an agent or topic. Inside the tool, you’ll find out-of-the-box templates to help you instruct the model effectively, or you can write the prompt from scratch. Then you can test the prompt with sample data or inputs before assigning it to an agent.
The Tools menu and in-app prompt builder are powerful new additions for two reasons. First, they streamline the experience so that it’s easier to get started on prompts, easier to test, and easier to work on prompts at the level you need them (app, agent, or topic), all inside one tool. These prompts also use the same consumption-based meter as those created in the external tool, no extra license or cost involved.
Second, they make these functions endlessly reusable. Makers can build a prompt once and assign it to multiple agents, and any maker can use prompts created by other makers in the same Copilot Studio environment. More consistent, more collaborative, and more scalable. All this results in more effective agents and more efficient business processes.
Future updates will expand available tool types, but you can start using the prompt builder inside Copilot Studio right away. Check out Tools in the left navigation of Copilot Studio, and keep an eye out for new tools coming soon!
7. Open web search
Open web search has arrived in Copilot Studio, giving your agents the ability to surface high-quality, real-time information from the web when configured knowledge sources fall short. This new capability helps your agents deliver relevant responses in broader, more open-ended scenarios like research, content creation, and competitive analysis—without requiring makers to anticipate every possible data source in advance.
Connecting agents to publicly available information through open web search significantly expands their ability to provide accurate and up-to-date answers. Whether enhancing internal knowledge with the latest technological advancements or empowering end-users with richer, more flexible responses, this integration ensures your agents stay relevant and valuable. This can help to increase usage, drive higher satisfaction rates, and create greater impact.
Build smarter, more adaptable agents that seamlessly meet a broader range of business needs with this capability, now available in public preview.
8. Find and install Microsoft-built agents inside Copilot Studio
The Microsoft-built and Microsoft-certified agent catalog is now available in preview for admins to discover and install within Copilot Studio! On the “Create” page in Copilot Studio, admins will now see available agents under the “Built by Microsoft” heading and can click on an agent to install it.
Once installed, the admin can go to the new agent from the installation dialog box or the banner at the top of the page. From there, they can customize the agent, install first-party add-ons, and configure connections as needed.
By accessing the whole agent installation process inside Copilot Studio, it’s faster and easier to create the agents you need, empowering your team to more efficiently deploy, manage, and scale properly configured agents across your organization and processes.
Learn more about how to install agents from the catalog here.
9. Private preview opportunity: try GPT-4.5 in Copilot Studio
Copilot Studio is actively testing GPT-4.5, the latest AI model from OpenAI, to power generative answer experiences. Today, we are making GPT-4.5 available to customers through a limited preview!
Users will have the opportunity to explore the capabilities of Copilot Studio agents powered by GPT-4.5 on an agent-by-agent basis. If you would like to explore GPT-4.5 in Copilot Studio and register your interest in the preview, click here.
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 here: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio – Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn
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.
