Welcome to the What’s new in Copilot Studio series. This series will provide all the exciting announcements and updates from Microsoft Copilot Studio on a monthly basis. Since Copilot Studio is a software as a service (SaaS) product, new features and capabilities light up every month making your agents even more powerful—and this blog series will feature some of these capabilities every month.
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.
