• The case for AI in employee assistance
• Chapter 1: Governance means getting your data right
• Chapter 2: Implementation with intention
• Chapter 3: Driving adoption by breaking old habits
• Begin your journey with the Employee Self-Service Agent

The case for AI in employee assistance

The advent of generative AI tools and agents has been a game changer for the modern workplace at Microsoft. And one of the foremost examples of how we’re reaping the benefits of this agentic revolution is our deployment of our new Employee Self-Service Agent across the company.

Thanks to the power of AI, agents, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, our employees—and workers everywhere—are discovering new ways to be more productive at their jobs every day. Recent research shows that knowledge workers are increasingly seeing big gains from using AI tools for work tasks. According to our Microsoft Work Trend Index:

As an AI-first Frontier Firm, Microsoft is at the leading edge of a transformation that’s bringing this technology into all aspects of our workplace operations. With tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot providing “intelligence on tap,” we’re forging a human-led, AI-operated work culture that enables our employees to accomplish more than ever before.

Bringing AI to employee assistance

As part of this move to embed AI across our enterprise, it was a natural step for us to apply this burgeoning technology to a common pain point for us and many workplaces today—employee assistance.

Workers in organizations large and small face many common issues in their day-to-day jobs. Whether it’s a problem with their device, a question about their benefits, or a facilities request, our typical employee was often forced to navigate a bewildering array of tools, apps, and systems in order to get help with each specific task.

This confusion is reflected in research showing that most workers are dissatisfied with existing employee-service solutions.

Our studies show that most employees have trouble finding the appropriate tools and resources they need to address their workplace-related questions.

Realizing that this was an ideal opportunity for AI, we set out to develop a state-of-the-art agentic solution. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we partnered with our product groups to develop and deploy the Employee Self-Service Agent, a “single pane of glass” that employees can turn to any time they need help. The product is now broadly available in general release.

“With this employee self-service solution, we’re shaping a new era in worker support. With AI, every interaction is intuitive, every resource is within reach, and help feels seamless—creating an experience that empowers our people and accelerates business outcomes.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Employee Experience

Because Copilot is our “UI for AI,” the Employee Self-Service Agent is delivered as an agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot. If your employees have access to Copilot, you can deploy the agent at your company at no extra cost. If your employees don’t have a Copilot license, they can access it via Copilot Chat if it’s enabled by your IT administrator.

For the initial development and launch of our Employee Self-Service Agent, we decided to provide agentic help in three categories: Human resources, IT support, and campus services (real estate and facilities). Every organization will have to make its own determination for which functions to include in their implementation. Note that the agent is inherently flexible and expandable; we plan to add additional capabilities, such as finance and legal, in the future.

We learned many lessons in the almost year-long process of developing and implementing the Employee Self-Service Agent across our organization worldwide. The goal of this guide is to pass on what we learned—including how we used it to provide value to our employees and vendors—to help you prepare for, implement, and drive adoption of your own version of the agent.  

“With this employee self-service solution, we’re shaping a new era in worker support,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Employee Experience. “With AI, every interaction is intuitive, every resource is within reach, and help feels seamless—creating an experience that empowers our people and accelerates business outcomes.”

Before you start: Developing your plan

As you embark on your Employee Self-Service Agent journey, make sure to establish a clear and structured plan. This was a critical step for us in our deployment, and we can say with confidence that it will help you avoid surprises and increase your chances of a successful outcome.

Based on our experience here at Microsoft, the below is a high-level outline of the steps you should consider as you prepare for deploying your agent.

1. Define prerequisites
Start by making sure that all foundational elements for the agent are in place.

• Assign licenses to your employees who will interact with the agent. They will need Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Chat.
• Verify readiness by configuring your Power Platform environments, applying Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, and setting up isolation (limited and controlled deployment with guardrails in place) where needed.
• Ensure connectivity with critical systems by confirming that you have appropriate APIs and connectors available and functioning for the essential workplace systems that your organization uses (e.g., Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, and ServiceNow).

2. Identify your core team and responsibilities
Successful implementation of the Employee Self-Service Agent requires collaboration across multiple roles and departments in your organization.

• Business owners from the areas your agent will cover—such as human resources and IT support—can help you define requirements, priorities, success criteria, and telemetry needs.
• Platform administrators, particularly for Power Platform and tenant/identity teams, can manage your technical configuration.
• Content owners and editors are needed to identify the knowledge sources to surface in the agent, curate new knowledge sources, and maintain the data underpinning these sources on an ongoing basis.
• Subject matter experts can provide important “golden” prompt and user scenarios that the agent should prioritize and answer accurately.
• Compliance, privacy, and security leaders and their teams are needed to address risk considerations.
• Support professionals can help build a structure for live agent escalation and ticketing operations (in situations where the agent is unable to provide a solution).
• Focus groups of end users assist with validating requirements and scenarios, as well as help with testing the agent.

3. Establish a clear timeline
We found that creating a schedule for the creation, implementation, and adoption of the agent is crucial. This phased approach will help you maintain momentum and accountability over the duration of the project.

For example, here’s a rough implementation timeline that you might use to gauge your progress:

4. Articulate your vision

Communicate your rollout plan to your team, including timelines and phases, and adjust it based on feedback. Establish clear goals and meaningful success metrics to guide you and make sure your efforts are in alignment with your company objectives. (Note: You may want to consider key upcoming projects or events in your organization and link the agent roadmap to them. This will help you meet your project’s success criteria faster and encourage quicker agent adoption.)

5. Define your governance

This phase will allow you to define policies and standards and conduct a thorough content audit to ensure accuracy, relevance, security, and sustainability.

6. Implement your agent

This phase involves configuration and integration, followed by testing.

7. Roll out the agent while driving adoption and measurement

We advise deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent using a phased, or ringed, approach. We started with a small group of employees, then gradually rolled it out to larger and larger groups  before finally releasing it to our entire organization.

We encouraged adoption with internal targeted communications and promotional efforts. Careful measurement enabled us to track impact and optimize agent performance. This type of concerted change management allowed us to share the latest product developments with our employees and to keep them excited and engaged with the tool.

By investing sufficient time and effort in the planning phase of your deployment, you’ll create a strong foundation for a secure, scalable, and successful self-service agent experience.

Chapter 1: Governance means getting your data right

When a Microsoft employee enters a query into an AI chat tool like Microsoft 365 Copilot, they know that they may not receive an individualized response that is directly specific to their situation. They are aware that they might need to verify the answer they receive with further research and additional sources.

But when it comes to our company-endorsed self-service agent, the stakes are different. Our employees expect to receive accurate and personally relevant responses when they ask for help. This is particularly true for queries related to important personal details, like HR-related questions about leave policies or benefits.

“People expect personally tailored and highly accurate answers, especially for HR moments that really matter. We designed the Employee Self‑Service Agent with that expectation in mind, pairing trusted data and deep personalization with strong governance controls so that privacy, security, and trust are built into every interaction.”

Prerna Ajmera, general manager, HR digital strategy and innovation

Although the Employee Self-Service Agent comes pretrained with basic HR and IT support data, we found that the quality of the responses that our employees receive is directly connected to the accuracy, currency, and depth of the information we provide to the tool. You’ll want to spend the necessary time and effort to make sure that your data governance process is well thought-out and thorough, so that your employees experience the best possible results.

“Employee self‑service has a higher bar than generic AI tools,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager of HR strategy and innovation. “People expect personally tailored and highly accurate answers, especially for HR moments that really matter. We designed the Employee Self‑Service Agent with that expectation in mind, pairing trusted data and deep personalization with strong governance controls so that privacy, security, and trust are built into every interaction.”

Major considerations for governance

We learned that before you configure your agent, you need to establish guardrails that protect your data’s integrity and that build your employees’ trust. These considerations will form the backbone of your governance framework:

• Managing requirements: Define what the agent must deliver and align your stakeholders on clear, prioritized goals and objectives.
• Determining and managing resources: Ensure you have the right people, systems, and funding in place to support your full product lifecycle.
• Data security: Protect your sensitive employee information with strong controls, compliant storage, and least‑privilege access.
• User access: Establish who can use, administer, and update your agent, with appropriate permissions and guardrails.
• Change tracking: Monitor your updates to content, configurations, and workflows so your agent always reflects your current policies.
• Reviewing: Regularly evaluate your content’s accuracy, the agent’s performance, and your organizational fitness to help you keep your employees’ experience with the agent trustworthy.
• Auditing: Maintain traceability for compliance, incident investigation, and quality assurance across all of your data flows.
• Deployment control: Manage where, when, and how you roll out new versions of the agent to reduce disruption and ensure consistency.
• Rollback: Prepare a fast, safe path to reverting your changes if something breaks.

We found that addressing these considerations early in the process creates a governance structure that is proactive rather than reactive, increasing the quality of responses and setting your organization up for success.

Architecture essentials

Understanding the architecture of our agent helped our governance teams make informed decisions about our configuration and integration. To do that, they needed to review and understand its key architectural components. You’ll need to do the same.

Here’s a list of the different architecture components that our team assessed, to help you get started on your own process:   

• Topics: Structured intents (e.g., “view paystub”) that align to employee questions and drive consistent answers.
• Domain packages: Pre-curated bundles for different agent segments (like HR and IT support) that provide reusable patterns, prompts, and integrations.
• Knowledge sources: Documents, intranet pages, FAQs, and databases that ground responses in authoritative content.
• Connectors: Secure integrations to systems of record (like Workday or SAP SuccessFactors) can help enable read/write operations. (Because the Employee Self-Service Agent was built with Copilot Studio, it has access to more than 1,400 different connectors.)
• Instructions: Governance-approved rules and prompts that shape tone, guardrails, and escalation behavior.

Assessing and preparing your content

A key early governance step is to audit all relevant content in your knowledge bases. This process should include assessing, updating, and, if necessary, restructuring this information before it is ingested by the agent.

An important caveat here is that the agent’s ability to understand which policies and procedures apply to which employee relies on your content having consistent metadata, permissions, and content structure. We found that before feeding your data into the agent, you need to:

• Inventory existing content: Your content will incorporate many different types, such as SharePoint pages, Microsoft Teams posts, PDFs, intranet articles, and knowledge-base documents. The goal of the inventory process is to identify content that is complete rather than outdated, duplicative, or siloed; if there are issues with the content, they should be addressed before loading into the agent.
• Assign knowledge owners: The owners should be SMEs who can help validate, tag, and maintain the content going forward. Part of this process is training up knowledge owners to be able to prepare and maintain content in ways that make it easily consumable by both agents and people.
• Structure content for discoverability: All your content needs to have accurate metadata, well-defined topic pages, and consistent naming so that the agent can surface the right information at the right time.

We found that completing a thorough content audit helps us ensure that the Employee Self-Service Agent isn’t just chatting—it’s delivering trusted, up-to-date answers that save your workers time and effort as they go about their day.

Be aware of tone and conversational flow

Providing vetted and well-structured data to the agent is important, but it’s not the entire battle. You’ll also need to make sure your agent is given clear guidance on conversational tone and instructions on what to do in specific scenarios.

Make sure you incorporate:

• Global instructions: Define the agent’s voice, behavior, and escalation rules to ensure consistency and trust. 
• Topic-level triggers: Map natural language phrases to specific workflows (such as “reset password” or “check PTO”) so the agent routes these common queries correctly.
• Advanced knowledge rules: Prioritize which data sources to use in ambiguous scenarios, and define when the agent should ask clarifying questions.

Taking these steps gave our agent a better chance of being accurate, helpful, and aligned with our organization’s specific preferences.

Addressing common scenarios with “golden” content

Another vital aspect of your content audit is identifying the most frequently accessed information in each topic area.

A good example comes from the preparation of our IT support content for ingestion by the Employee Self-Service Agent. One of the focuses of this effort was on so-called “golden prompts:” the 20 or so topics that generate up to 80 percent of our employee queries (a version of the famous “80/20 rule”).

Our golden prompts are a curated set of scenarios that:

• Represent our critical user workflows and edge cases
• Possess clear, expected responses (golden responses)
• Cover core functionality that must never break

We made sure that the agent was providing high-quality responses for these common scenarios—we recommend you do the same.

Including “zero prompt” content

Another important aspect of your content process should be to develop “zero prompts.” These are preconfigured prompts in the agent that the user can simply click on to get an answer for a common issue or request.

For example, if one of your employees wants to understand how to set up a VPN, they simply click on the zero prompt provided for that topic. The tool then gives them complete instructions on how to set one up.

During our deployment of the agent, one case where we prepopulated the tool with content for a specific, high-demand scenario came when Microsoft made a major announcement regarding employees returning to the office. We knew this policy change would generate a lot of questions from our employees.

In preparation for this, we asked Microsoft 365 Copilot to create a single document that pulled in all the “return to office” material found in its verified HR content database. We then made this document available to the agent. Just by taking that simple step, we saw our user satisfaction ratings in the tool jump from 85 percent to 98 percent for that issue!

In your own deployment, think about what issues and topics generate the most questions from your employees. You can then prepare specific content to address these scenarios, which will increase your chances of success with the agent.

Data security and compliance

Data security was a high priority when we developed our agent, especially because it must necessarily access sensitive HR information on a regular basis. During product development, we made sure that the agent adhered to enterprise-grade security standards, including identity federation, least-privilege access, and encrypted storage.

Because the agent is built on Copilot Studio, it supports robust data-loss prevention features. The agent also complies with regulatory frameworks like General Data Protection Regulation through built-in auditing and data-retention policies.

One of the big advantages that an AI agent has over a static website or similar data source is the ability to personalize responses for each user. At the same time, we had to make sure that the agent had guardrails in place to avoid overexposing sensitive information. This included detailed disclaimers to help call out these kinds of responses and flag them for more careful handling.

Our agent complies fully with our accessibility standards as well. Like all Microsoft products and services, the tool underwent a rigorous review to ensure it was fully accessible for all users.

Responsible AI

Whenever a new AI application is launched, there may be concerns raised about potential challenges regarding bias, safety, and transparency. That’s why the Employee Self-Service Agent follows the Microsoft Responsible AI principles by default.

When you enable the sensitivity topic in your agent, it screens all responses for harassment, abuse, discrimination, unethical behavior, and other sensitive areas. We tested the agent thoroughly for objectionable responses before it was launched to a broad internal audience at Microsoft.

In addition, the agent includes an emotional intelligence (EQ) option. This feature is designed to make responses more empathetic, context-aware, and relevant for diverse user audiences. It analyzes the conversation’s context and tailors the agent’s replies to ensure that users feel understood and valued throughout their session (which could be particularly relevant for any conversations related to sensitive HR topics, such as family leave). The EQ option is customizable and can be turned off by your product admins.

Key takeaways

The following are important considerations for data governance when you deploy your Employee Self-Service Agent:

• Employee expectations regarding accuracy and relevance are high for employee self-service tools, which makes data governance a key aspect of your deployment.
• Consider which data repositories are best to incorporate into your agent, and make sure they are up-to-date and well-structured. This process requires a thorough content audit.
• Pay special attention to the so-called “golden prompts” that make up a large percentage of expected queries. The agent’s answers to these questions should be top-notch.
• Restructuring content can improve response quality. When we anticipated huge interest in a particular topic, such as workplace policy changes, we restructured our content on that subject and saw a significant jump in user satisfaction.
• Build your agent to meet or exceed high standards for data security, privacy, and Responsible AI. These are vital concerns for any product that has access to sensitive personal information.

Learn more

How we did it at Microsoft

• Learn how we’re getting the most out of agents internally here at Microsoft with good governance. This story shares what our Microsoft Digital governance team learned while deploying AI-driven tools here at Microsoft.   
• Find out how we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility internally with Microsoft Copilot Studio. This post explains how we’re empowering our employees to create and extend Copilot-based agents using Copilot Studio.
• Read about how we’re infusing responsible AI principles into all our AI tools and projects at Microsoft. An article that explores the Microsoft Responsible AI Standard and how it informs our work with AI technologies at Microsoft Digital.

Further guidance for you

• Explore Microsoft Learn documentation for Microsoft Copilot Studio to read about key concepts in governance and security.
• Examine Microsoft Learn content related to security and data protection in Power Platform.
• Conduct the Microsoft 365 Copilot Optimization Assessment to understand your level of AI adoption and chart your course.
• Access Microsoft Learn documentation for Microsoft 365 Copilot to learn about data, privacy, security, and Zero Trust principles.

Chapter 2: Implementation with intention

Deploying a powerful and versatile tool like the Employee Self-Service Agent is no simple task. It requires guidance and buy-in from top leaders at the company, as well as detailed planning and execution across disparate parts of your organization. Here, we identify some of the key steps that we took here at Microsoft that can help guide you when launching your own self-service agent.

Determine category parameters

One of the first major decisions around implementing the agent is deciding which business function—we call them agent starters—to choose for your initial implementation.

We recommend starting with HR support or IT help (we started with HR). Both agent starters can be deployed into a single Employee Self-Service Agent experience, but they must be deployed one at a time. 

So you know, we’ve built the Employee Self-Service Agent to be connectable with other first- or third-party Copilot agents, enabling a seamless handoff to these agents without having to navigate to other tools or interfaces.

Understanding your deployment steps

There were four essential stages involved in the deployment of our agent, each with multiple steps. Here’s a quick rundown that you can use at your company:

1. Preparation for deployment
   • Establish roles: Define who will manage, configure, and support the tool, assigning responsibilities to ensure accountability during deployment.
   • Set up your environment: Prepare the necessary hardware, operating system, and network configurations so the agent can run smoothly.
   • Set up third-party system integration: Ensure your infrastructure can securely connect and exchange data with external systems that the agent will need to integrate with.
2. Installation
   • Install the agent: Deploy the core Employee Self-Service Agent software on the designated servers or endpoints.
   • Install accelerator packages: Add any desired connectors that enable the agent to communicate with commonly used systems for HR, payroll, IT support, etc.
3. Customization
   • Configure the core agent: Adjust default settings to align with your organization’s policies and workflows.
   • Identify knowledge sources: Specify where the agent will pull information from, such as internal knowledge bases or FAQs.
   • Provide common questions and responses: Add employee FAQs to improve the agent’s ability to respond quickly and accurately.
   • Identify sensitive queries: Flag questions and responses that involve confidential or regulated information to ensure they’ll be handled securely.
4. Publication
   • Approve the agent: Complete internal reviews and compliance checks to confirm the agent meets your organizational standards before full rollout.
   • Publish the agent: Make the configured agent available to your employees in your production environment.

Customization

The Employee Self-Service Agent operates as a custom agent within Copilot Studio, using our AI infrastructure via the Power Platform. The agent is constructed on a modular architecture that allows you to integrate it with your own enterprise data sources using APIs, prebuilt and custom connectors, and secure authentication mechanisms.

To streamline this integration process, we provide a library of prebuilt and custom connectors through both Copilot Studio and Power Platform. Preconfigured scenarios include connecting to major enterprise service providers such as Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, and ServiceNow. (View the full list of connectors offered by Copilot Studio.)

These connectors facilitate data exchange with the following systems and other agents in this ecosystem:

• HR information systems
• IT systems management
• Identity management
• Knowledge base platforms

We found that third-party integrations require setup effort and technical expertise across stakeholders in your tenant. Be sure to get buy-in and involve all relevant departments that will be impacted.

Rollout: A phased approach

As previously noted, we started our agent with HR content and then added IT support (we later expanded to include campus services help as well). We rolled the agent out to different groups of employees and geographic regions around the world over the course of months, adding new knowledge sources to the different categories at each step along the way. This gave us an opportunity to gather user data and refine performance of the tool as we went.

Adding campus support services required us to handle queries and tasks related to dining, transportation, facilities, and similar subjects. This was a challenging addition, because the facilities and real estate space—unlike the HR and IT support areas—doesn’t have many large service providers, which are easier to provide prebuilt connectors for.

One area that did lend itself to prebuilt connectors, however, was facilities ticketing.

Because many of our campus facilities vendors use Microsoft Dynamics 365, we were able to create an out-of-the-box connector in the agent for their ticketing process. You can take advantage of these kinds of preconfigured tools in your deployment.  

Key takeaways

Here are some things to remember when implementing the Employee Self-Service Agent at your organization:

• Decide which starter agent you will deploy first. We recommend starting with a single agent covering one area (vertical), such as HR or IT support, and then expanding from there.
• Consider a phased rollout to allow time to refine responses and ramp up the number of topic areas and knowledge sources installed in your agent.
• Use the prebuilt connectors to make it easier to integrate the agent with your existing systems.We developed customized connectors for major HR and IT service providers and a Microsoft 365 Dynamics connector to integrate with our many facilities vendors around the world.

Learn more

How we did it at Microsoft

• Learn how we’re embracing this “agentic” moment at Microsoft. This post describes how we’re integrating agents into many of our workflows and processes at the company.
• Get our step-by-step guide to how we’re unleashing API-powered agents at Microsoft. This article describes what we’ve learned from deploying agents internally at the company.

Further guidance for you

• Learn how to prepare for a successful Microsoft Employee Self-Service Agent implementation. This Microsoft 365 Copilot Blog story includes a webinar video on the same topic.
• Discover a step-by-step guide to getting your organization prepared for the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Check out our Microsoft Learn content about deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Learn more about the customizable accelerator packs that come with the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Read our Microsoft Learn content about installing the agent.
• Explore Microsoft Learn content about customizing your agent.
• Dive into detailed information about integrating the agent with Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP SuccessFactors.
• Work through this learning path to discover how you can create agents with Copilot Studio.

Chapter 3: Driving adoption by breaking old habits

Once upon a time, when our employees needed help with a technical issue or an HR question, they literally picked up the phone and called the relevant internal phone number. That quickly evolved into an email-centered system, where employee questions were sent to a centralized inbox that would then generate a service request. Still later, chat-based help was introduced.

Using AI to handle employee questions and service requests is a natural step in this evolution, as large-language models were built to parse vast data repositories and return the right information (often with the help of multi-turn queries and responses). And by encouraging self-service, an AI agent can help meet employee needs faster while saving the organization’s staffing resources for other needs.

But getting employees to change their habits and use a tool like the Employee Self-Service Agent wasn’t going to be as easy as just flipping a switch. Here’s how we handled this important change management task at Microsoft.

Adoption across verticals

A key principle that we learned during the adoption process was that 80% of our change management activities for the agent are applicable to all our verticals (whether it be HR, IT support, campus facilities, or another category). We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel each time we added to the topics that the agent covered.

This allowed us to create a change management “playbook” that we could use each time we expanded to a new category. So, while roughly 20% of the strategies we used were specific to that vertical, the vast majority were the same, which saved time as we moved through onboarding the different categories.

Leadership is key

To get our employees to change the way they ask for help, we found it essential to get the support of our key leaders, something we refer to as “sponsorship.”

We found that good sponsorship doesn’t just come from your central product, communications, or marketing groups. It is equally vital to invest in relationships with local leadership in different regions as you roll out the agent (especially in multinational companies like ours).

Local leaders understand the various regional intricacies—including language, functionality, and the rhythm of the business—that can help inspire their segments of the workforce to adopt a new tool, and then evangelize it to others in turn. Working closely with these kinds of sponsors will help you pull off a successful adoption campaign.

If you have works councils, be sure to seek out your representatives and solicit their feedback on your agent experience early on. You can help them understand how the agent was developed and trained, then address any concerns they raise.

We’ve found that once our works councils are made aware of the careful processes we go through to protect user privacy, and to ensure compliance with our Responsible AI standards, they become enthusiastic supporters and can help promote agent adoption. (Read more about our experience with our works councils and the Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout.)

Defining your messaging

Work with your internal communications team to come up with a well-planned messaging framework for your agent rollout. Based on our experience, it’s likely you’ll need to communicate across a wide variety of teams and organizations like HR, IT, facilities, finance, and so on.

It’s important to be clear about how you’re positioning the product for your employees. This will allow you to develop both overall messaging for general use, but also content tailored to specific teams or employee roles. The more sophisticated your messaging, the more likely it is to be effective in encouraging user adoption of the agent in their regular workflow.

Listening to feedback

As Customer Zero for the company, our employees are our best testers and sources of feedback during our product development process. The Employee Self-Service Agent was no different, and we continue to gather crucial feedback and user data throughout the internal adoption process.

Because the agent is a tool centered on helping your workers resolve challenges and get quick answers to questions, you’ll want to set up your own systems for capturing their feedback and make sure the agent is meeting a high-quality bar.

We found that setting yourself up for success when it comes to listening to your employees involves two major aspects: Developing and deploying a system for gathering employee sentiment about the product, and then creating a system for analyzing that feedback and funneling the findings back to your IT team.

Some of the types of feedback and methods we used to gather it during the development process included:

• User-testing data
• User satisfaction ratings
• User surveys, interviews and other research
• Voice of the customer (in-product feedback)
• Pilot projects and focus groups (smaller segments of users)
• IT support incidents
• Usage data and telemetry
• Community-based early adopter feedback (similar to our Copilot Champs community)
• Social media feedback and comments

You can choose from among these options to set up your own feedback mechanisms, or come up with something customized to your implementation.

Calibrating your usage goals

Remember that the Employee Self-Service Agent is not an all-purpose AI tool like Microsoft 365 Copilot, which your employees might use a dozen times a day. Instead, they may only need assistance from HR or IT support, tools, and information sources a few times a week (or even less). Your usage targets should be calibrated accordingly.

At the same time, the more categories of assistance you add to the agent, the more your usage levels can grow—along with user expectations.

When we decided to add campus support (dining, transportation, and facilities-related needs and queries), one of the motivators was to provide information that users might need on a more regular basis. This addition helped us increase adoption and build daily usage habits for the agent among our employees.

Making the agent your front door for employee assistance

Your employees may have longstanding habits around the ways that they seek assistance, such as moving quickly to email a service request, or immediately engaging a live support technician. There might even be someone helpful in the office next to them that they lean on for IT support. We’re aware that breaking such habits can be a challenge.

That’s why we decided to change our own employee-assistance workflows. In the case of HR, we are planning to remove the option to email a centralized alias for help, which was the default in the past. This forcing function will instead prompt our employees to turn to the agent first for assistance, creating a “front door” for all our HR service requests.

For our IT support function, we are switching from a Virtual Agent chatbot to the Employee Self-Service Agent, which should provide users with a richer experience and a higher rate of resolution.

Of course, our main goal is for the agent to handle an employee’s issue without having to seek further assistance. But what happens when the agent cannot resolve their problem or handle their request? That’s why we’ve also implemented a “smooth handoff”—either to create a service request or connect the user to a live agent for specialized assistance.

There are three key steps in this process:

1. The Employee Self-Service Agent can identify when the user has reached a point where they need to move to a higher level of assistance via a live agent or a service request. (Note that we also allow the employee to make that determination for themselves.)
2. We then give them different options for how they want to connect to live support.
3. When the employee is transferred to a live technician, the Employee Self-Service Agent is able to pass on the chat history from its session with the user. That way, the technician or staff support can quickly get up to speed on the situation, see what the employee has already asked about and tried, and start helping them immediately.

Enabling the employee to quickly and smoothly transition to a higher level of support without leaving the chat increases user satisfaction and makes them more likely to return to the agent the next time they need assistance.

Strategic outreach to employees

Of course your workers, like ours, are busy with their day-to-day job functions. They may be resistant to trying a new tool or going through special training on how to access employee assistance. Or they may just not know about it.

Because of our regionally phased rollout of the agent, email was one of the most effective tools we used to connect with specific audiences and make them aware of the tool. With specific email lists, we could make sure that only employees in that phase of the rollout were seeing the message.

A key aspect of getting our employees to adopt any new tool is reinforcement—the process of sustaining behavior change by providing ongoing incentives, recognition, and support. Some of the reinforcement strategies we used for the agent included:

• Targeted communications: Emails and organizational messages invited employees to try the agent as they received access
• Multi-channel campaigns: Promotion of the agent via portals, newsletters, digital signage, and more to keep it at the forefront of employee minds
• Training: Workshops and micro-learning sessions about the agent
• Social campaigns: Posts highlighting the tool to increase awareness and gather employee feedback (see details below)
• Leadership support: Managers modeled usage of the agent and promoted it regularly
• Processes: The tool was part of regular employee workflows

One very important communications channel that we used in our adoption efforts was Microsoft Viva Engage. We set up a private Engage community for the Employee Self-Service Agent, then populated it with each new wave of users as they were given access to the tool (eventually all were given access when the tool went companywide).

We used this channel for various kinds of messaging:

• General product awareness
• Updates on new or changing functionality
• Answering questions or addressing frustrations (two-way dialogue between users and the product team)
• Fun and helpful “tips and tricks” that users could try (these could come from the product team, leadership, or individual product “champions”)

We also inserted messages about the new agent into our regular communications with different audiences, including HR professionals, IT support personnel, and internal comms staff at the company. And we regularly messaged company leaders about it, so they could encourage their teams and direct reports to support the effort and evangelize for the tool.

One thing we did was make clear to our employees that even though the agent was not able to handle an issue today, it might be able to in a month or two. That’s why ongoing communications to users was important.”

Prerna Ajmera, general manager, HR digital strategy and innovation

Of course, as a natural language chat tool, the Employee Self-Service Agent doesn’t require formalized training. The product itself is designed to guide users and allow them to experiment, simply by stating their needs in plain language. Most employees will already be familiar with AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, so effectively using an AI-powered employee-assistance agent should be a low bar to clear.

Managing expectations

Your Employee Self-Service Agent rollout will be an ongoing journey as you add topic areas, functionalities, and other product features. Your product roadmap will evolve as you learn more about what your employees need with this kind of AI solution.

One factor to consider is how to set realistic user expectations about what the agent can do while the product matures and improves. As we gradually rolled out the tool, we messaged that the agent was in “early preview,” which helped avoid employee disappointment when it couldn’t handle a specific request.

“One thing we did was make clear to our employees that even though the agent was not able to handle an issue today, it might be able to in a month or two,” Ajmera says. “That’s why ongoing communications to users was important, as new capabilities were added and speed and accuracy improved.”

We also created messaging for early users indicating that their testing was an integral part of making the tool more effective. This created a positive feedback loop while also keeping employee expectations reasonable.

How we measured success

Carefully tracking and analyzing your success metrics throughout your development and release of the product is a high priority. Without this step, you are working in the dark.

At Microsoft, we identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) for a particular product and then use them as our North Star for any internal release. But the specifics of those KPIs can vary from product to product.

For example, measuring the monthly average user (MAU) statistics might be extremely important for an all-purpose productivity tool like Microsoft 365 Copilot. But for an employee-assistance tool, the goal is not necessarily regular use, because employees aren’t constantly facing challenges that require help (we hope). Usage statistics may also be affected by certain events or cyclical needs, such as annual employee reviews or a major technology change (like a significant Windows update).

With this in mind, we identified certain key metrics for the Employee Self-Service Agent. In this case, the top KPIs included:

• Percentage of support tickets deflected
• Net satisfaction score
• Latency period
• Reliability
• Total time savings
• Total cost savings
• Identified and prioritized issues (reported back to product group)

Overall, we focused on the rate at which employees were able to resolve issues without opening a support ticket, as this would likely generate the greatest return on time and cost savings. We came up with an overall target across the different verticals of 40% ticket deflection, and we’re making solid progress toward this goal as we continue to refine and improve the agent.

Part of our measurement process is a monthly progress meeting of key project stakeholders, where all KPIs are evaluated to see if our targets are being met. If the results do not meet expectations, we identify the potential causes and discuss what adjustments need to be made to address these shortfalls.

Key takeaways

Here are some key things to remember when it comes to adoption efforts for your Employee Self-Service Agent:

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Most of your change management and adoption strategies for the agent will be the same across different regions and help categories.
• Line up product sponsors. Finding leaders and others across the organization to help you promote the Employee Self-Service Agent within their own groups, functions, and regions can make a big difference in gaining employee trust and encouraging adoption.
• Set up proper listening channels. You’ll want to gather as much feedback as possible from your employees as you roll out the agent so you can understand what is working well and what needs improvement. This kind of feedback loop can also make your employees feel heard and help them shape the tool.
• Make the shift to agent-first help. Employee habits for seeking assistance can be resistant to change. We decided that turning off the “email to create a service ticket” workflow was a great way to nudge our workers to recognize the agent as the first option for their assistance needs.
• Be strategic in your communications. Use tools like email, Viva Engage, and other appropriate communications channels to target your communications and encourage a two-way conversation with employees about the agent. Sharing fun tips and encouraging peer support are other ways to increase awareness and engagement with product.
• Identify your key metrics. We determined our benchmarks for success for this particular type of agent, then tracked them and made the results available to key stakeholders. This allowed us to measure the impact and effectiveness of the product.

Learn more

How we did it at Microsoft

Although some of the blog posts below are about adoption efforts related to Microsoft 365 Copilot, they can give you ideas on how we promote internal adoption of agentic AI products at Microsoft.

• Find out how we’re reimagining campus support with the Employee Self-Service Agent. This post describes how we targeted popular employee queries—such as “What’s for lunch?”—to drive adoption of our new agentic tool in the facilities and real estate space.
• Read about how we drove Copilot adoption using Microsoft Viva. This article explains how Viva provides a powerful suite of tools that can assist with your adoption efforts.
• Learn how we created an internal Microsoft 365 Copilot Champs community to help drive adoption of the tool. This article covers how we created a special community of Copilot enthusiasts at Microsoft, who provided peer training and support for their coworkers’ Copilot journeys.  
• Discover how we built an AI-powered continuous improvement culture at Microsoft. This article provides a detailed examination of how we use data to track adoption and continuously improve our products and processes within Microsoft.
• See how we’re supercharging our internal communications with Microsoft Viva. This post explains how we use tools like Viva engage to build trust and encourage two-way dialogue with our employees about important topics, company initiatives, and key product rollouts.

Further guidance for you

• Explore the formal Adoption Guide for the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Read the product group’s guide for deploying an Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Check out our Microsoft Learn content about collecting usage data and feedback on the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Begin your journey with the Employee Self-Service Agent

Agentic AI offers incredible promise to transform employee productivity, giving individuals access to powerful tools that enable them to accomplish more. We believe the Employee Self-Service Agent is another step along that path, allowing workers to get instant help with tasks that used to be cumbersome and time-consuming.

“We’re excited to get the Employee Self-Service Agent out and into the hands of our customers, so that they can reap the same benefits that we’re already seeing from it. As we continue to refine the product and expand the number of verticals it can cover, we expect to realize exponential efficiency gains and capture even more cost savings across our entire organization.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

Now that you’ve read about our experience deploying the tool, it’s time to start your own journey. Successful implementation means your people will spend less time on the phone with support staff or hunting through web pages and other resources for help with routine employment tasks and more time devoted to their productive work, reducing job-related pain points and frustrations.

You can benefit from the lessons we’ve learned and the many helpful features and capabilities that we’ve built into this product, all of which are designed to make your implementation as fast, easy, and effective as possible.

“We’re excited to get the Employee Self-Service Agent out and into the hands of our customers, so that they can reap the same benefits that we’re already seeing from it,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “As we continue to refine the product and expand the number of verticals it can cover, we expect to realize exponential efficiency gains and capture even more cost savings across our entire organization.”

Key takeaways

Here are some of the essential top-level learnings we gleaned from our deployment of the Employee Self-Service Agent, which you should keep in mind as you start out on your own deployment path:

• Identify and engage the right people. You’ll need buy-in and advocacy from leaders across the organization; the involvement of key stakeholders from HR, IT, legal, and compliance; and technical guidance from admins, license administrators, environment makers, and knowledge-base subject matter experts.
• Develop your plan. Understand the major phases of governance, implementation, and adoption of the tool, and make sure that you have adequate resources and support for each phase.
• Verify the quality of your content. Your chances of success will be better if you undertake a thorough content assessment to address the currency, accuracy, and structure of all relevant knowledge bases. Pay particular attention to the topics and tasks that are in greatest demand by employees when they access help services.
• Consider a phased rollout. Releasing your Employee Self-Service Agent to progressively larger groups of workers across your organization allows you to gather data and feedback and improve the performance and relevance of the agent over time. You can also expand the number of categories that your agent covers as you go, increasing the impact and appeal of the tool.
• Communicate strategically to promote adoption. Convincing employees to break longstanding habits when seeking help is a challenge. Email is helpful for targeting specific groups of employees, but be sure to use tools like Viva Engage to create community, answer questions, provide fun tips and tricks, and announce new capabilities and options.
• Set clear goals and measure against them. Come up with a targeted set of KPIs that reflect your organization’s needs and aspirations, then develop a plan to capture data for each of these indicators and a regular reporting cadence to keep stakeholders informed of progress toward your goals.

Learn more

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read the official Employee Self-Service Agent product release announcement.
• Learn how we’re accelerating employee services at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• View a series of Microsoft Learning Community videos about deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Explore the Microsoft Learn content related to the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Discover how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Explore our leaders’ guide to enterprise AI maturity in five steps.
• Watch a video from the Understanding Microsoft Agents series devoted to the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Try it out

• Learn more about how you can begin your own journey with the Employee Self-Service Agent.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story, and we’ll get back to you.

The post Deploying the Employee Self‑Service Agent: Our blueprint for enterprise‑scale success appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In short, we’re all-in on agentic AI, and we want to help you get there, too.

“We’ve made a lot of progress deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot since it was released, and we’re now doing the same when it comes to enabling our employees and our teams to build agents that make us more productive,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re Customer Zero at Microsoft, which means we’re the first to deploy and use the technology and services that we sell to our customers. Those learnings give us a unique perspective and story to share with you about the journey we’ve been on with AI and agents.”

We have two collections of agentic AI content that we think will be useful to you.

“When it comes to agents, we’re still at the start. We expect to learn much more as we continue, lessons we’ll share here—stay connected and we’ll continue to share our story with you.” 

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

The first set of stories documents our vision and strategy for agents. They walk you through our experience deploying agentic AI, our work to create tools that enable our employees to dive in, and, through smart governance, empower everyone at Microsoft to be confident and creative with how they use agents while keeping the company safe and secure.

Our second set of stories highlights some of the most interesting and effective agents that our employees, teams, and organizations have built. These stories will not only give you examples of agents that we’ve built, they show how you can go about building  similar agents for your organization based on the collective experience of our employees and teams at Microsoft.

“We hope you find reviewing the journey we’ve been on practical and useful,” Fielder says. “When it comes to agents, we’re still at the start. We expect to learn much more as we continue, lessons we’ll share here—stay connected and we’ll continue to share our story with you.”  

November 13, 2025

Alex Fleck

The agentic future: How we’re becoming an AI-first Frontier Firm at Microsoft

January 30, 2025

Keith Boyd

AI-powered agents in action: How we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft

Deploying agentic AI at Microsoft

May 15, 2025

Alex Fleck

Riding the wave of agents washing over Microsoft with good governance

Agentic extensibility is expanding the frontier of enterprise AI. By creating agents that surface knowledge, take actions, and even reinvent workflows, people can personalize AI’s power like never before. But how do you move into the agentic future without putting your organization and employees at risk? How do you encourage citizen developers to create agents Read More

Agents we’ve deployed internally at Microsoft

November 13, 2025

David Hirning

Accelerating employee services at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent

Microsoft is a huge and complex organization, with more than 200,000 full-time employees working in hundreds of locations around the world. Engage with our experts! Customers or Microsoft account team representatives from Fortune 500 companies are welcome to request a virtual engagement on this topic with experts from our Microsoft Digital team. Previously, when our Read More

Key takeaways

We hope that you find our agentic AI stories useful. We wanted to share a mixture of our strategy and vision around enabling our employees to deploy agents, and to share stories that feature some of the most promising agents that our employees and teams have built and deployed.

We also understand that it can feel challenging to know where to start—it was for us. Here are some things we learned along the way that should help you:

• Governing agents is complex, and dependent on the overall AI maturity of your organization. Start slowly to build that maturity before unleashing too many new agents in your environment.
• A strong policy framework is the foundation. Lean on existing app governance policies, then layer agent-specific structures on top.
• Invest in data infrastructure and AI platforms. Building robust data infrastructure ensures your organization is prepared to leverage AI, and supports scalable, innovative, and secure AI-driven solutions.
• Develop a building environment strategy. Decide what scenarios match up with specific environments and make the right environments available to the relevant employees.
• Global regulations around categories like privacy, security, and responsibility provide a good baseline for establishing governance policies. Set relevant teams to work thinking through these regulations and incorporate their insights into your agent governance.
• Foster a culture of creativity and teamwork. Champion an AI-forward culture where innovation and collaboration drive the adoption of agentic AI.
• Develop AI expertise through training and development. As agentic AI transforms workflows and business outcomes across every industry, upskilling will empower your teams to navigate the rapid advances of AI, drive innovation, and ensure your organization stays competitive.
• Align AI initiatives with strategy. Ensuring AI initiatives align with business goals maximizes their impact and positions your organization to succeed in the rapidly evolving world of agentic AI.
• Implement ethical AI practices. You can use Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles as a guide. Adopting ethical AI practices builds trust, ensures responsible innovation, and prepares your organization to navigate the evolving landscape as AI becomes central to business operations and decision-making.

Try it out

• Get started with AI agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and Copilot Studio.

Related links

• Learn how to create and publish agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Find out how to create and deploy agents with Microsoft 365 Agents SDK.
• Check out these 12 lessons to get started building AI agents.

The post Powering agentic AI adoption at Microsoft: Our ‘Customer Zero’ story appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Agents are specialized AI tools built to handle specific processes or solve business challenges. Within Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re responsible for unlocking their potential internally at Microsoft.

“This is a generational opportunity. The pace of change is only increasing, and we’re committed to experimenting, learning, and leading the way to the deeper possibilities that agentic AI represents.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

As Customer Zero, we serve as the company’s first and best users of new technologies. It’s our role to confirm that they’re business-ready and establish best practices that others can follow.

We’re doing that by empowering our team here in Microsoft Digital to supercharge their work with AI agents. At the same time, we’re the custodians of the employee experience of employees at Microsoft, so we’re actively guiding deployment and adoption efforts for AI tools across the business.

“This is a generational opportunity,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “The pace of change is only increasing, and we’re committed to experimenting, learning, and leading the way to the deeper possibilities agents represent.”

By following our lead, you can chart your own course to the agentic future, where employees and agents work as teams to achieve more together.

Our vision for agents and the AI-first future of IT

A new organizational blueprint is emerging. It blends machine intelligence with human judgment to create systems that are AI-operated but human-led.

We call it becoming an AI-first Frontier Firm.

The path to the frontier is starting to reveal itself already. As organizations progress through different phases of AI maturity, they move from foundational Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities through escalating levels of agentic complexity.

First, humans operate with an assistant like Copilot. Then, human-agent teams work together. But the future lies in humans leading teams of digital workers: AI agents that perform core labor with relative autonomy.

Becoming a Frontier Firm

Pattern 1

Human with assistant

Every employee has an AI assistant that helps them work better and faster

Pattern 2

Human-agent teams

Agents join teams as “digital colleagues,” taking on specific tasks at human direction

Pattern 3

Human-led, agent-operated

Humans set direction and agents execute business processes and workflows, checking in as needed

AI maturity starts at simple AI assistance, then progresses to more complex patterns between humans and agents.

This progression reflects the levels of agentic complexity represented by simple retrieval agents, then knowledge and action agents, and finally workflow reinvention through agents that can perform fully autonomous actions to complete end-to-end business processes. The human-led, agent-operated teams that will drive Frontier Firms forward depend on this advanced stage of agentic maturity.

As the tools used to build agents rapidly mature, we’ve observed that teams can experience these patterns simultaneously. In this rapidly changing environment, it makes sense to think of these as processes that can be targeted to specific business outcomes.

Soon, Frontier Firms will have employees experiencing each of these patterns daily, leveraging the best pattern to complete the task at optimal quality and in the least amount of time. Every business challenge or opportunity is unique, so it makes sense to choose the right tool for the job.  

At Microsoft, we’ve been unlocking opportunities throughout this Frontier Firm curve. At the simpler end of the spectrum, we’re empowering our employees to create their own custom retrieval agents and boosting enterprise knowledge sharing using simple SharePoint agents.

“AI agents are an entirely new kind of tool that presents possibilities we’re only beginning to realize. We capture that potential through a disciplined, rigorous, repeatable process of continuous improvement.”

Tom Heath, senior business program manager, Microsoft Digital

We’re also creating more complex agents that affect processes at the team, division, or even company-wide level. They include our autonomous Employee Self-Service Agent designed to enable modern support on key HR IT, and real estate issues, delivering operational excellence through AIOps, and supporting engineers as they manage complex network environments.

In our role as Customer Zero for the company’s agentic solutions, we in Microsoft Digital work closely with Microsoft’s product groups to ensure that our internal usage insights are helping to shape our products to make them more effective for our customers. This is something we do, so our customers don’t have to.

They also ensure we implement these new tools safely and effectively. That’s important, because AI isn’t without its challenges.

We need to minimize risk by using AI responsibly and securely according to our Responsible AI Principles. We need to assuage AI hesitancy among employees and equip them with the skills they need to succeed. Most importantly, we need to use intentional continuous improvement practices to ensure we apply AI’s potential to processes that drive genuine value.

“AI agents are an entirely new kind of tool that presents possibilities we’re only beginning to realize,” says Tom Heath, senior business program manager for Microsoft Digital.  “We capture that potential through a disciplined, rigorous, repeatable process of continuous improvement.”

The opportunities are worth the effort.

As a company, we surveyed leaders working at Frontier Firms. We found that they’re more likely to say their company is thriving, they’re able to take on more work, and they’re more optimistic about future opportunities than the global average.

All those benefits depend on moving toward agentic maturity.

Lessons learned deploying agents at Microsoft

As Customer Zero, our team within Microsoft Digital is already making progress on agent-based workflows, and the patterns and strategies we’re using can help you on your own journey. Like other digital investments, deploying agents depends on the critical pillars of governance, implementation, change management, measurement, and support.

Culture is also a crucial factor.

AI transformation is about unlocking human potential, not replacing it. So, meeting human needs while reaping the benefits of more intelligent tools is paramount.

Agents’ disruptive potential makes getting these elements right even more important.

Governance and AI-ready data

Our Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment acted as proving ground for governing AI and ensuring our data estate is ready for intelligent tools. We’ve applied our learnings from that experience to agents.

The first and most important lesson is ensuring you have a strong data hygiene foundation for employees to build and use agents. AI-ready data rests on five pillars: Unification, connection, quality and governance, accessibility to all, and the ability to accelerate time to value.

“Thanks to our early experiences with Copilot Studio, we’ve been able to develop gates and controls based on the type of agents that creators want to build.”

Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager, Microsoft Digital

Agents offer powerful opportunities to enhance employee productivity, but they also introduce risks. For example, how do we keep privileged information where it belongs? How do we keep employees from building agents that violate company policies? And how can we balance the freedom to create agents with the need to prevent sprawl?

Our response has been a matrixed approach to governing agents, where we apply policies and procedures based on an array of attributes.

Examples of agentic attributes that require different governance policies

Fortunately, we have tools—many of which we built ourselves—that are helping us keep the company safe as we navigate our agentic transformation. We’re using them to establish and manage our data, keep our confidential information confidential, and protect our data from unauthorized access, misuse, or disclosures. Microsoft Purview is our primary vehicle for handling data governance.

Finally, rules and a lifecycle for agents are helping us combat sprawl and the risks associated with ownership, access, and identity. The enterprise lifecycle is the model for this work, and attestation is essential for accountability. These structures also include an agent catalog to track these tools and help determine what kinds of AI agents our employees can “hire” as digital workers to help them get their work done.

Structuring your implementation

Implementing AI tools and agents is largely about who, what, and how. For us, it comes down to creating policies that manage which employees can use or create certain agents and how we permit those agents to work within the company.

Our matrixed approach to agent creation

To land on these policies, we considered what out-of-the-box agents in Microsoft 365 can accomplish, what employees in non-engineering roles can safely and easily create for themselves using no-code or low-code tools, and what agents demand the greater experience of AI developers using pro-code applications. Options include simple agents created in Microsoft SharePoint agent builder or Copilot Studio experience lite, then more complex tools like Microsoft Power Platform, Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and more—each governed, protected, and overseen by its own policies and procedures.

With these policies in place, implementing agents at scale depends on determining the best opportunities for value.

“Thanks to our early experiences with Copilot Studio, we’ve been able to develop gates and controls based on the type of agents that creators want to build,” says Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager for Microsoft Digital. “Through predetermined groups and rules, we can allow freedom and experimentation at different scales without putting our internal tenant at risk.”

At Microsoft, continuous improvement provides us with a mechanism for discovering which processes to optimize through agentic workflows, then implementing and tracking those changes. This framework helps us reimagine processes as deterministic state machines to enable digital colleagues that complete workflows on employees’ behalf.

Driving adoption through change management

Change doesn’t happen automatically, especially when a new technology fundamentally alters ways of working. At Microsoft, the message is clear: Regardless of your role, there’s an agent for every task.

We have a global change team operating according to Prosci’s ADKAR model combined with the Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide. At the same time, we recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all adoption campaign, so we take efforts to tailor adoption to specific regions and internal organizations.

We’ve taken a multi-pronged approach to adoption, communications, community, and skilling that relies heavily on Microsoft Viva. Communications center on raising awareness, driving engagement, and encouraging feedback while tracking adoption.

Each Microsoft Viva app has a role to play, but Viva Engage has been the most impactful. It provides opportunities for organic connections that enhance employees’ knowledge and ability while providing opportunities to share successes and inspiration.

Adoption communications focus both on encouraging usage of ready-made agents and encouraging employees to create their own using the right tools for their level of technical capability. Campaigns include an ongoing “Agent of the month” series, spotlighting experimental agent releases, how-to content for agent builders, and promotional efforts for enterprise agents that occupy central places in business processes.

The Analyst and Researcher agents built into Copilot are ideal ways to introduce your employees to the power of agents, and “Agent Mode” in Word and Excel can make agentic workflows more intuitive through integration into the tools your employees are already using every day.

• Analyst uses chain-of-thought reasoning like a skilled data scientist to progress through problems iteratively, taking as many steps as necessary to refine its reasoning and provide a high-quality answer.
• Researcher helps employees tackle multi-step research at work—delivering insights with greater quality and accuracy than previously possible. It combines OpenAI’s deep research model with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities.
• Agent Mode in Microsoft Word and Excel transforms how users create documents or spreadsheets by enabling a more interactive and collaborative experience with AI. Instead of just generating responses to single prompts, Agent Mode allows users to engage in a multi-step process where they can guide the AI through various tasks, making document creation or data analysis more intuitive and efficient.

Building the AI habit takes time, but encouraging usage of these pre-built AI agents is the perfect way to accelerate your journey to the frontier.

At every stage of our AI transformation so far, we’ve experienced the power of peer-led adoption efforts.

Our Copilot Champs Community, a team of AI enthusiasts, early adopters, and eager learners, has been incredibly effective both at providing examples of AI usage and supporting change management initiatives run by our Microsoft Digital organization.

Camp Copilot represented our first runaway success in grassroots, peer-led AI skilling. This three-week learning event gave our Copilot Champs an opportunity to showcase emerging best practices in a structured, gamified setting and reached thousands of employees. We’ve recently followed that with a Copilot Expo, which expanded on Camp Copilot with more learning around agents and a templatized format we deployed to different regions and divisions.

As we shift our focus from Copilot adoption to agentic innovation, we’re also evolving our community strategy.

Our Copilot Champs Community is still a vital source of leadership and guidance, but now we’ve augmented its role with the Builders Community, a new group tailored to sharing knowledge and inspiration around creating agents.

It’s also important to have mechanisms in place that guide employees as our company’s agentic maturity increases.

We are accelerating innovation through agent and automation templates that employees and teams are applying to their own scenarios. On top of those resources, our AI Center of Excellence and a dedicated continuous improvement function are helping our teams think through their opportunities, ensure they capture value, and maintain security.

Measuring impact to demonstrate value

Measuring the impact of AI tools has been a unique challenge, and we’re only at the beginning of our journey. That’s especially true for agents.

The Experience Insights dashboard for Microsoft 365 admin center helps our technology decision makers gather information about product usage, feedback, and employee views of help articles. Crucially, this tool allows people outside of our IT apparatus to gain limited, compliant access to adoption data, which supports more effective change management efforts within their scope.

We’ve also devised several measurement areas and key metrics we can track using the Microsoft Digital AI Value Framework. They include:

• Revenue impact: Direct contributions to revenue generation and business growth.
• Productivity and efficiency: Efficiency gains while completing tasks and processes without a reduction in quality.
• Security and risk management: Improvements in identifying, preventing, and managing security vulnerabilities and risks.
• Employee and customer experience: The impact of AI initiatives on employee satisfaction, engagement, and productivity.
• Quality improvement: Enhancements in the quality of deliverables, services, and processes.
• Cost savings: Reduction in operational costs and resource allocation efficiencies.

As our company has dedicated more attention and resources to an AI and continuous improvement framework, these value drivers have become guiding lights for ideating and executing AI initiatives—and most importantly, tracking them. Methodologies like Bowler scorecards and monthly operating reviews align perfectly with our learn-it-all culture to help us measure and adjust AI projects to align them with our business goals more effectively.

Enabling effective support for agents

When you enter an unprecedented new phase of technology, anticipating the support employees need can be difficult. Our role as Customer Zero has been essential for making sure we have enough experience to properly understand the issues that arise from implementing agents.

Our employees in Microsoft Digital have been some of the company’s first movers on agentic AI initiatives. Through our initial experience, we’ve gradually built up our knowledge and widened access to equip support professionals with everything they need to enable employees.

Within Microsoft Digital, we established a solid support base by progressing through seven steps:

1. Preliminary access: We selected our initial support specialists, including people with different Microsoft 365 app focuses, support tiers, and service audiences.
2. Communication hub: We created a community space where our support team could connect and collaborate on issues and invited non-support professionals as needed.
3. Knowledge base: We created a collaborative document where we added learnings, which eventually evolved into our knowledge base for internal support.
4. Widening access: We hosted information sessions with the wider support team and extended access so all relevant support professionals could ramp up.
5. Rehearsal: Role-playing and shadowing sessions helped teams build practical knowledge and confidence.
6. Go-live support: We prepared our support resources and processes and pushed them live in advance of our deployment.
7. Tracking: A pre-determined tracking cadence for gathering data on incidents helps support teams identify trending issues and tickets.

Pushing the frontier forward with agentic AI

It’s clear that agents will be the major driving force behind modern workflows. The AI-first Frontier Firm will be the defining blueprint of this next era.

“The future of IT is increasingly about experimentation and adaptation to accelerating AI technologies. We take our role as Customer Zero seriously, and that means boldly experimenting with agentic AI and leading this next transformation for our company and our customers.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

Knowing the future that awaits, our Microsoft Digital team will continue to explore, experiment, and share what we’ve learned. We want to discover pathways to greater human potential, powered by AI agents.

“The future of IT is increasingly about experimentation and adaptation to accelerating AI technologies,” Fielder says. “We take our role as Customer Zero seriously, and that means boldly experimenting with agentic AI and leading this next transformation for our company and our customers.”

Key takeaways

The lessons we’ve learned throughout our unfolding agentic AI transformation can help you start your own journey:

• Build a solid foundation for governance: Take stock of your data hygiene and ensure your general governance policies are sufficiently robust before deploying agents widely.
• Consider the who, what, and how: Think carefully about how to structure agent creation across different toolsets, levels of complexity, sharing options, and more.
• Find and engage your peer leaders: Create a community tailored to agent exploration and peer-led adoption support and promote their work among your employees.
• Use a multi-pronged adoption strategy: A good strategy will include a mix of centralized communications, peer-driven leadership, learning events, and asynchronous opportunities. Don’t forget measurement and opportunities for feedback.
• Determine your metrics for success: Identify the impact you want to drive with agents, isolate them into primary value drivers, and cascade those down into key metrics.
• Build toward successful support: Use your technical team’s experience during pilots and early implementation to build a base for effective support material.

Try it out

Learn more about our journey with agentic AI.

Related links

• Learn how we’re Customer Zero for Microsoft and it’s AI products.
• See how we’re building an AI-powered continuous improvement culture at Microsoft.
• Get a look inside the councils steering AI projects at Microsoft.
• Learn how we answer the key question: Should I use Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry to build my agent?
• Check out what we learned using a virtual skilling event to drive Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption.
• Walk through our guide for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Find out how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post The agentic future: How we’re becoming an AI-first Frontier Firm at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Previously, when our employees had a question or a problem—whether it be a technical issue, an HR query, or just wanting to know what’s for lunch—they had to navigate through a variety of different apps, tools, and SharePoint sites to find the answer or get help with their task.

It was a time-consuming and frustrating experience. But the advent of generative AI has given us a new opportunity.

Microsoft 365 Copilot and the power of agentic AI have created a world where people simply type in questions or requests to get prompt and helpful assistance. Now we’re applying the capabilities of Copilot and agentic technology to the ongoing challenge of employee assistance.

“At Microsoft, our mission is to transform the employee experience with AI solutions that provide personalized and seamless interactions for our employees throughout the workday. What we’ve created with the Employee Self-Service Agent is a powerful example of a solution doing just that.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Employee Experience

The result is the new Employee Self-Service Agent, a “one-stop shop” providing vetted and personalized solutions to our workers across a range of high-demand topics and tasks, including human resources (HR), IT support, and facilities and real estate.

The agent combines the help functions for human resources, IT support, and facilities and real estate into one tool, allowing our employees to handle a range of tasks, such as requesting parental leave, resolving a problem with their device, or getting something fixed in their office. The Employee Self-Service Agent is available to all Microsoft employees worldwide and is also now available to customers.

“At Microsoft, our mission is to transform the employee experience with AI solutions that provide personalized and seamless interactions for our employees throughout the workday,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Employee Experience. “What we’ve created with the Employee Self-Service Agent is a powerful example of a solution doing just that.”

The power of a ‘single pane of glass’

The essential premise of the Employee Self-Service Agent is that it serves as the one place for Microsoft employees to go when they need assistance. This means that they don’t have to remember what tool or website offers the best way to handle their question or task—it’s all available in one seamless, AI-powered interface.

“With this agent, we wanted a ‘single pane of glass’ for our employees and managers,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, principal PM architect manager for Employee Experience in Microsoft HR. “The idea is that they can come in and get all their questions answered, rather than have to go to multiple tools or URLs in different areas.”

Employee-Self Service screenshot

The workflow is simple—launch Microsoft 365 Copilot, select “Employee Self-Service,” and type in your query. The agent then orchestrates an authoritative response and/or offers a form that can be used to carry out the desired action (auto-populating the form with details from the chat where possible).

“Many support tools that could benefit employees go unused because of limited awareness and the friction involved in completing tasks. This tool gives employees a new way to access that helpful information.”

Prerna Ajmera, general manager, HR digital strategy and innovation

If the question or task can’t be resolved by the agent, it hands the employee off to the appropriate tool, subagent, or support person.

The Employee Self-Service Agent is driving usage of support tools that our employees often overlook.

“Many support tools that could benefit employees go unused because of limited awareness and the friction involved in completing tasks,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager for HR digital strategy and innovation. “This tool gives employees a new way to access that helpful information.”

An early focus on HR and IT Support

In developing the Employee Self-Service Agent, we initially identified two main categories of employee assistance to focus on: HR and technical support. These are areas that generate millions of internal queries and support cases (help tickets) from our employees every year, which means the potential for a significant return on investment (ROI). (We subsequently added real estate and facilities later in the process.)

In the case of human resources, this meant looking at all the HR experiences that employees need help with and figuring out what could be handled with AI. Whether it was a question or task related to personal time off (PTO), performance, compensation, learning, internal job listings, well-being, or something else, we needed to make sure that the information the agent returned was relevant and helpful to that employee.

This is what distinguishes the Employee Self-Service Agent from Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which provides a more general answer that may not apply to that particular worker’s situation, and can’t access all relevant information about that employee.

“When it comes to HR, you need to make sure the answers are coming from authoritative sources, because HR is a very sensitive and vital part of how a company runs.”

Rajamma Krishnamurthy, principal PM architect manager, Employee Experience, Microsoft HR

With Copilot, you might ask for an overview of everything to do with a given project. But when it comes to employee-assistance topics, casting a wide net is not the desired outcome. An employee doesn’t want to hear about HR policies in India when they work in the U.S., or to get Mac-focused tech help when they use a PC. The needs of each of our employees are different, and so we built the agent to reflect that.

A major task in developing the agent was making sure that all the content that it draws from is accurate and up to date. This was especially important for HR-related responses, which sometimes deal with sensitive topics. We’ve carefully thought through privacy and security issues, are following our company Responsible AI principles, and making sure the agent adheres to regulations for each country or region.

“When it comes to HR, you need to make sure the answers are coming from authoritative sources, because HR is a very sensitive and vital part of how a company runs,” Krishnamurthy says. “Our new agent was built so that only vetted sources are responding to these questions.”

One advantage of the Employee Self-Service Agent is its ability to provide real-time assistance. Rather than having to file a ticket and then wait 24 to 48 hours for a response, the employee can get on-demand help and hopefully resolve their problem without waiting. 

“Previously, resolving an HR help request could take a couple of days,” Ajmera says. “These delays often came from the back-and-forth of traditional support channels—‘OK, you told me this; now, what’s the policy for that? What’s next?’ With the agent, employees can get answers in minutes. That’s the beauty of it.”

“The agent’s content is specifically grounded in our authoritative IT service sources, and it also knows relevant details about you as a user. All of this context makes it better at guiding employees to solve their own support issues.”

Trent Berghofer, general manager, Microsoft Digital Modern Support

Agentic assistance to accomplish more

Another differentiator from previous employee assistance tools is that the Employee Self-Service Agent enables task completion, not just information retrieval.

For example, consider technical support (such as dealing with an audio issue on an employee’s device). Our workers are now able to get detailed, contextual, and specific help with their technical issues, helping them solve the issue without having to engage with assisted support and get a ticket created.

An agentic solution for employee assistance

Retrieve

The agent retrieves information from authoritative sources and delivers responses based on contextual data about the employee.

Take action

The agent helps the employee take action right from the chat and avoid having to navigate multiple tools and workspaces.

Extend

The agent is designed to be flexible and customizable, based on the organization’s existing software workflows and third-party solutions.

The Employee Self-Service Agent retrieves authoritative information with natural-language queries and enables users to take action from within the chat.

“The agent’s content is specifically grounded in our authoritative IT service sources, and it also knows about you as a user—that you have this particular device, and the compliance state of that device, and what country you’re located in,” says Trent Berghofer, general manager of the Microsoft Digital Modern Support team. “All of this context makes it better at guiding the employee to solve their own problem, versus doing a generic search on the issue.”

If the employee does have to connect to live support via phone or chat, the technician will have access to their conversation with the agent. This way, the support professional can view details the user has already provided and the solutions that have already been tried. This saves time and decreases frustration.

Task completion is a primary gauge of return on investment (ROI) for the Employee Self-Service Agent. The overall goal across all help categories is for the agent to result in at least 40% fewer support tickets.

Each ticket represents a significant cost to any organization, and those costs add up, especially at large companies. With more than 2 million IT support interactions (via Virtual Agent, chat, and phone) across Microsoft annually, we project that the Self-Service Agent will produce substantial savings in tech support alone.

HR is another area where we hope to generate impact, as employees meet their needs with the Employee Self-Service Agent. Our specific goals include:

• Reduce monthly HR tickets by 44% by mid-2026 through expanded self-service capabilities
• Save employee time with rapid, frictionless fulfillment of requests 
• Boost overall discovery and use of HR programs to deliver increased ROI
• Increase business agility and reduce end-to-end process time

“Once it’s fully adopted, we’re expecting the agent to manage somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 employee interactions a year that used to result in an HR support ticket,” Ajmera says. “That’s a significant shift and learning curve for our organization, in terms of how employees get help. Scaling the agent up to have this major business impact has been one of the biggest challenges for us.”

Saving time with AI support

Employee time savings is another significant driver of ROI. This is a key part of the third vertical we’ve targeted with the Employee Self-Service Agent—real estate and facilities.

“Before we had the Employee Self-Service Agent, the employee-assistance experience was kind of fragmented across mobile, websites, and physical kiosks. The new agent unifies all of these experiences and puts them in the same place.”

Becky West, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

With hundreds of office buildings around the world, including dozens of cafés and other specialized sites, Microsoft must handle a constant stream of employee inquiries and activities related to real estate and facilities. These include things like:

• Transportation – calling a shuttle for a ride between buildings
• Dining – learning where your favorite dish is being served (and ordering it to go)
• Booking a room – locating a space to relax or connect with colleagues
• Lobby and visitor services – registering a campus guest
• Facilities tickets – getting help with a repair or other building issue
• Parking registration – recording where your car is parked
• Maps – finding your way around a building or a campus

“Before we had the Employee Self-Service Agent, the employee-assistance experience was kind of fragmented across mobile, websites, and physical kiosks,” says Becky West, principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “The new agent unifies all of these experiences and puts them in the same place. Now our employees can ask questions in natural language, and it guides them through whatever campus experience they need to do—invite a guest, find dining options, create a ticket, etc.”

The number of working hours currently spent by our employees trying to find the answer to their facilities-related question or filling out a form to complete a task is difficult to quantify precisely across such a large organization. But consider just one common exercise: registering a visitor at a Microsoft building.

According to Digital Workplace Services data, in 2024 there were 2 million registered visitors at Microsoft buildings worldwide, with roughly 1.2 million of these considered business-related.

Previously, employees had to email or talk to lobby hosts (front-desk staff) to invite guests to Microsoft; the host would then enter the guest details into the Guest Management System.

Now, the Employee Self-Service Agent provides a simple form within the chat, asking for details like guest name, email, purpose (business or personal), building number, and date. Once the form is submitted, the system generates a confirmation and sends a QR code directly to the guest via email. That alone has the potential to save us 50,000 hours of employee time per year.

“One benefit of this is that anything you can do with Copilot Studio in terms of a custom engine agent, you can do in the Employee Self-Service Agent. Our product documentation goes into detail on how to configure it based on your particular needs.”

Kyle von Haden, principal group product manager, Microsoft 365 Copilot product group

Another great example is a common facilities request, like replacing a light bulb, reporting broken furniture, or workspaces that require cleaning. Instead of having to figure out which tool to use to report the issue and then filling out a request, the individual can go straight to the Employee Self-Service Agent and upload a photo.

“The agent detects the problem based on the image, fills in details, and enables the user to file their service request right from the chat,” West says.

Customizable and extensible

The Employee Self-Service Agent was built with Microsoft Copilot Studio, a tool that enables users to create and extend AI agents. The product is intentionally designed so that our customers can customize it to fit their own business needs using preconfigured workflows and accelerator packs that come with the agent.

“One benefit of this is that anything you can do with Copilot Studio in terms of a custom engine agent, you can do in the Employee Self-Service Agent,” says Kyle von Haden, a principal group product manager for the Microsoft 365 Copilot product group. “Our product documentation goes into detail on how to configure it based on your particular needs. We’re even including code samples that show you how to extend the agent further than what you get right out of the box.”

For instance, many of our customers rely on third-party solution providers such as Workday, SAP, or ServiceNow. So, our development process included producing connectors for some of these third-party offerings, making it easier for customers to integrate the Employee Self-Service Agent into their existing workflows.

This extensibility is an advantage of adopting the Employee Self-Service Agent, according to von Haden.

“The beauty of this product is that it comes with all these accelerators that help customers jumpstart their ability to deliver AI-driven employee assistance, because there’s no inherent limitations,” he says. “They have all the same flexibility they’d get by building a solution from scratch, but they get to build on this Copilot Studio foundation that offers powerful capabilities and will continue to grow as we invest more in it.”

The role of Customer Zero

With a new product like the Employee Self-Service Agent, having Microsoft employees use it as part of their everyday work and then provide detailed feedback was a valuable aspect of the development process. This is the essence of the company’s commitment as Customer Zero.

“For the Employee Self-Service Agent, the role of our internal users as Customer Zero has been incredibly important—in this case, doubly so,” says Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president of product for Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences. “Because not only are we learning how to deploy the product in a real, complex environment, but we’re doing it in a world that’s completely new, given all of the changing variables around AI.”

To that end, we began rolling the agent out to employees more than a year ago in a geographically phased approach—first to the United Kingdom and Canada, then India, then to the United States and the rest of the world. Regular communications to employees—via email, Microsoft Viva, and other channels—raised awareness and encouraged use of the agent. And a sophisticated plan for listening and gathering product telemetry was implemented, so that all feedback could be captured and routed back to the product team.

This process was particularly important for building stakeholder trust in the tool. For example, our HR professionals worked closely with the product group to make sure the answers produced by the Employee Self-Service Agent met their high bar for accuracy and reliability.

“Engaging our stakeholders early was key,” Ajmera says. “We iterated with them as they went through the various prompts and responses manually and rated them for accuracy. We learned a lot. It’s still a work in progress, but we’ve gotten to the point where the agent is able to automatically generate responses that meet stakeholder expectations.”

“This product is very significant for us, both from the user perspective and the cost-savings angle. We can get the right answers to and solve issues for our employees faster, which increases their satisfaction and helps them be more effective.”

Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president, Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences

This “virtuous flywheel” development process played a role in making the Employee Self-Service Agent better and preparing it for general release, as a feature available to all Microsoft 365 enterprise customers with a Copilot license. That release is expected soon.

Because the agent is built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, it gives us flexibility to adapt and grow as needed. We plan to eventually expand the Employee Self-Service Agent to other key areas across the company, like finance, legal, and more—to become a true single-pane-of-glass portal for all our employees’ needs.

In the end, the agent offers the potential to deliver the kind of impact that only truly breakthrough business software can: delighted users and major ROI.

“This product is very significant for us, both from the user perspective and the cost-savings angle,” Gregersen says. “We can get the right answers to and solve issues for our employees faster, which increases their satisfaction and helps them be more effective. And the solution scales up to real cost savings for the organization.”

Key takeaways

Here are some things to consider when tackling employee assistance at your organization:

• Approach it from the user perspective. Offering a “single pane of glass” portal from which an employee can access help on a wide variety of topics may present some technical challenges, but it meets users where they are and resolves their pain points.
• Start with high-demand categories. We launched our Employee Self-Service Agent journey with two core verticals that offer potential for ROI: HR and IT support. We then added facilities and real estate, in part because the high usage rates (such as for dining and transportation) would drive greater employee awareness and boost user-session numbers.
• Think about task completion. Employees need to not only access authoritative information, they also want the ability to accomplish their goal right from the agent interface. If their issue can’t be handled by the agent, it should be able to make a smooth handoff to the tool that can.
• Spend time up front on data governance. An employee-assistance agent must supply clear, current, and accurate information that is highly relevant to that user. Vague, inaccurate, or irrelevant answers can damage product credibility with your employees.
• Customizable rather than a turnkey solution. It’s important to note that the Employee Self-Service Agent is a flexible template built on top of Copilot Studio; it requires customization by your organization in terms of implementation, categorization, data selection, third-party integration, privacy, legal considerations, and other factors.
• Make sure to collect feedback and iterate. Generative AI tools are still new, and your help solutions can be improved by listening to your employees and acting on what they tell you about their experience.

Try it out

Learn more about the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Related links

• Learn more about our strategic approach to agentic AI internally at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re transforming the way our employees get help on campus with the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Read how the Employee Self-Service Agent is helping Puget Sound-based Microsoft employees with their transportation needs.
• Explore how Microsoft HR is using Viva and Copilot to empower our employees.
• Learn how we’re enabling modern support at Microsoft with AI.
• Discover our five-step guide that helps IT leaders get to enterprise AI maturity.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Accelerating employee services at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In the past, Julie might have interacted with different apps and websites to get help with each of those tasks. Today, thanks to the power of agentic AI and Microsoft Copilot Studio, Julie can turn to a single portal to handle all of it: the Employee Self-Service Agent.

This agentic tool, which will soon be released publicly as a free add-on for the Microsoft 365 Copilot license, has already made a big impact on the lives of our employees, saving them time, effort, and frustration. We call it the “one-stop shop” experience of employee self-service.

“Before we had the Employee Self-Service Agent, the employee-assistance experience was fragmented across mobile, websites, and physical kiosks,” says Becky West, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “The new agent unifies all of these experiences and puts them in the same place.” Now our employees can ask questions in natural language, and it guides them through whatever campus experience they need to do—invite a guest, find dining options, create a help ticket, etc.

“Our employees rely on AI tools like Copilot to help get their work done. And the same is now true for resolving an issue related to facilities.”

Becky West, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

Of course, employees like Julie also need assistance with other common job-related tasks, like getting their human resources (HR) questions answered or fixing a technical issue with their device.

Those are also important categories included in the Employee Self-Service Agent, something the flexibility and extensibility of Copilot Studio makes possible.

“Our employees rely on AI tools like Copilot to help get their work done,” West says. “And the same is now true for resolving an issue related to facilities, HR, or IT support. We live in an AI-powered world, and this agent meets the moment for our people.”

In this story we share how we’re using the Employee Self-Service Agent in the real estate and facilities space, but it does much more than that. Our employees also use it to get help with IT problems and answers to their HR queries, and we expect to add other key areas soon, such as finance and legal. Available to all Microsoft employees worldwide, the full agent is already delivering a significant boost in productivity, cost savings, and user satisfaction across the company.

Everyday use cases for agentic assistance

Julie might not need IT support or help with an HR issue every day. But she’s always on the hunt for her favorite foods for lunch.

In our existing dining app, employees could look up that day’s menu for a specific building cafeteria, but they couldn’t just ask, “Hey, where can I get some good teriyaki on campus today?”

With the Employee Self-Service Agent, now they can.

“Searching on type of cuisine or dish is one of the top requests we were getting,” says Balaji Radhakrishnan, principal software engineering manager for the dining team. “It was an important feature missing from our existing apps, and we solved that with the employee-assistance agent.”

Employee Self-Service Agent screenshot

Not only can the agent help Julie locate the perfect lunch, it also connects her to the tool where she can order and pay for it. This streamlines the process for her—she doesn’t have to remember which website or app to call up to procure her teriyaki treat. (In the future, we plan to extend the functionality so the agent remembers your previous food choices, and you can order right from the agent.)

Dining is just one of the facilities-related experiences we targeted when developing the Employee Self-Service Agent. Other tasks include:  

• Lobby and visitor services – registering a campus guest
• Parking – registering a car to park on campus
• Maps – navigating around a building or a campus
• Facilities tickets – getting help with office furniture, lighting, HVAC, or other building issue
• Transportation – calling a shuttle for a ride between buildings or finding commuting help
• Finding a space – locating a place to relax, work, or connect with colleagues

“We started out by looking at the services we already offered,” West says. “We thought about what tasks would be in highest demand, where that information or transaction lived now, and how best to surface it. The more we explored the power of the agent, the wider the variety of experiences we were able to incorporate.”

Saving time and reducing frustration

Resolving employee pain points and saving time are two of the key advantages inherent to this area of agentic employee assistance. Consider the common employee task of registering a business-related campus guest (such as an interview candidate or a prospective customer).

“If we can handle 50%—600,000—of these business-related visitor registrations through the Employee Self-Service Agent, that adds up to 50,000 hours of employee time each year.”

Bhavani Paruchuri, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

According to Bhavani Paruchuri, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, in 2024 Microsoft saw more than 2 million registered visitors at our buildings worldwide. Roughly 1.2 million of these were business-related guests.

Previously, employees had to email or talk to lobby hosts (front-desk staff) when they wanted to register a guest; the host would then enter visitor details into the Guest Management System. Now, the Employee Self-Service Agent provides a simple form within the chat, asking for details like guest name, email, purpose, building number, and date. Once the form is submitted, the system confirms it and sends a QR code directly to the guest via email.

“We calculated that this new process could save at least five minutes for each guest registration,” Bhavani says. “If we can handle 50%—600,000—of these business-related visitor registrations through the Employee Self-Service Agent, that adds up to 50,000 hours of employee time each year. So, just in this one area alone, the agent can have a big impact on overall productivity.”

Those savings add up, and quickly.

“Once you start using the agent for dining, you use it daily. As we added in cuisine and price filtering and other functionality that wasn’t available before, you could see it was a big differentiator from what the previous tools could do.”

Erik Downing, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

One of the reasons we decided to include facilities-related help early on in the development of the Employee Self-Service Agent is that these common tasks would help increase usage of the new portal—building a habit with our workers that would have long-term benefits.

We have already seen employees used to finding a meal with the agent also using it to solve other challenges, including in the HR and Support spaces.

“Once you start using the agent for dining, you use it daily,” says Erik Downing, a principal product manager with Microsoft Digital. “As we added in cuisine and price filtering and other functionality that wasn’t available before, you could see it was a big differentiator from what the previous tools could do.”

West explains how this can have an outsized effect on promoting product adoption.

“If people get in the daily habit of using the agent for these routine tasks, they’ll be more comfortable going to it for other things,” West says. “Then you can really start to scale the agent up and see the larger impact across more areas.”

Filing a service request with the help of AI

Julie gets to work one morning and is dismayed to discover that her adjustable desk will no longer rise to a standing position. She needs to open a facilities ticket for help.

“The AI automatically picks out the problem class and the problem type; presents a form with the details; asks for confirmation; then kicks off the ticket right from there. It’s all in one place, AI-driven, and truly agentic in terms of task completion—and it will only get better.”

Sonaly Choudary, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

In the past, this would have required Julie to send Facilities an email with a description of the problem, or she would have had to track down the right app or web form for the same purpose.

Now, she can simply snap a photo of the broken desk and upload it to the Employee Self-Service Agent.

The agent will open a form and use information from the photo to create the help ticket right there. This image-based technology, like natural-language chat, is something that our previous apps couldn’t do, which reflects the power of AI. 

“Whether you upload a photo or just describe your issue using natural language, we’ve really pushed this tool to be as agentic as possible,” says Sonaly Choudary, a senior product manager who works on facilities technology products for Microsoft Digital. “The AI automatically picks out the problem class and the problem type; presents a form with the details; asks for confirmation; then kicks off the ticket right from there. And then you can query the agent to get status updates on it. It’s all in one place, AI-driven, and truly agentic in terms of task completion—and it will only get better.”

How Customer Zero makes our products better

Because Microsoft employees are the first ones to use our newest products and features, we have the opportunity to roll them out gradually and test them under actual enterprise-work conditions, which enables us to gather valuable feedback and telemetry. This data is then fed back into the product development process to make key improvements. We call this our Customer Zero philosophy.

“We were pioneers as Customer Zero in showing the need for these services in an employee-assistance portal, and the product group saw that need.”

Michelle Schaefer, principal product manager in Microsoft Digital

In the case of the Employee Self-Service Agent, we began product development by tackling HR and IT support, which were key areas to capture cost savings.

But how could we get even wider usage of the product? We turned to our real estate and facilities functions.

“The facilities and real estate aspect of Microsoft Digital is unique, in that it focuses on the employee experience at the company, literally in the buildings,” says Michelle Schaefer, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “All those tasks—getting lunch, parking, filing a facilities ticket, moving around the campus, inviting a guest—are universal for all our employees. We were pioneers as Customer Zero in showing the need for these services in an employee-assistance portal, and the product group saw that need. And we’re constantly gathering telemetry to learn how our workers can more easily discover the agent and have a better experience with it each time.”

Adding the facilities and real estate category to the Employee Self-Service Agent also helped our engineers learn more about building an agent that presents a “single pane of glass” to the user on the front end but incorporates so many different functions on the back end.

“Our strategy with this new natural-language agent is to augment our existing tools, which brings AI to the experience and gets the user to the right place.”

Thomas Po, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Each team has its own tools that compete for our employees’ attention.

“The challenge was to turn all those into a common experience for the user,” says Erik Orum Hansen, a principal engineering manager for Microsoft Digital. “That’s been a learning journey for us, as the organization pivoted to developing a single agent incorporating all these different functions.”

This single-portal approach makes it so much easier for users to explore their options and figure out the best way to accomplish the task, even as the underlying tools are still available.

We still have as many as 15 different tools that employees use today for campus related tasks, but we’re managing them more effectively—now our employees only need to use them when their use case is more challenging or detailed in nature.

“Our strategy with this new natural-language agent is to augment our existing tools, which brings AI to the experience and gets the user to the right place,” says Thomas Po, a senior product manager for Microsoft Digital. “The user may not have the specific facilities app they need on their phone, but everyone has Copilot, right? It’s about giving our employees access to information in more places and connecting them to the right tool or function.”

Employee Self-Service Agent screenshot

The Employee Self-Service Agent can also see when an employee took prior action, recognize that they might want to take the same action again, and suggest that action—for example, suggesting that they may want to reserve a shuttle ride to the same location they’ve visited previously.

“This allows users to have a more contextual, conversational experience,” says Ram Kuppaswamy, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “For example, for transportation needs they can just type, ‘Help me book a campus shuttle,’ and the agent can suggest options based on their previous ride history. Then it can call up a form to help complete the booking. Users really love it.”

Built on the power of Copilot Studio

We built the Employee Self-Service Agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio, a powerful platform that allows you to create and extend AI agents. The agent is designed so that our customers can customize it to fit their own business needs and integrate it with their existing technologies.

“We didn’t want a custom connector; we wanted to go with an out-of-the-box connector that worked with Dynamics,” he says. “There were some product iterations to deal with while we made sure it met Microsoft’s data-compliance standards, but ultimately it made it easier to show customers how simple it is to implement the agent—it’s a very low-code/no-code solution.”

Erik Orum Hansen, principal engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

When we built the part of the Employee Self-Service Agent that handled HR and IT Support needs, we were able to create connectors for major third-party service providers in those areas, such as Workday, SAP, and ServiceNow. (These connectors are now “out-of-the-box capabilities” that are included in the product.)

In the facilities and real estate space, we have numerous vendors that we work with to provide various campus services. Since we already used various existing internal applications to connect employee requests with these vendors, we were able to create connectors for the agent easily using Copilot Studio. More importantly, we were also able to use the out-of-the-box Dataverse connector that worked with our Dynamics 365 data, which cut down on development time.

“The agent functions as a single entry point, which then connects with the Microsoft Dynamics data,” Schaefer says. “We have numerous different facilities vendors in different parts of the world, but we didn’t have to build multiple connectors to those vendors because of the common Dynamics back end.”

Orum Hansen says this caused a small delay in the internal deployment of the product, but that it was worth it in the end.

“We didn’t want a custom connector; we wanted to go with an out-of-the-box connector that worked with Dynamics,” he says. “There were some product iterations to deal with while we made sure it met Microsoft’s data-compliance standards, but ultimately it made it easier to show customers how simple it is to implement the agent—it’s a very low-code/no-code solution.”

“We’re also previewing more multi-agent capabilities that are coming from Copilot Studio, which our customers will be able to incorporate into their own solutions. The product is just going to get richer and richer over time, as it extends into other lines of business.”

Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president, Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences

The future of workplace AI

In many ways, we’re still in the early stages of the revolution that AI agents are going to bring to the workplace.

But the Employee Self-Service Agent is a significant early marker on that path.

“The first step is to develop this agent that’s optimized for the HR, IT, and facilities verticals,” says Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president of product for Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences. “We’re also previewing more multi-agent capabilities that are coming from Copilot Studio, which our customers will be able to incorporate into their own solutions. The product is just going to get richer and richer over time as it extends into other lines of business.”

As employees like Julie are already finding out, this new era of agentic AI is going to be a major improvement over what came before.

“Most companies already have some kind of employee-assistance portal solution,” Orum Hansen says. “With this new agent, there’s an opportunity to really reimagine the entire experience—to shed some of the old baggage and figure out how to do things differently. It’s going to lead to a more efficient workplace, along with more satisfied employees.”

Key takeaways

Here are a few factors to remember when implementing an AI-powered employee-assistance solution at your company:

• Pick high-value targets. Consider employee needs and the most commonly used assistance functions (using data where available), then develop a solution that addresses those areas. This will drive adoption and daily use of the agent.
• Customize the solution. Take advantage of the extensibility of Copilot Studio to develop an agent that fits your organization’s specific needs.
• Augment existing tools. Your employee-assistance agent can be the front door through which users find the tool they need. Over time, you can retire legacy tools and portals as the agent is able to complete the same functions on its own.
• Go beyond information retrieval. Employees want to be able to carry out tasks right from the agent, so incorporate forms and other technologies that allow them to accomplish their goal as quickly and easily as possible.
• Think outside the box. The image-driven feature we developed for filing a facilities ticket is a great example of applying the revolutionary abilities of AI to solve problems in new and innovative ways.    

Try it out

Learn more about the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Related links

• Read about the full scope of the impact the Employee Self-Service Agent is having on our organization.
• Learn about our strategic approach to agentic AI internally at Microsoft. 
• Explore how the Employee Self-Service Agent is helping Puget Sound-based Microsoft employees with their transportation needs.
• Explore how Microsoft HR is using Viva and Copilot to empower our employees.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Reimagining campus support at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

These agents help employees reach beyond Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 applications to do their work more thoroughly and efficiently. By empowering users to experiment with AI-driven assistance and capabilities internally at Microsoft, we’re unlocking efficiency, process automation, and data-driven insights tailored to specific individuals’ or teams’ needs.

One tool is making Copilot extensions accessible to more employees than ever before: Microsoft Copilot Studio.

This low-code solution makes it possible for both technical and non-technical users to create their own agents and tailor Copilot’s capabilities to their work. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re the first to implement Copilot Studio and develop a methodology for empowering our employees to create while establishing guardrails to keep our organization’s data safe.

As a result, we’ve built best practices that help us protect employees while enabling helpful agents—from individualized tools to organization-wide utilities. We’ve also learned lessons that can help customers navigate their own Copilot Studio journey.

Extending enterprise AI with Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio, a part of Microsoft Power Platform, empowers employees to build their own agents or use them to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot’s value. It uses the same low-code connector model as Power Platform to power actions through first-party and third-party services.

“Copilot Studio is a way for a non-technical person to spin up an agent quickly.”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager, Copilot Extensibility, Microsoft Digital

As a result, users can create their own agents tailored to specific professional needs and business functions. These agents can narrow the focus of knowledge within the Microsoft 365 Graph, reach outside of it, and even take actions.

There are several ways to create agents. They range from simple natural language queries in Copilot Studio agent builder through Copilot Chat in Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to the full-featured Copilot Studio graphical authoring environment to a combination of Copilot Studio and Azure AI.

“Copilot Studio is a way for a non-technical person to spin up an agent quickly,” says Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager responsible for Copilot extensibility at Microsoft Digital. “You can pull from a SharePoint site, from a graph connector, or from the web, and so employees are using it to tailor their experience to their business process.”

Building agents with Copilot Studio

“There’s an important role for Copilot Studio in helping customize the solutions our employees create, whether they want to use existing functionality, extend their knowledge, or expand their skill compatibility.”

Eileen Zhou, senior program manager, Microsoft Digital

Ultimately, the goal is to help employees work more efficiently by putting them in the driver’s seat through the power of self-directed agent creation. It also helps alleviate strain on business functions by getting people to the answers they need faster, without the need for human intervention.

“There’s an important role for Copilot Studio in helping customize the solutions our employees create, whether they want to use existing functionality, extend their knowledge, or expand their skill compatibility,” says Eileen Zhou, senior program manager in Microsoft Digital. “And it provides opportunities for both non-technical creators who want to create individualized solutions and people with advanced knowledge who are building more enterprise-focused agents.”

To empower our employees for this kind of creativity, we needed to put guardrails in place that ensure they can build agents confidently without putting themselves or the company at risk.

Managing the scale and sophistication of Copilot Studio creations

Building guardrails around agent production meant developing a system for classifying them according to their purpose, reach, and potential risk.

On one end of the spectrum, simple retrieval agents might only access content that individuals author and own. Non-technical employees typically create this kind of agent through natural language prompts in Copilot Studio agent builder.

“There’s a time and place for personal agents that integrate with business workflows, but if something is a business-critical service, we need to think security-first.”

Jake Visser, principal architect manager, Copilot and AI apps

On the other end, more elaborate tools—task or autonomous agents that combine knowledge, action, and orchestration—need to cross data boundaries to accomplish their work. More technically advanced IT employees and professional developers build these agents for larger-scale business functions using the full-featured Copilot Studio authoring environment.

Agent capabilities

This simple taxonomy doesn’t capture the whole picture though. As a result of the varying reaches and risk profiles for different agents, we tend to group them into three categories:

• Personal self-service agents created by employees to meet highly individual business needs.
• Line-of-business agents created by individual organizations within Microsoft to fulfil discipline-specific work functions.
• Agents intended for publishing across the entire organization.

“If an employee is building a service, we need to manage it like a service,” says Jake Visser, principal architect manager for Copilot and AI apps. “There’s a time and place for personal agents that integrate with business workflows, but if something is a business-critical service, we need to think security-first.”

Microsoft Digital is responsible for developing and enforcing guidelines for managing those services.

“Thanks to our early experiences with Copilot Studio, we’ve been able to develop gates and controls based on the type of agents that creators want to build.”

Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager, Microsoft Digital

Governance, processes, and policy for enabling Microsoft Copilot Studio

Establishing guardrails around the different agents our employees can create in Microsoft Copilot Studio involved asking a lot of questions. What Power Platform features apply to Copilot Studio workflows? What additional areas of risk do agents introduce? How can we build policies and processes around low-code AI creations? How can we help employees understand the implications of the agents they create?

“Thanks to our early experiences with Copilot Studio, we’ve been able to develop gates and controls based on the type of agents that creators want to build,” says Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager for Microsoft Digital. “Through predetermined groups and rules, we can allow freedom and experimentation at different scales without putting our internal tenant at risk.”

Since Copilot Studio exists within Power Platform, that tool’s capabilities provided a solid foundation for managing agents. We have extensive experience empowering citizen developers while maintaining good governance through Microsoft Power Platform. So it was easy for us to apply existing administration and governance best practices to this new framework.

At the outset of our journey, we already had robust systems in place for securing custom connectors, and Microsoft 365’s built-in governance capabilities ensure Microsoft 365 agents respect our labeling taxonomy and the policies it articulates. Finally, we have the power to introduce sharing limits that restrict how widely creators can distribute agents depending on their purpose and scope.

Together, these features and capabilities helped us extend existing administration and governance structures to the new world of agents. But thoughtful process and policy are equally important.

For the simpler self-service agents that individual employees create and use, we’re able to define our policies at the Copilot Studio environment level. Tenant administrators and partners on the Microsoft Security team apply data loss prevention policies to configure what individual employees can and can’t do. At this level, everyone in the company has the same configuration and tools available, and automation largely handles agent reviews and assessments based on pre-configured settings.

For more wide-reaching apps that operate at the line-of-business level or that we might publish enterprise-wide, we need to apply greater rigor. Thanks to our experience administrating and governing Power Platform, Microsoft Digital already had a robust process in place to review internally created enterprise apps. Discipline-specific professionals in security, privacy, and other spaces conduct these reviews to ensure internal teams meet our high standards.

By building onto that structure, we’ve updated our custom environment review process for agents created in Copilot Studio. We step through a review process that includes phases for security assessments, threat modeling, privacy assessments, and Responsible AI reviews.

Our goal is to properly scope our governance controls into what people are building. If we can easily enable things we consider low-risk like retrieval agents, we let employees build those in their personal development environment, but more powerful or far-reaching custom agents require more thorough oversight.

Configuration, review, and assessment are only parts of the puzzle. We also flighted user awareness efforts to help employees understand not just how to use Copilot Studio, but also its implications for security, privacy, and Responsible AI.

These campaigns included field readiness through Viva Learning, Copilot Champs sessions, newsletters, marketing campaigns through Viva Amplify, office hours, internal roadshows, and elite programs. We even launched an agent-building contest that invited employees to design whatever they liked.

Providing employees with opportunities for learning and experimentation has helped jumpstart interest in creating agents. Together with product features, process, and policy, it ensures we unlock the full value of Copilot Studio safely and effectively.

Unlocking Copilot Studio value

With the freedom to create using Microsoft Copilot Studio and the protection of robust guardrails, individuals and teams are flexing their imaginations to create highly useful agents. We’re in the early days of our own Copilot extensibility journey, but agents are already driving faster and more accurate access to information and greater productivity.

Two examples stand out:

• The IDEAS Copilot, a retrieval agent, empowers informed decision-making by democratizing access to our IDEAS knowledge base and its insights on app usage. Through natural language queries, IDEAS lets users take action on crucial usage data without the need for technical expertise.
• The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, a more advanced and organization-spanning agent, provides access to HR, IT, and facilities-related information and tools through two interfaces: Copilot or our company sites.

As the capabilities of Copilot Studio continue to grow, Microsoft Digital is actively collaborating with the product team to ensure administration and governance features keep pace with its technical elements. Our experience as the first and largest adopters of this new framework mean that every lesson we learn internally helps the product accommodate businesses’ needs more effectively.

“Everyone wants to move fast, and people are enthusiastic to explore this new framework for enterprise AI. Our guiding principle is making the product secure by default so businesses can make it happen safely.”

David Johnson, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

Thanks to our experience at Microsoft, the product has incorporated several new features:

• A set of controls for Copilot Studio connectors that allow guardrails for self-service.
• The ability to specify data sources including SharePoint sites, public URLs, internal documents, or others.
• Connector endpoint filtering that lets administrators govern the SharePoint sites and other connectable endpoints when creators build apps, flows, or agents.
• Different channels for publishing agents, like Microsoft Teams, websites, or integrations into tools like Dynamics 365.
• Suggested configuration defaults, for example requiring authentication so people can’t create anonymous Copilots.

Between built-in features and emerging best practices, Copilot Studio is unlocking the freedom to create like never before while maintaining organizational safety. For our customers and Copilot users, that means multiplying AI’s impact by setting employees free to create tools that will help them do their work faster, better, more creatively, and more insightfully.

“Everyone wants to move fast, and people are enthusiastic to explore this new framework for enterprise AI,” says David Johnson, principal program manager architect for governance at Microsoft Digital. “Our guiding principle is making the product secure by default so businesses can make it happen safely.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for getting started with Copilot Studio at your company:

• Have an all-up tenant strategy. Create separate Power Platform environments based on what people want to build, what data they want to use, and what controls you need as a result.
• Take this opportunity to make sure that your governance is up to date and aligns properly between Power Platform and Microsoft 365.
• Educating your users is key. Recognize that most difficulties arise from inefficiency and error, not nefarious intention.
• Evaluate your risk tolerance for different kinds of Copilot Studio creation and structure your security and governance efforts around that.
• Take advantage of dev environments to learn and practice.

Try it out

• Curious what Copilot Studio can accomplish for your business? Try a demo here.

Related links

• Learn how we’re using good governance to ride the wave of agents washing over Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Check out our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.
• Discover how we’re driving deeper AI value with Copilot extensibility.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

But how are we implementing this new framework?

Thanks to our team at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re extending Copilot’s value by taking better advantage of our Microsoft 365 Graph in more connected and efficient ways. As a result, Copilot extensions can connect with widely dispersed organizational information to help our employees find answers more effectively, work more efficiently, and think more creatively.

Taking Copilot to this next level is enabling us to extend its reach into more specific business scenarios. Those include quickly spinning up specialized agents that range from large, companywide experiences—like an agent that’s streamlining how our employees interact with HR and IT—to small, citizen developer-built solutions that solve specific tasks for individual employees or small teams.

Using Copilot Studio, organizations from across the company can build agents that provide tailored AI assistance to unlock new experiences for our employees, optimize our core processes, and provide deeper business insights.

Opening new horizons for intelligent assistance

Out of the box, Microsoft 365 Copilot provides powerful access to company data across our Microsoft tenant, discoverable through the Microsoft Graph. But not all information lives in the Microsoft Graph, and our employees do their work using more than just one set of tools.

“Our needs as employees don’t conform neatly to the different tools that we use to fulfill them. Copilot extensions are a way to collapse that complexity.”

Matthew Marzynski, product manager, Microsoft Digital

Many companies have data spread across an expansive digital landscape. Within Microsoft, our employees access a vast quantity of content within Microsoft 365 apps and in other data and systems. That breadth can create issues with discoverability and block our employees from taking action effectively. On top of that, some processes benefit from narrowing search parameters instead of widening them.

Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility is the framework that makes closing those gaps possible. It enables users and developers to customize Copilot’s behavior with additional instructions, grounding, and actions while providing a clear and discoverable entry point in the user interface.

“Organizations have mountains and mountains of data available, with an ever-increasing number of tools and experiences,” says Matthew Marzynski, product manager with Microsoft Digital. “The problem is that our needs as employees don’t conform neatly to the different tools that we use to fulfill them. Copilot extensions are a way to collapse that complexity.”

Through Copilot extensibility, employees no longer need encyclopedic knowledge of each and every app, tool, or repository that pertains to their work, enabling them to avoid time-consuming manual exploration. Instead, users and organizations can configure Copilot extensions to intelligently surface the information they need within a single pane. And at the center of this shift is a new kind of interface: the agent.

Agents enable users and developers to customize Copilot’s behavior with additional instructions, grounding, and actions, and they provide a clear and discoverable entry point through a single, accessible user interface. As a result, it’s now possible to extend the power of Copilot beyond our first-party product portfolio to deliver highly transformative and personalized employee experiences.

Users have enormous flexibility in terms of the kinds of agents they can create, their level of complexity, and how they create them. Creation approaches include Microsoft Copilot Studio Agent Builder, Copilot Studio itself, or working with both Copilot Studio and Azure AI.

For the simplest agents, creators can access Microsoft Copilot Studio Agent Builder right in Teams through Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. They can use it to walk through a streamlined process driven by natural language. Simple prompting and configuration panes make this interface accessible to anyone who wants to create agents.

“We’re looking at every workflow, process, and interaction to find ways of applying a Copilot-first perspective.”

Nitul Pancholi, AI Center of Excellence lead, Microsoft Employee Experience

Accessing Copilot Studio directly provides more power and flexibility. Based on Microsoft Power Platform, this tool provides a low-code or pro-code environment for creating and enhancing agents with custom experiences.

By focusing Copilot intelligence on specific repositories and apps, agents created in Copilot Studio provide greater discoverability outside the Microsoft 365 data estate while unlocking custom workflows. Most importantly, they make it possible to explore different information silos and take different kinds of actions from one interface, accessed through Copilot.

“We’re looking at every workflow, process, and interaction to find ways of applying a Copilot-first perspective,” says Nitul Pancholi, a lead in the AI Center of Excellence in Microsoft Employee Experience. “It’s an opportunity to redefine how we do work and drive greater impact than ever before.”

Whether an employee creates a personal agent tailored to their role or a line of business builds an enterprise tool to support their team’s work, Copilot Studio brings their vision to life. It lets users create agents using two building blocks, connectors and plugins, plus the ability to customize those elements.

Kinds of Copilot agents

“Through extensibility, we’re enabling anyone to create a Copilot-powered solution tailored to their team, suited for their organization, and focused on the right content,” says Dodd Willingham, program manager for internal deployment of search and chat in Microsoft Digital. “Graph connectors and plugins make the right content easily identifiable for their agents so they can target the data they need appropriately.”

Our Copilot extensibility journey

Microsoft is actively building and deploying agents. The Microsoft Digital team has been instrumental in creating and implementing these early scenarios using Copilot Studio through Microsoft Elite Builders, our internal program that encourages Microsoft employees to build and share their custom agents with fellow employees.

“The copilot extensibility concept is really about creating agents that are low-maintenance and high-value for users.”

Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager, Microsoft Digital

Simple retrieval agents are enabling much of this early work. This kind of extension powers scoped, task-specific experiences to accomplish specialized tasks in Copilot by accessing Microsoft Graph data alongside additional semantic ground.

The IDEAS Copilot is one example. It democratizes access to our IDEAS knowledge base’s insights on app usage to empower informed decision-making. Through natural language queries, it enables users to take action on crucial usage data without technical expertise.

“The copilot extensibility concept is really about creating agents that are low-maintenance and high-value for users,” says Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager for Microsoft Digital. “Anyone on the tenant can create their own agents, while engineering teams can build enterprise-level solutions using Copilot Studio to solve business problems and boost productivity on a wider scale.”

Our most ambitious project so far has been an agent that unlocks scoped, role-specific Copilot experiences we can embed in public and private apps. The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot grants employees access to HR, IT, and facilities-related information and tools through their choice of interface—Copilot or our company sites. It’s now available in a limited public preview.

The agent connects to SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, and other resources that comprise the Microsoft Graph to retrieve the right information. Depending on what area the employee’s query is related to, the agent integrates their personalized data from a variety of knowledge bases and third-party apps. From there, it provides the employee with an answer that creates a single, reliable starting point for resolving their query or need.

“As Customer Zero, we need to balance product innovation with security and operational needs.”

Mykhailo Sydorchuk, Customer Zero lead, Microsoft Digital

Employees are finding answers more accurately and faster, without the need for extensive searches across wide-ranging toolsets. In our initial pilot, people who use the Employee Self-Service Agent for HR receive 42% greater accuracy in answering their questions. On the IT side, the overall self-help success rate increased by 36%. But the greatest benefit is the way this agent keeps employee productivity flowing by allowing users to seek out crucial information in a single pane within their flow of work.

Learning from early extensibility projects

As one of the first enterprises to explore Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility, developing and implementing these solutions comes with its own challenges and learnings.

“As Customer Zero, we need to balance product innovation with security and operational needs,” says Mykhailo Sydorchuk, Customer Zero lead for Microsoft 365 integrated apps in Microsoft Digital. “We’re balancing the priorities of driving productivity for the business, supporting the product teams in deploying new features, and also maintaining the guardrails to protect employees and our organization.”

Within Microsoft Digital, we have two chief advantages as we address these IT challenges:

• A trustworthy technology ecosystem operating at an incredible scope and scale across a huge product suite, ripe with the kinds of data that empower AI tools.

• A mature IT organization that has decades of experience in adopting and operationalizing new technologies and mitigating risks.

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned has been about adapting our existing governance structures to the framework of Copilot extensibility.

Agents rely on connections with existing tools that have well-established parameters for reasoning over data and governing information. Because Copilot respects Microsoft 365 governance and data loss prevention protocols, it honors all the access controls, security policies, and personally identifiable information (PII) data-handling structures that an organization puts in place across its tenant. As a result, businesses can rely on Microsoft 365’s robust foundation of security even as they forge ahead into new AI capabilities.

But this is a new approach to technology, so we’ve adapted our review process for new agents alongside our implementation to ensure governance and security keep pace with innovation. Those reviews largely revolve around key questions we ask about all our technology, with an added layer around Responsible AI, where we ask ourselves questions like these:

• Security: How does data move from one app to another across the Microsoft 365 tenant boundary, and how does an agent interact with that data?
• Privacy: Where does the agent handle and store PII?
• Accessibility: Does the UI make this technology equally available to all users?
• Responsible AI: Does the agent meet our standards for fairness, reliability and safety, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability?

From a security and governance perspective, it can be daunting to implement internally built extensions that have access to your organizational data and incorporate them into your business workflows. By asking the same questions we’ve embedded into our review framework and relying on the robust security and governance features of Microsoft 365, you can ensure you maintain control over your organizational data.

It’s also important to realize that adopting this new framework will take time. There’s a natural progression from simpler extensions to more complex tooling. It’s all part of accelerating along an adoption maturity curve with the next iteration of AI tools.

“A cornerstone of Copilot extensibility is understanding your data and the scenarios you think will be most impactful for optimizing processes.”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

The technical aspects of enabling Copilot extensibility require forethought, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. If your team maintains robust governance policies through your Microsoft 365 tenant and they’re experienced with Power Platform, much of the legwork is already done.

But if your organization is new to this space, our internal experience governing Copilot can act as a guide for keeping your data secure. We’ve also created resources tailored to helping first-time users get up to speed with Copilot Studio. We’ve also made the Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot available to customers in limited public preview to provide a straightforward on-ramp to extensibility.

It starts with considering where Copilot extensions might fit into your workflows and what data it needs to access, starting with simple implementations, then deliberately building from there.

“A cornerstone of Copilot extensibility is understanding your data and the scenarios you think will be most impactful for optimizing processes,” says Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager for Customer Zero Extensibility in Microsoft Digital. “Then ensure your endpoints are ready to hook into natural language processing and build your instructions.”

A principled approach to employee usage and adoption is also important. Eagerness among IT professionals and early adopters won’t necessarily drive business-wide transformation. As a result, we’re actively working to inform employees about the value of these tools and provide skilling opportunities.

“One of the main things we observed is that there’s a certain level of change management involved,” Pancholi says. “In order to build these habits, we’ve focused on creating simple workflows with tangible impacts so employees can see the value and start building Copilot-first habits.”

Finally, we’ve discovered that keeping agents lean in scope helps them function more easily. It’s important to think about back-end processes as you create extensions. For example, including too many data sources can become a serious tax on processing power. From both a performance and scenario standpoint, it’s a better strategy to keep agents narrowly focused.

Next steps into the era of extensibility

As we continue our Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility journey, we’re looking to our internal experience to guide the product for our customers, especially in IT. Our team is currently exploring ways to further unify the ecosystem until administration and management of extensions can all occur through a single layer. That will reduce operational costs and enable successful adoption on a greater scale.

We’re also exploring ways to shift more aspects of governance to Copilot itself. Since many agents access data and third-party apps outside our tenant, those sources might not benefit from Microsoft 365 data protection policies. Allocating more of the burden of governance to agents themselves may help fill that gap.

“The vision around extensibility is that Copilot can be the single place where all tools coalesce into one single pane. It’s a way to make your time much more effective and reduce the cognitive tax of changing channels or swiveling seats, and it’s ultimately a way to make your employee experience more rewarding.”

Matthew Marzynski, product manager, Microsoft Digital

For now, we’re still exploring what’s possible. And employee uptake tells a strong story about extensibility’s impact. Since the release of our initial Copilot extensions a few months ago, usage of retrieval agents has shot up by a factor of 10. Initial results from our rollout of the Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot are equally promising.

It’s all coming together to demonstrate the profound value Copilot can provide for businesses.

“The vision around extensibility is that Copilot can be the single place where all tools coalesce into one single pane,” Marzynski says. “It’s a way to make your time much more effective and reduce the cognitive tax of changing channels or swiveling seats, and it’s ultimately a way to make your employee experience more rewarding.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for getting started with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility at your company:

• Be curious: Don’t limit your imagination, because it’s a chance to redefine workflows.
• Be patient but continue driving forward. This is the beginning of a more long-term journey, and it’s important to get more comfortable with the technology.
• Hackathons produce amazing results. It’s important to give people time to experiment together.
• Have a strong change management program. No matter how wonderful the tech is, people need to see helpful use cases and real value.
• Use your existing investment, processes, governance, and management practices for Microsoft 365 and scale it out.
• Build a well-documented review process.
• Start with only allowing approved apps, or enable guardrails for self-service to ensure IT maintains control and security, then grow from there. When it comes time for citizen developers, open the door to retrieval agents.
• Think in terms of data. It’s about what data you have, if it’s properly governed, where it’s being accessed, and what tenant boundaries it crosses.

Try it out

Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility at your company.

Related links

• Discover Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Learn how we’re embracing this ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Explore the use of good governance to manage the wave of agents washing over Microsoft.
• Read more about our Employee Self-Service Agent.
• See how we’re powering our AI transformation with our AI Center of Excellence.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Powering AI value with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, we’re deploying a spectrum of agents to fulfill different needs, from acting as knowledge sources for our individual employees, to helpers that handle specific tasks for our teams, organizations, and for the full company.

Of the different kinds of agents, the easiest to implement are retrieval agents, which employees can build using Microsoft Copilot Studio agent builder or SharePoint. After a few quick steps, the agents they create retrieve information for them from data grounded in our Microsoft 365 tenant, like a SharePoint library or collection of libraries, reason over it, summarize it, and answer their questions.

As one of the first enterprise IT organizations to deploy this capability to our employees, we’re starting to see their impact first-hand, and along the way, we’re learning lessons that our customers can use to unlock their own agentic abilities.

Copilot + retrieval agents: A new way to drive enterprise AI value

So, what are retrieval agents?

First, it’s important to understand where these Microsoft 365 Copilot extensions fit within the emerging agentic environment.

Copilot agents expand Copilot’s knowledge and skills, and they can even operate autonomously to complete tasks or automate processes. Retrieval agents operate at the simplest end of the agentic spectrum and are the easiest for employees to create.

Types of agents

“Retrieval agents wrap around knowledge sources and data sets, and they include system prompts so they behave the way their creators want,” says Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager for Microsoft Digital. “They’re AI helpers that our employees can create to find what they want without having to search around manually.”

“If we think of Copilot as the UI for AI, retrieval agents are a further layer on that UI, that can access and reason over their organization’s data.”

Mykhailo Sydorchuk, Customer Zero lead for Microsoft 365 integrated apps, Microsoft Digital

A retrieval agent is essentially Copilot, plus its creator’s instructions, plus grounding in a particular data set. These extensions can accomplish a wide variety of jobs, from acting as an event planning assistant to sourcing insights into business optimizations to surfacing internal guidance around leadership best practices.

“If we think of Copilot as the UI for AI, retrieval agents are a further layer on that UI, that can access and reason over their organization’s data,” says Mykhailo Sydorchuk, Customer Zero lead for Microsoft 365 integrated apps at Microsoft Digital. “They can also address other data sets and systems using Copilot, without the need to build custom connectors or orchestration.”

At Microsoft, retrieval agents are accelerating our AI journey by enabling employees to tailor Copilot’s capabilities to their own work and specific knowledge sources. Their value comes from creating micro-experiences that meet specialized needs to enhance productivity and information discoverability.

“With Copilot Studio agent builder and retrieval agents, we’re empowering our employee citizen developers to experiment freely and create agents easily, then share them out, all surrounded by the right governance and management process.”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager for Customer Zero Extensibility, Microsoft Digital

Creating retrieval agents couldn’t be easier. One option is through Microsoft Copilot Studio agent builder, accessible through Copilot Chat within Microsoft Teams. Employees can use natural language prompts and a simplified configuration process to provide custom instructions, tell their agents how to behave, and provide specific data and knowledge sources.

SharePoint agents are another opportunity to add AI assistance into everyday work. These enable users to turn SharePoint sites and documents into scoped agents that are subject matter experts for your business needs. Site owners or admins simply customize their SharePoint agent’s branding and purpose, specify the sites, pages, and files it should get information from, and define customized prompts tailored to its purpose and scope.​​​​​​​

“We’re targeting our core enterprise professional developer scenarios with more advanced tooling,” says Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager for Customer Zero Extensibility in Microsoft Digital. “But with Copilot Studio agent builder and retrieval agents, we’re empowering our employee citizen developers to experiment freely and create agents easily, then share them out, all surrounded by the right governance and management process.”

Enabling retrieval agents while ensuring our organization’s integrity

While agents represent a leap forward in AI-powered productivity, capturing that value means balancing the freedom to explore with the need to protect our company.

Microsoft is one of the first and largest organizations to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot by enabling agents. As a result, our team here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, has been hard at work ensuring those agents don’t put the company at risk.

“The beauty of retrieval agents is that, for the most part, they’re grounded in Microsoft 365 data, so they provide a single-pane view within Teams, instead of forcing users to go from one source to another to seek out information.”

Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager, Microsoft Digital

The level of risk an agent presents largely depends on its access to data sources and the actions it can take. More advanced task and autonomous agents need to cross Microsoft 365 tenant boundaries to enable actions. But retrieval agents are much simpler.

Retrieval agents typically only access data within tenant boundaries through graph connectors. Although they occasionally need to connect with information outside the tenant, they only retrieve data and don’t transmit it externally. As a result, administrating and governing these agents is much simpler.

“The beauty of retrieval agents is that, for the most part, they’re grounded in Microsoft 365 data, so they provide a single-pane view within Teams, instead of forcing users to go from one source to another to seek out information,” Hasan says. “Whatever your window of productivity might be, you can interact with the information you need without constantly switching context.”

We started small, experimenting with retrieval agents with trusted stakeholders and reviewing each one to ensure they didn’t present unacceptable risks to the company. Through what we learned during that process and the data safety controls we maintain across our tenant, we’ve minimized the scenarios where agents require reviews, which only come into play for more complex agents that build on bespoke graph connectors, API plugins, or custom orchestration to access external knowledge sources and take actions.

Our confidence in retrieval agents’ safety comes from a few key factors.

Administration and configuration

Retrieval agents’ simplicity also helps us keep the risk of data overexposure low. Unlike more complex agents that require security assessments, threat modeling, privacy assessments, and Responsible AI reviews, we’re able to define our policies for retrieval agents at the agent builder environment level.

We empower tenant administrators and our partners on the Microsoft Security team to apply data loss prevention policies that configure what individual employees can enable for their retrieval agents. At this level, everyone in the company has the same configuration and tools available, and automation largely handles agent reviews and assessments. We based these pre-configured settings on the same security, privacy, and regulatory compliance standards we apply to any internally built application.

Approved graph connectors

Graph connectors increase the discoverability of external data by integrating it into an agent’s grounding. At Microsoft, we’ve onboarded a series of approved connectors that creators can use to incorporate additional data for their agents to reason over. They include connectors for external websites as well as tools like Azure DevOps and ServiceNow.

Our criteria and review process for connectors ensure that agents don’t put our tenant at risk. As long as a connector is approved, employees are free to use it to create their agents.

Ensuring Responsible AI standards at the platform layer

Microsoft has been at the forefront of establishing Responsible AI principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. To ensure we enabled retrieval agents that would respect Responsible AI standards, we needed to translate those concepts into concrete policies we could apply at the platform level.

Microsoft’s Office of Responsible AI has been an indispensable resource during this process. They maintain a comprehensive and evolving list of policy statements around restricted uses for AI capabilities. Those include things like using AI to infer emotions or personal characteristics, assess employee performance, or social scoring.

As our implementation of retrieval agents matured, we instituted controls at the platform layer to block these restricted uses for AI, identifying what kinds of information an agent can retrieve. Now, Copilot Studio agent builder knows how to evaluate responsibility against a wide array of parameters and make determinations based on the parameters we’ve set out.

For example, if a manager attempted to create a retrieval agent that would assess employee performance based on meeting attendance, guardrails at the platform layer would curtail that ability. Naturally, as we develop our policies around responsible AI further, the parameters of Responsible AI will shift and grow, and we’ll continue to nuance our configurations.

Thanks to these foundations, we’re now at the point where we feel comfortable giving every Microsoft employee access to Microsoft Copilot Studio agent builder and the freedom to create retrieval agents. It’s all part of our principle of employee self-service with guardrails.

“It’s a constant evaluation,” says Hasan. “Our goal is to allow as much freedom as we can with retrieval agents so employees can increase productivity without going down the path of greater customization that requires more intensive review.”

Different organizations are at different stages of their AI maturity journey. As you experiment with Copilot extensibility, it will be important to define your organization’s level of experience implementing AI tools, your employees’ state of readiness and training, key risk areas, and sensitive scenarios.

“Users who want to build agents with no code can select from premade templates using natural language, or they can fill out a few fields.”

Brian Moran, senior product manager, Employee Experiences team, Microsoft Digital

From there, you’ll be able to use out-of-the-box configuration capabilities in Copilot Studio agent builder to establish guardrails that work for you. It will take careful collaboration across security, privacy, legal, and IT teams, but we’re already learning that the benefits are worth the effort.

Ease and access drive creativity and new ways to work

Now that we’ve empowered our employees to build retrieval agents organization-wide, examples of creativity and innovation are popping up all over the company. Ease of use and freedom have a lot to do with this proliferation.

Using Copilot Studio agent builder

“Users who want to build agents with no code can select from premade templates using natural language, or they can fill out a few fields,” says Brian Moran, senior product manager on the Employee Experiences team at Microsoft Digital. “They can get their agents up and running in minutes.”

Creative examples of the ways that employees and teams are using retrieval agents include:

• IDEAS Copilot democratizes access to our Insights, Data, Engineering, Analytics, AI, and Systems (IDEAS) knowledge base to help users act on crucial usage information without the need for technical expertise. The agent fully integrates with Microsoft Teams, so employees can dig into data across sales, marketing, finance, operations, and more using natural language queries in their familiar working environment.
• Security Comms Agent helps our communications team create blog posts by providing a prompt that includes the content’s purpose and context. It accesses internal documents about business objectives, positioning frameworks, voice guidelines, and our Microsoft Digital communications and marketing plan, as well as the internet and specific Microsoft-owned learning sites for added context. From there, the agent creates a first draft that aligns with our Microsoft Digital positioning, objectives, and voice.

“Empowering our people to create retrieval agents in a responsible environment is the ideal combination of human creativity and AI capabilities, and we’re confident it will unlock a new era of innovation.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Employee Experience

• Know Your Customer leverages AI to provide a comprehensive view of customer profiles. It accesses an overview of a customer’s tenant, usage metrics for Copilot, service incident reports, and more to provide usage statistics and health data for Microsoft 365 apps, email, meetings, Microsoft Viva, and other products to enhance customer engagement and support. The agent can even generate a tenant-specific Microsoft PowerPoint dossier for ease of use.
• Prompt Buddy Agent helps employees discover ready-to-use prompts that eliminate the need for experimentation and prompt engineering. Employees use natural language queries to discover AI prompts their colleagues have shared across industries, roles, personas, and topics, all without leaving Copilot Chat. As a result, they can save valuable time by streamlining AI-assisted workflows.
• Communications Plan Assistant accesses a library of prompts our Microsoft Viva communications team has developed to quickly draft content. The team communicates with the agent conversationally, providing feedback and selecting from the options it provides, then populates pre-defined sections in their communications plan template. At the end of the interaction, they can request a summary with all the final content that will go into the plan.

“By trusting our employees to imagine and create their own extensions for Microsoft 365 Copilot, we’re making it possible to personalize enterprise AI like never before,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Employee Experience. “Empowering our people to create retrieval agents in a responsible environment is the ideal combination of human creativity and AI capabilities, and we’re confident it will unlock a new era of innovation.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for getting started with retrieval agents at your company:

• Establish early communication and collaboration with members of your security, legal, compliance, IT, and any other teams who can help you define ways to configure Copilot Studio agent builder safely.
• Agents rely on data, so ensure your enterprise data is clean, well-governed, and accessible through scalable pipelines.
• Start slowly. Enable retrieval agents for smaller, select groups to work through any configuration issues or concerns before widening access. Plan to review everything you do at each step, and use those learnings as a basis for configuration and automation as time progresses.
• Balance employee empowerment with organizational safety. That balance will evolve as your organization’s AI maturity progresses.
• Use simple retrieval agents as a springboard to more complex extensions that require a structured review process.

Try it out

Want to explore the possibilities for creating agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio? Try it free here.

Related links

• Witness AI-powered agents in action to see how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re finding deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.
• Discover ways we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Check out how we’re riding the wave of AI agents washing over Microsoft using good governance.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post How our employees are extending enterprise AI with custom retrieval agents appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

But how do you move into the agentic future without putting your organization and employees at risk? How do you encourage citizen developers to create agents freely while maintaining security, privacy, and compliance?

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re putting practical governance structures in place to ensure our internal agents are useful, safe, and properly scoped. Through employee empowerment with guardrails, we’re unlocking the potential of the agentic era.

New frontiers, new challenges

Plenty of organizations are still getting used to the idea of AI in the workplace. Adding agents on top of that can ignite fears for IT practitioners, security teams, privacy experts, and other professionals whose job it is to keep their organizations functioning safely and smoothly.

“We’re now putting generative AI capabilities into the hands of people with little to no technical background, and that’s incredible from a productivity and innovation standpoint.”

Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager, Microsoft Digital

Most of those fears are around a new territory of unknowns. Organizations want to understand if and how agents will exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and violate policies. They’re unsure whether centralized governance is enough to secure agents at scale. And they’re worried about agent sprawl—too many agents shared too freely, with too little oversight.

The democratic nature of agent building plays a major role.

“We’re now putting generative AI capabilities into the hands of people with little to no technical background, and that’s incredible from a productivity and innovation standpoint,” says Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager for Microsoft Digital. “But it also makes it simpler for people to do potentially risky things, because AI lets them do it that much faster and easier.”

To address these risks, our governance team at Microsoft Digital has identified the greatest challenges facing the company and our customers. They include:

• Ensuring users and apps don’t get access to privileged information and effectively applying controls
• Keeping employees from creating agents that violate company policies
• Balancing between the freedom for employees to share their creations and the need to prevent agent sprawl
• Delineating which agents are authoritative, safe, and centralized for enterprise functions
• Inventorying agents to provide lifecycle management

Managing all of these challenges comes down to a delicate balancing act.

“The key is to achieve an equilibrium between innovation and governance,” Hasan says. “A strong policy framework is the foundation of good governance.”

Applying our existing governance groundwork to agents

At Microsoft Digital, our approach to governing agents has grown out of years of practices and policies that we’ve already matured with other products, including AI-powered tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot. We’re also learning as we build, identifying new issues and edge cases as they emerge.

“You have to learn from what you’ve already successfully worked into your tenant. What are your core governance principles, and what’s your risk tolerance for different capabilities like openness to external systems or high-compliance environments?”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager, Copilot Extensibility team, Microsoft Digital

We prioritize three chief categories to keep our employees and organization safe:

1. Security: We’ve established standards for data classification, policies on handling confidential information, and other security measures to protect data from unauthorized access, misuse, and disclosures. Microsoft Purview powers these capabilities through data labeling, rights management, and data loss prevention.
2. Privacy: Privacy compliance measures keep personal data protected and ensure agents adhere to regulatory frameworks in regions where we operate. We conduct regular privacy assessments for all applications, and that applies to high-impact agents as well.
3. Regulatory compliance: Regulatory compliance assessments ensure agents meet legal standards. To keep us up to speed, our Legal and Compliance teams carefully monitor AI guidelines, regulations, and laws as they evolve so we can understand and incorporate them into our assessments.

Expanding these priorities to agents is an unfolding process for our Microsoft Digital Governance and Security teams.

“You have to learn from what you’ve already successfully worked into your tenant,” says Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager responsible for Copilot extensibility with Microsoft Digital. “What are your core governance principles, and what’s your risk tolerance for different capabilities like openness to external systems or high-compliance environments?”

We incorporated elements of our tenant’s minimum bar for governance into how we secure agents. Those include Microsoft Information Protection, a functional inventory, activity logging, lifecycle management, and the ability to properly isolate agents against crossing data boundaries.

Although our all-up strategy is to govern at the container level, the added functionality of agents demands that we also introduce further controls like sharing limits, breadth of knowledge sources, agent metadata, and information about an agent’s behaviors.

“We’re focused on what we allow for our employees, what governance means in this environment, and expanding these principles out to cover individual agents.”

David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect, Microsoft Digital

Our intention is always to act as proactively as possible while putting reactive structures in place to catch any issues that arise. After all, this is a new technology, so there are bound to be some surprises. By combining all of these elements, we’ve landed on four core principles for governing agents:

1. We empower employees to create and share simple, low-risk agents: We provide a safe space and personal flexibility that allows individual employees to experiment without implicating company data or content that users don’t own.
2. We capture and vet sensitive data flows at the enterprise level: More complex or far-reaching agents owned by teams or lines of business need enterprise documentation to account for external audits or security and privacy validation. Builders need to demonstrate that they’ve thought through the security and privacy implications of their agents, so these projects go through approval process flows similar to any other professionally developed apps before we trust them with potentially sensitive data.
3. We protect data designated confidential or higher: We contain data flows to tenant mandates and only trust suitable storage destinations for content. That depends on the ability to gate which connectors can work with particular source data and sensitivity labels.
4. We honor the enterprise lifecycle: Both user-based and attestation-based lifecycles come into play. We treat agents that individual users own like any other user app and delete them when the employee leaves the organization. Agents owned by teams have a lifecycle defined by the tenant and tied to attestation, the software development lifecycle (SDL), and accountability confirmations.

“It all goes back to our core principles, to what we’re trying to achieve,” says David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect with Microsoft Digital. “We’re focused on what we allow for our employees, what governance means in this environment, and expanding these principles out to cover individual agents.”

Covering the full spectrum of agents with a toolkit of policies and protections

Because agents are so diverse, generalized governance will only get you so far. There’s an entire matrix of different parameters that apply to any agent, and they all require different policies. Those parameters include:

• Different types of reach: Personal agents, limited sharing like dev environments, or broad sharing
• The agent-building tool: Microsoft 365 Copilot agent builder, SharePoint agent builder, Microsoft Copilot Studio, or tools geared to more professional developers
• Knowledge sources: Public sites, SharePoint and OneDrive, directly uploaded files, enterprise apps and systems, and third-party products
• Enterprise sanctioning: Whether we promote agents into officially published internal tools that represent authoritative applications

Each of these parameters creates a pivot that we need to manage through governance, and we’ve painstakingly assembled a set of policies and controls to account for them. As our understanding and use of agents advances, we’re continually updating how we match their characteristics and capabilities with relevant policies and any applicable reviews.

“Well-established application policies help us drive adoption and management for agents.”

Mykhailo Sydorchuk, Customer Zero lead, Microsoft 365 integrated experiences, Microsoft Digital

In addition to mapping out our policies for governing agents, this chart illustrates how we see their relative utility across our organization. From left to right, it demonstrates an escalation from personally useful to organizationally useful agents. Their governance policies and controls escalate accordingly.

“Well-established application policies help us drive adoption and management for agents,” says Mykhailo Sydorchuk, a Customer Zero lead for Microsoft 365 integrated experiences at Microsoft Digital. “Fortunately, most organizations have well-defined security, privacy, and other governance mechanisms in place, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to extend those to agents.”

Managing agent sprawl in the enterprise environment

Our governance structures, practices, and policies also prevent sprawl that comes from unnecessary, duplicative, or unused agents. For example, if more than one team were to create an agent that points to HR information, the employee experience would suffer because our users wouldn’t be sure which agent presents the authoritative source of truth.

Most importantly, Microsoft Digital partners with other internal organizations to ensure they target agent development to avoid sprawl. Ideally, these engagements take place before teams start building their agents so we can avoid wasted effort or rework.

Microsoft Digital acts as a resource for teams who create agents in three ways:

1. Before we set a team free to create an agent, we conduct early consultations that empower teams to identify the right scenarios. If a pre-existing agent fits their scenario, we encourage them to use that agent instead of creating another, redundant solution.
2. We actively partner with teams to lend technical assistance and ensure they only build relevant, uniquely useful solutions that don’t overlap with other, already-authoritative enterprise agents. Additionally, we encourage creators to build the simplest possible solution to meet their needs so they can deliver agents with minimal custom investment and iterate quickly.
3. Members of Microsoft Digital operate as an “Agent Center of Excellence.” They conduct internal engagements, acting as educators and coaches for teams who want to build agents.

We also combat sprawl in other ways. First, user-based lifecycles and periodic attestation help us keep agents from getting out of hand by making sure employees take accountability for them. Requiring attestation means that agents cease to exist once they’re no longer useful or their owner leaves the company.

In-product controls are very helpful. For example, our policies around how widely individuals or teams can share their agents restrict the degree they overlap with each other.

IT administration helps us control the many surface areas for creating and publishing agents. Because we have a firm minimum bar founded in our overall tenant, that provides a good policy framework for consistency among admins.

Finally, user education has an important role to play. Like agent creation capabilities themselves, our employee knowledge-building efforts are still relatively new. We’re prioritizing education to ensure everyone can use these tools safely and keep them scoped to their needs.

“The biggest part of managing sprawl is that we clean house regularly,” Johnson says. “We make sure we tie every agent to some sort of accountability policy to confirm it’s still compliant, effectively managed, and secure, and if all of that is in place, the agent can continue its work.”

Lessons learned from our agent governance efforts

As your organization dives deeper into the new era of AI-empowered work, agents will become an essential part of your employees’ day-to-day lives. But your IT, Security, Privacy, Data, and other teams may have concerns about ensuring the new agentic frontier doesn’t turn into the Wild West.

Although every organization is unique, the lessons you learn from our experience can help you start unlocking the power of agents. Here are five steps you can take today:

1. Provide safe spaces with appropriate guardrails for individual employees to experiment with simple agents. Copilot Studio agent builder is a great place to start.
2. Empower a small number of trusted creators to experiment with more powerful agent-building tools under the close watch of IT, Governance, Security, Privacy, Data, and HR teams. This will help you see where the gaps appear in existing processes and policies, and it will provide visibility into what you need to review as these processes become more widely available.
3. Revisit your labeling structures and data flows. It will be important to have these structures in place to support this new agentic environment. Start by learning from our experience governing AI internally at Microsoft.
4. Adapt your review process to the new world of agents. It’s highly likely you have robust security, privacy, and accessibility reviews in place. Without too much work, you can add reviews into the publishing workflow for agents you intend to use at the line of business or company-wide level. Also consider adding reviews for Responsible AI.
5. Establish a reasonable enterprise lifecycle for agents that includes attestation. That will keep agents from sprawling or remaining in place after employees have left your organization or simply no longer need a particular agent.

As AI continues to evolve and agents become essential assistants for every employee, developing structures to guide their creation and use will only become more important.

“We definitely want to prevent sprawl and promote safety, but we also want to encourage all employees at Microsoft to build agents,” Hasan says. “We accomplish that by standardizing the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ around agents and the policies that govern them.”

We’re just at the beginning of this journey, but our core principle will remain the same: We empower employees while providing guardrails.

Key takeaways

Below, you’ll find essential guidelines for successfully governing agents within your organization, covering everything from policy frameworks and environment strategies to leveraging Copilot Studio and adhering to global regulations.

• The complexity of governing agents depends on the maturity of your organization and where you are in your adoption journey. Start slowly to let that maturity build.
• A strong policy framework is the foundation. Lean on existing app governance policies, then layer agent-specific structures on top.
• Figure out your building environment strategy. Decide on what scenarios match up with specific environments and make the relevant environments available to the relevant employees.
• Don’t forget that Copilot Studio is part of Power Platform. Use what you’ve learned empowering citizen developers in Power Platform to guide your work with agents.
• Global regulations around categories like privacy, security, and responsibility provide a good baseline for establishing governance policies. Set relevant teams to work thinking through these regulations and incorporate their insights into your agent governance.

Try it out

Find out how to set up Microsoft 365 Copilot and assign licenses at your organization.

Related links

• Learn about how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• See how we’re getting more value out of AI with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.
• Explore ways we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Discover our process for unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Riding the wave of agents washing over Microsoft with good governance appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve implemented a Power Platform governance strategy and vision that is empowering our employees to build solutions that are improving how they get their work done, including crafting their own AI agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio.

How are we doing this?

With proper governance mechanisms that keep them safe while letting their creativity flow—and our employees are running with it, creating innovative and dynamic solutions that are streamlining our processes and enhancing our productivity.

And that’s exactly the point—the Power Platform democratizes development, allowing the citizen developer in all of us to come out and play. For us, this is an essential ingredient for fostering the kind of innovation that can and will continue to drive our company forward.  

Our strategic approach to governance on the Power Platform

Locking in on the right approach to governance is pivotal.

“Governance provides essential guardrails, by ensuring that we have visibility into what is being built and enforcing policies to maintain security and compliance with the Power Platform,” says Aisha Hasan, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “Governance allows us to balance the freedom to innovate with the need to protect our tenant from risks.”

Governance is a key strategic enabler to our approach.

With the wide variety of users at Microsoft developing solutions in the Power Platform, it’s vital they understand how to develop within governance parameters and deploy their solutions effectively. This ensures that while innovation flourishes, it does so within a framework that maintains security and compliance.

Starting at the top with environments

Power Platform environments are the foundation for providing structure and organization with our Power Platform tenant.

“Our governance approach is rooted in a holistic environment strategy,” Hasan says. “We’re applying policies at the environment (or container) level to assess and manage risk uniformly and at scale.”

We use an intentional environment structure to enable good governance practices, and we apply our policies and rules to that structure to ensure that every single environment is governed to our standards. This approach avoids broadly shared environments that are difficult to govern effectively.

“We’re routing developers out of the default environment. It’s about getting away from that ‘big bucket’ approach. We want every flow, bot, and app to be in an environment that is purpose-built and intentionally configured.”

Aisha Hasan, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Every environment in our tenant has a specific purpose and we ensure we have the proper information about each environment to maintain proper governance. Every environment in our tenant is tied to an owner who is accountable for everything within that environment. This ownership model ensures clear responsibility and accountability.

To enable this specific approach to environments, we make clear distinctions.

First, the default environment—a built-in environment that comes with every single Power Platform tenant—is not the default.

“We’re routing developers out of the default environment,” Hasan says. “It’s about getting away from that ‘big bucket’ approach. We want every flow, bot, and app to be in an environment that is purpose-built and intentionally configured.”

To streamline the process and ensure proper governance, we’ve turned on automated routing. This means that if anyone tries to use the default environment, they’re automatically routed to a specific environment type instead, according to their use case and our environment groupings. This helps in managing the lifecycles of our environments and ensures that every Power Platform solution is in the right place with the right governance.

Shifting to environment routing

We group environments based on their usage and apply specific rules to each group. There are groups for personal productivity, team collaboration, and enterprise development; each with its own set of rules and compliance requirements and tied to a specific environment type in the Power Platform.

Personal productivity environments are designed for individual use, where users can create and experiment with applications and automations without the need for extensive governance. These environments are typically developer environments, which are highly restricted in terms of sharing capabilities. Users can build apps, flows, and other solutions for their personal productivity, but they can’t share these solutions with others. This ensures that any experimentation or personal projects remain isolated and don’t impact the broader organization.

Team collaboration environments are intended for team-based projects and workflows. These environments are usually built within Dataverse for Teams, which integrates with Microsoft Teams. Dataverse for Teams environments are tied to a Microsoft 365 group, which helps manage governance and lifecycle through the group’s settings. These environments are perfect for team productivity solutions that are used within a specific team but aren’t meant to be shared companywide. While Dataverse for Teams environments have some quirks and limitations, they provide a balance between flexibility and governance, making them suitable for moderate governance and security controls.

Enterprise development environments are used for large-scale, enterprise-level projects that require stringent governance and compliance. These environments are typically sandbox or production environments and are subject to a rigorous request and approval process. Users must provide detailed information about their project, including data sensitivity, regulatory requirements, and business justification. These environments are governed by stricter usage policies, custom ownership policies, and regular security reviews. The goal is to ensure that any enterprise-level solutions are secure, compliant, and properly managed.

Using groups, roles, and policies

Microsoft runs on trust, and our success depends on earning and maintaining it. Our Secure Future Initiative ensures that security is first in everything that we do, and that extends to how we govern the Power Platform.

Our governance strategy revolves around applying controls at the environment level. We categorize environments, using the three main groups already identified. There are specific security controls and approaches in place in each group:

“Our security controls and policies are really about enablement as much as possible,” says Jake Visser, a principal architect manager at Microsoft. “If you create a developer environment, we’ll assign an appropriate DLP policy for you to work with your solution and send you a Teams message indicating what policy we’ve assigned and what you can do there. It’s about making sure that people can build and innovate while staying within the guardrails of our governance policies.”

DLP policies are crucial for preventing data breaches and ensuring that data remains within the organization’s boundaries. We apply DLP policies at various levels to control which connectors and actions are allowed within different environments to prevent the unintentional sharing of sensitive information and ensure that data stays within the organization. These policies control which actions and endpoints connectors are allowed to interact with. For instance, if a connector is used to write data, the policy ensures that the data is protected and only interacts with approved endpoints.

For enterprise development environments, teams can request custom DLP policies if they need to use specific connectors or actions that aren’t covered by the standard policy. This involves providing a threat model and other relevant information to justify the need for the custom policy.

Harnessing proactive and reactive governance

Within each environment group, we apply a set of practices that apply our governance strategy. These practices maintain a balanced approach that incorporates both reactive and proactive measures.

We use a proactive governance approach to anticipate issues before they arise. Gaining visibility into what’s being built within our environment is a critical first step. Our inventory data collection processes collect data on apps, connectors, flows, and shared resources. By having a clear picture of our digital landscape, we can enforce policies that ensure security and compliance from the outset. We collect and integrate this data with the following methods:

• Automated data collection tools. We use automated tools to gather data on all assets within the Power Platform. These tools scan our environment to identify and catalog apps, connectors, flows, and shared resources. By automating this process, we ensure that our inventory is always current and accurate.
• Policy enforcement. With visibility and usage data in hand, we can enforce governance policies. This includes defining and applying DLP policies, custom ownership policies, and regular security reviews. These policies help ensure that solutions are secure and compliant with organizational standards. Even if users follow certain policies during the development phase, we need to keep them in check post-deployment to ensure ongoing compliance.
• Regular audits and updates. To maintain the accuracy of our inventory, we conduct regular audits. These audits involve cross-checking the data in our repository with actual usage and configurations in the Power Platform. Any discrepancies are investigated and resolved promptly.
• Integration with governance policies. Our inventory data collection is tightly integrated with our governance policies. For example, we use DLP policies to enforce data flow and access. The inventory data helps us enforce these policies by providing visibility into how data is being used and shared across the platform.
• Custom reporting and dashboards. We’ve used Power BI to develop custom reporting and dashboards to visualize our inventory data. These tools provide insights into asset usage, compliance status, and potential risks. They help us make informed decisions about governance and resource allocation.
• Collaboration with stakeholders. Collecting inventory data is a collaborative effort. We work closely with various stakeholders, including IT, security, and business units, to ensure that our data collection processes align with their needs and requirements. This collaboration helps us address any gaps and continuously improve our inventory management.

Reactive governance, on the other hand, deals with issues that arise after the fact. Even with stringent policies in place, there’s always a need to monitor and manage ongoing activities. The general application of our reactive measures is similar to the proactive measures—they even share some categories. However, our reactive governance measures are built around quickly identifying—as quickly as possible—events in the tenant that might compromise the integrity of our governance.

• Visibility and inventory. Without a good inventory, it’s impossible to govern effectively. To overcome this, we worked closely with the product group to develop an inventory solution. This tool collects data on all the apps, connectors, flows, and connections being used. By having a comprehensive inventory, we can see what’s being built and shared now, which is the first step in reactively enforcing governance.
• Usage data and metadata. After visibility is established, the next step is collecting usage data and metadata. This information tells us who is doing what within the Power Platform. By understanding usage patterns, we can enforce governance policies more effectively. For example, we can identify high-risk activities and take appropriate actions to mitigate potential issues.
• Continuous monitoring. Reactive governance also involves continuous monitoring of the Power Platform environment. This means regularly reviewing the inventory and usage data to identify any anomalies or potential risks. By staying vigilant, we can quickly address any issues that arise and ensure that our governance measures remain effective.
• Ownership accountability. One of our key reactive measures is the periodic attestation process. Every six months, we require asset owners to confirm their ownership and compliance with our policies. This includes verifying that they aren’t using unauthorized data, not sharing data outside the tenant, and adhering to all security protocols. This process helps us catch any deviations and address them promptly.
• Collaboration with product teams. Our reactive governance efforts are supported by close collaboration with the product teams. By working together, we can develop and refine tools and policies that enhance our governance capabilities. This ongoing partnership ensures that we stay ahead of potential risks and continue to improve our governance practices.

By combining proactive measures to prevent issues and reactive measures to address them, we can provide environments that allow our developers to innovate freely while safeguarding our digital assets. It’s a win for everyone involved and it’s truly enabling innovation at Microsoft.

“With Sentinel, we can perform real-time monitoring of all activities within the Power Platform. We must have visibility into what’s being built and how the platform is being used.”

Jake Visser, principal architect manager, Microsoft

Integrating with Microsoft Sentinel detection and response

Microsoft Sentinel plays a crucial role in our governance strategy. It’s an essential tool that helps us monitor, detect, and respond to various activities within the platform, ensuring that our governance policies are enforced effectively.

Sentinel integrates with Microsoft Purview audit feeds to monitor all activities within the Power Platform. This integration allows us to capture events such as bot creation, environment creation, flow runs, and edits. Essentially, any action performed by a user or admin within the Power Platform generates an event that is captured by Sentinel.

“With Sentinel, we can perform real-time monitoring of all activities within the Power Platform,” Visser says. “We must have visibility into what’s being built and how the platform is being used. For instance, if a user creates a new environment or modifies an existing one, Sentinel captures this event and allows us to cross-reference it with our governance policies.”

Sentinel enables us to automate governance actions based on the events it captures. For example, when a user creates a personal developer environment, we use the Sentinel events and an Azure Logic App to automatically assign a DLP policy to that environment and send a Teams message to the user, informing them of the assigned policy and what they can do within that environment.

Sentinel’s integration with the Power Platform’s inventory service allows us to maintain an up-to-date inventory of all environments, apps, and flows within the platform. This inventory is crucial for proactive governance, as it provides us with the necessary metadata to enforce policies and ensure compliance. If an environment’s configuration is altered against policy, Sentinel can trigger an alert and send an email to the environment owners, asking them to rectify the issue.

Collaborating and innovating in the framework of governance

Appropriate governance and environment ownership has opened up a whole new wave of collaboration between departments and teams at Microsoft. The controls and assurances provided by an effective governance strategy have enabled our teams to work side-by-side in the Power Platform with confidence.

“Internally, our employees and our team, especially in Microsoft Digital, are building solutions to look at different aspects of how we can continue to improve productivity,” Hasan says. “The Power Platform offers so much freedom to create quickly and with the introduction of AI and Copilot, we can add more intelligence and use all Power Platform tools to create more robust solutions across the organization.”

Streamlining financial reporting with Power Apps

The finance team at Microsoft has been using the Power Platform to streamline their processes. By collaborating with us in Microsoft Digital, they’ve developed a series of Power Apps to automate financial reporting and budget tracking. This collaboration allowed the finance team to reduce manual data entry and improve accuracy in their reports.

We provided the necessary technical support to ensure the apps were secure and compliant with company policies. For instance, they created an app that pulls data from multiple sources, consolidates it, and generates real-time financial reports. This has significantly reduced the time spent on manual data consolidation and reporting.

Simplifying legal reviews with Power Automate

The marketing and legal teams have also found common ground on the Power Platform. They worked together to create a Power Automate flow that simplifies the approval process for marketing materials. The flow ensures that all marketing content is reviewed and approved by the legal team before publication.

This collaboration has significantly reduced the time it takes to get marketing materials approved, allowing the marketing team to be more agile and responsive. For example, the flow includes automated notifications and reminders, ensuring that the legal team reviews and approves content promptly.

Enhancing onboarding with integration and collaboration

The HR and support teams have used the Power Platform to enhance employee onboarding and support processes. By building a Power App, they created a centralized onboarding portal where new hires can access all the necessary resources and complete required tasks.

The support team integrated this app with their existing systems to provide seamless support for new employees. This collaboration has improved the onboarding experience and ensured that new hires have all the support they need from day one. The app includes features like task checklists, document uploads, and direct links to support resources.

Creating cross-functional innovation with Copilot Studio

One of the most exciting examples of collaboration is the use of Copilot Studio across various departments. Teams from finance, marketing, CELA, HR, and IT have all contributed to developing AI-infused solutions using Copilot Studio.

For instance, the marketing team created an AI-powered agent to handle customer inquiries, while the HR team developed an AI assistant to help employees with common HR-related questions. Using Copilot Studio, we’ve been able to increase discoverability and productivity by using Copilot as our “UI for AI”, bringing the power of these specialized agents to answer frequently asked questions, provide product information, and even assist with troubleshooting.

Looking forward

Governance on the Power Platform at Microsoft is poised to become even more robust and comprehensive. As the platform continues to evolve, so will our strategies for ensuring its secure and effective use.

We’re working to develop and implement more granular governance controls. Currently, our governance strategy revolves around applying rules at the environment level, using environment groups and rules to manage security and compliance. However, the future holds the promise of even more detailed control mechanisms and as customer zero, we’re working with the Power Platform PG to ensure that our learnings related to governance are reflected in the product. This includes the ability to nest environment groups, allowing for more specific governance based on criteria such as geography, data sensitivity, and regulatory requirements.

The Power Platform has proven to be a transformative tool for fostering collaboration and innovation across various departments at Microsoft. From streamlining the approval process for marketing materials to enhancing employee onboarding and creating AI-driven solutions, the platform has enabled teams to work more efficiently and effectively. Our focus on robust governance helps ensure that the Power Platform remains a secure and innovative environment for all users—and Microsoft customers.

Key takeaways

Do you want to implement effective and enabling governance in your Power Platform? Apply these best practices:

• Establish clear environment groups. Categorize environments into distinct groups such as personal productivity, team collaboration, and enterprise development. This helps apply appropriate governance controls based on the usage and risk level of each environment.
• Implement DLP policies. Use DLP policies to control which connectors and actions are allowed within different environments. This prevents unintentional sharing of sensitive information and ensures data remains within organizational boundaries.
• Use proactive and reactive governance. Employ both proactive measures, like predefined rules and policies, and reactive measures, such as custom tools and scanning mechanisms, to enforce governance. This ensures that potential risks are mitigated before they become issues.
• Use Sentinel for real-time monitoring. Integrate Sentinel with Purview audit feeds to monitor all activities within the Power Platform. This allows for real-time detection of any actions that might violate governance policies.
• Maintain an up-to-date inventory. Keep an accurate inventory of all environments, apps, and flows within the Power Platform. This is crucial for proactive governance and ensures that all necessary metadata is available for enforcing policies.
• Conduct regular security reviews. Register all enterprise development environments in a service tree and conduct biannual security, privacy, and accessibility reviews. This ensures that all solutions comply with stringent security and privacy standards.
• Enable lifecycle management. Implement lifecycle management tied to inactivity or attestation. This ensures that unused environments are deleted after a certain period, minimizing security risks.

Try it out

Discover security and governance considerations in Power Platform.

Related links

• Learn more about how we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Discover how we’re embracing AI agents at Microsoft.
• Read about how we helped our HR team get started with the Power Platform.
• Explore admin and governance best practices for Microsoft Power Platform.
• Check out Microsoft Power Platform adoption best practices.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Empowering employees with the Microsoft Power Platform at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“Today marks a significant milestone in our journey to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said when he announced the product. “With Copilot, we are bringing the power of next-generation AI to the tools millions of people use every day.”

Fast forward to now and there’s no doubt that Copilot is revolutionizing employee productivity here at Microsoft and elsewhere. It’s also clear that the pace of innovation is only increasing, and AI-powered agents, integrated with Copilot, are poised to help enterprises all over the world fulfill the promise of AI.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft corporate vice president for AI at Work, reflected on this paradigm shift during his keynote address at Microsoft Ignite. “Agents are the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents, ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous.”

“AI-powered agents can automate or assist with time-consuming tasks like document creation, email or meeting summarization, and creating presentations or reports, saving precious time and energy. This will enable our employees to focus on more innovative and engaging work.”

Rajamma Krishnamurthy, principal PM architect manager, Employee Experience

Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, the feeling of excitement that we felt that day was palpable.

“It was exciting to hear about the vision for an ‘agentic world,’ where a rich tapestry of AI agents, including personal agents, business process agents, and cross-organizational agents, work together to enhance productivity and collaboration,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal PM architect manager for Employee Experience at Microsoft.

The opportunity that agents present is massive; they will become our personal assistants.

“AI-powered agents can automate or assist with time-consuming tasks like document creation, email or meeting summarization, and creating presentations or reports, saving precious time and energy,” Krishnamurthy says. “This will enable our employees to focus on more innovative and engaging work.”

The ways that AI agents will impact our daily activities—both personally and professionally—is limitless.

“Agents will be able to do things like tell me what time I should leave for work based on traffic, help me navigate which way to go, help me find parking, and help me set up my day so I know what’s most important to work on,” says Amy Rosenkranz, a principal program manager also working on agents in Microsoft Digital. “I’ve been excited about these scenarios for a long time, anticipating how AI can seamlessly integrate into our daily lives. And now it’s here.”

In Microsoft Digital, we’re embracing our agentic future, where agents will make our employees, as well as the millions of people who rely on Microsoft 365 globally, more productive every day.

Enabling an agent-powered Microsoft

It’s important to acknowledge that adopting AI in the enterprise is a journey. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve adopted a maturity model for AI deployment in the enterprise. Early phases focus on using Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases enable employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows. Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise deployment phases

Copilot enterprise deployment phases

Use these principles to guide you as you move through the two phases.  

1. Foundational capabilities. The first and most important step is to deploy a secure, enterprise-grade AI solution like Copilot for Microsoft 365 that’s grounded in your enterprise data. At Microsoft, we’ve deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to all of the more than 300,000 employees and vendors at the company, providing everyone with an AI-powered assistant to enhance their daily productivity.
2. Retrieval agents. Employees use low-code solutions like Copilot Studio Agent Builder or ready-made agents in SharePoint to quickly train models and retrieve knowledge for specialized scenarios.
3. Knowledge and actions. Powered by Copilot Studio, agents go beyond simple knowledge retrieval, offering next steps and actions that help employees to defragment their day-to-day employee experience. While these agents take a little more time to build, they offer significantly more utility in the enterprise. Copilot Studio provides a robust library of first- and third-party connectors that make it easy to incorporate actions across enterprise platforms.
4. Workflow reinvention. Employees manage and train a constellation of agents that perform fully autonomous actions. Note that the ability to create fully autonomous agents is currently in public preview. “The best way to think about these agents are just as your teammates,” Nadella said at Microsoft Ignite.

It’s important to note that these steps can take time.

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at global enterprise scale and developing proper governance practices to help our employees maximize the potential of AI has required patience as we create locally relevant change-management campaigns tailored to individual countries, roles, and other factors.

“The better your data—including back-end data—and the better that data is set up to interact with AI, the better the responses are going to be.”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

Later phases require more advanced tools, appropriate tenant governance, and collaboration between departments to ensure appropriate and responsible uses of AI. Additionally, our AI Center of Excellence has been instrumental in helping to build an AI-forward culture through training activities, knowledge sharing, and other activities to accelerate our growth as an organization.

Data quality and tenant governance are also important considerations for unlocking the value of agents in your enterprise.

“The better your data—including back-end data—and the better that data is set up to interact with AI, the better the responses are going to be,” Rosenkranz says.

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve adopted standards and policies that help us ensure that our agents are trained on high quality, accurate AI-ready data. AI-ready data for enterprise agents is data that’s clean, well-governed, and accessible through scalable pipelines. It integrates principles of data standardization, privacy compliance, and federated governance to enable seamless interoperability and actionable insight. With AI-ready data, our data scientists and engineers are better equipped to locate, process, and govern the enterprise data that drives our organization and allows us to develop effective agents.

But we’ve also been deliberate in building tools that make it easy to build and deploy agents in the enterprise. In fact, our design-first mindset, facilitated through architectural reviews, is enabling us to design and deploy agentic architectures that are resilient, secure, cost-effective, high-performance, and operationally sound. This structured approach ensures that AI agents deliver transformative value while aligning with organizational goals and maintaining trust.

{Learn how we’re transforming our data culture with AI-ready data.}

Bringing agents to life at Microsoft

While everyone at Microsoft already has access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, we’ve been cautious in deploying Copilot Studio, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, to all of our employees. Copilot Studio uses the same low-code connector model as the Power Platform to provide over 1,400 first- and third-party services that can drive employee actions. The same principles that we apply to the Power Platform—“employee empowerment with guardrails”—are being used to safely bring agents to life at Microsoft.

“Sometimes we mysticize these agents as things that take a lot of effort to build. Our vision is that it should be as simple as creating a Word doc or a PowerPoint slide.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

“Anyone at Microsoft can build agents to help them through mundane tasks, such as a writing assistant to help write better content, or to strategize with them on important areas like their career. However, these agents are available only to the person who created them,” Krishnamurthy says. “Agents that need to scale enterprise-wide are worked on by the respective engineering teams in collaboration with business partners.”

While the power in these “knowledge-only” or retrieval agents is significant, we in Microsoft Digital must balance employee innovation against some of the risks of agentic AI. Security and privacy controls are important for all applications, and even more so for those that incorporate AI.

“Sometimes we mysticize these agents as things that take a lot of effort to build,” Nadella said at Ignite. “Our vision is that it should be as simple as creating a Word doc or a PowerPoint slide.”

Additionally, understanding and incorporating our responsible AI principles in all aspects of the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is critical.

“A robust governance process and controls should be adhered to when building these AI agents through the entire SDL, starting with designing, building, deploying and monitoring agents after they’re deployed,” Krishnamurthy says.

Some practices we’re using within Microsoft Digital to keep our employees safe include:  

1. Security. We have established standards for data classification, policies on handling confidential information, and other security measures to protect data from unauthorized access, misuse, and disclosures. Microsoft Purview provides these foundational capabilities, including data labeling, rights management, and data loss prevention at Microsoft. 
2. Privacy. At Microsoft, we have established privacy compliance measures to ensure that personal data is protected, including adhering to regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. We also conduct regular privacy assessments for all applications, especially AI-powered agents.
3. Regulatory. It’s important to conduct regulatory compliance assessments to ensure that agents and extensions are meeting legal standards. Our legal and compliance teams are carefully monitoring AI regulations like NY 144 and the EU AI Act. Understanding and incorporating applicable guidelines, regulations, and laws into assessments is critical.

As Peter Parker famously learned, “with great power comes great responsibility.” The same holds true with AI agents in the enterprise space. While agents are an incredibly powerful tool that nearly anyone can take advantage of to improve their productivity, being mindful of security, privacy, and regulatory issues is essential to the responsible deployment of agentic AI in the enterprise.

{Learn how citizen developers at Microsoft are empowered through good governance with the Power Platform.}

Enabling employee self-service

In Microsoft Digital, we’re building AI-powered agents to support common employee scenarios, such as IT support, HR queries, and campus-related needs. The Employee Self-Service Agent seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 Copilot and helps to defragment the employee experience by providing a single place for employees to seek help with their most common pain points. With Copilot Studio, this agentic experience helps employees quickly retrieve relevant information and resolve their issues while also enabling them to take further action, such as opening a support ticket or submitting a request for time off.

Other capabilities include:

• An out-of-the-box experience that facilitates a no-configuration, focused employee self-service lens for optimized responses to common HR and IT questions.
• The minimum configuration delivers answers to employees via official content sources and company-crafted responses where necessary, decreasing search time and lowering frustration levels.
• Additional configuration reduces costs and accelerates time to value for HR functions, IT workflows, and campus needs.

Employee Self-Service Agent in Copilot

This agent is available for use by all our employees and contingent staff. It’s also being used by some of our partners and customers in a private preview and will become available to all Microsoft customers soon.

The future of IT

While we’re at the very beginning of this agentic journey at Microsoft, the pace of change has been and will continue to be incredibly swift as new capabilities emerge and autonomous agents become more common.

“We are at the tip of the iceberg, and the pace at which the product is developing is unlike anything I’ve seen in my tenure at Microsoft—and I’ve been here awhile. Agents are already incredibly powerful, and they’re only going to get more powerful.”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

In Microsoft Digital, we see a world where agentic AI will unlock productivity and creativity. This new world will empower our employees to train their own agentic teams, which can then handle routine day-to-day operational tasks so that they can focus on the higher-value work only humans can do. Some of the ways we’re exploring applying agents within Microsoft Digital include:

• Autonomous agents that can detect, report, remediate, and monitor network security and connectivity issues
• Autonomous agents that streamline and simplify business and operational processes, enabling our employees to focus on the higher value work that only humans can do
• Autonomous agents that anticipate your needs during travel, clearing your calendar, reconciling schedule conflicts, and even helping with things like reserving a car or mitigating flight delays
• Autonomous agents that help our global workplace services team to manage their facilities more effectively, reducing carbon emissions while maximizing workplace occupancy
• Autonomous agents that anticipate device issues, apply patches, continuously monitor device health and security, and keep our infrastructure and devices secure and reliable

While the advent of generative AI in the enterprise has been a boon to employees and has given organizations like Microsoft a competitive advantage, fully autonomous agents, powered by Copilot Studio, will give our employees an even greater edge in the highly competitive global marketplace for products, ideas, and solutions.

“We are at the tip of the iceberg, and the pace at which the product is developing is unlike anything I’ve seen in my tenure at Microsoft—and I’ve been here awhile,” Rosenkranz says. “Agents are already incredibly powerful, and they’re only going to get more powerful. More ‘Wow’ moments are coming.”

We invite you to seize this generational opportunity that AI agents present to provide more “Wow” moments for your own employees.

Key takeaways

Here are principles to think about as you consider experimenting with agents at your company:

• Agents are the next wave of AI innovation, enabling your employees to retrieve information, act, or even fully automate business processes and operations.
• While agents are powerful and simple to create, be mindful of security, privacy, responsible AI, and compliance requirements to ensure that your agents aren’t creating unnecessary business risks.
• There are several ways to build no-code and low-code agents for personal or enterprise-wide use, including Agent Builder in SharePoint, creating agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, and using Copilot Studio.
• AI-ready data is essential to unlock the power of agents in the enterprise. Like other AI systems, the responses and actions of your agents are only as good as the data they were trained on.

Try it out

Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.

Related links

• Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Discover how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re keeping our network infrastructure healthy at Microsoft with an employee-built AI agent.
• Check out how the Employee Self-Service Agent is transforming our approach to employee assistance.
• Find out how we’re unlocking deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post AI-powered agents in action: How we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

That’s exactly the promise of citizen development through low-code/no-code solutions augmented by AI. Throughout our organization, we’re empowering all kinds of employees—not just developers—to create their own business solutions and services using our citizen development toolkit, the Microsoft Power Platform.

Low-code/no-code puts development tools in the hands of people who aren’t technical developers or don’t have well-resourced software engineering teams.

—Lianne Zelsman, product manager, Power Platform governance

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re enabling citizen development internally by encouraging and enabling our employees to become citizen developers while also making sure we put guardrails in place to protect the company.

[Unpack how a revamped Microsoft business intelligence platform boosts data handling and builds trust. Discover powering decision making at Microsoft by analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI. Explore building a content management system at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Platform.]

The promise of citizen development

There are plenty of circumstances when someone needs a process, tool, or service to support their work but can’t access the formal engineering resources to create it. In those cases, it makes sense for our employees to build something for themselves. Historically, software developers or engineers would code their own solutions, while people without those skills were out of luck.

“Low-code/no-code puts development tools in the hands of people who aren’t technical developers or don’t have well-resourced software engineering teams,” says Lianne Zelsman, product manager in charge of Power Platform governance within Microsoft Digital. “For us, this means enabling our people in HR, Finance, and other teams to build solutions with the Power Platform. They can use it to do a whole range of things—from implementing automations to building their own apps—with very little ramp-up time or expertise.”

If you work in a large organization, you know that much of any employee’s day gets eaten up by mundane or menial tasks. Those are just the kinds of things that simple hand-made automations or apps can handle.

“We’ve seen a lot of Power Platform usage for project management teams that need to streamline their workflows or email communications,” says Bert Byerly, solution manager for Power Platform and Microsoft Fabric. “Even our developers who write code as their regular job are now using our low-code/no-code platform to spin things up quickly, like automations and alerts.”

More about the Microsoft Power Platform

At Microsoft, we believe in empowering our teams with tools that make their lives easier and their work more innovative. The Microsoft Power Platform is our low-code/no-code development solution that helps everyday employees turn great ideas into impactful tools. And because the technical professionals within Microsoft Digital have put the platform through its paces internally as Customer Zero, we’ve been able to add all kinds of features and functionality that better serve our customers.

“Power Platform comes with around 1,100 out-of-the-box connectors,” says Zohar Raz, group product manager for Power Platform governance. “This gives you the ability to build custom connectors that you can use to link up with any data source on the planet.”

We’re infusing Microsoft 365 Copilot into the platform so you can use AI to convert your natural language queries into solutions.

—Zohar Raz, group product manager, Power Platform governance

It also gives you access to a business layer called Dataverse that makes it easy for you to create and run thousands of solutions on top of your data layer.

And we’re also adding AI into the mix.

“We’re infusing Microsoft 365 Copilot into the platform so you can use AI to convert your natural language queries into solutions,” Raz says.

Giving your employees all this new richness and power is great, but we also recognize that you’ll want to govern and guide this usage. In response, we’ve made a lot of investments to give customers that kind of flexibility.

“The product gives organizations a lot of visibility and control and empowers them to determine which connectors and functionality to enable where,” Raz says.

As part of our overall technology stack, Power Platform plays very well with other Microsoft tools and platforms. That means organizations that use the Microsoft ecosystem benefit even more.

“For me, the greatest value comes from integration because Microsoft has such a wide-ranging product suite,” Zelsman says. “Building Power BI reports off of Power Platform assets, pulling SharePoint information into your Outlook, or automating reminders in Teams is really simple.”

Understanding the risks of low-code/no-code development

Along with the benefits, opening the development process to non-technical professionals presents certain risks.

“Enablement can be a double-edged sword,” says David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect with Microsoft Digital. “You’re empowering employees to be successful, but at the same time, you’re effectively creating applications that get used for business purposes without IT oversight, without security oversight, without privacy oversight—just an employee putting something together on their own.”

In deeply connected environments that have the power to extend company data outwards, that can be a dangerous situation if we don’t properly control it.

“The risk is mostly around data leaks,” Raz says. “This kind of technology works really well for good actors, but it also opens up opportunities for bad actors to find nuggets they can use to hurt the company.”

Addressing the risks through technology and governance policy

Two factors help us limit the risks associated with citizen development at Microsoft: the technology of Power Platform itself and the governance efforts of our Microsoft Digital team.

As a well-integrated piece of Microsoft technology, Power Platform gives IT a lot of control at the platform level to govern what people do in their individual apps.

—David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect, Microsoft Digital

“What Power Platform has done well for us is give us the control to lock things down tight,” Byerly says. “And then, as we look at different features or connectors and their interactions, we can start to loosen things up and create policies so they’re safe to use.”

That control is part of the core functionality of Power Platform.

”As a well-integrated piece of Microsoft technology, Power Platform gives IT a lot of control at the platform level to govern what people do in their individual apps,” Johnson says.

As a result, Power Platform enables a robust compliance strategy. Building and deploying that strategy has been a collaborative effort between Microsoft Digital’s governance professionals, the Power Platform product team, and the Microsoft Data-Loss Prevention team.

Our overall governance strategy breaks down into three sets of activities: Protect, measure, and enforce. Within this strategy, we divide our efforts between the macro-level, which sets policies for the overall tenant, and the micro-level, where individual groups within Microsoft can apply governance policies that complement our all-up guardrails.

“We’re forever finding the right balance between empowerment and safety,” Zelsman says. “So a lot of what we do is risk-based, essentially giving everything an internal risk rating, and that’s going to generate the scope of the compliance requirements any employee-developed solution will have to go through.”

That means we have to break our governance efforts down into tiers where we apply policies to employee-created solutions based on their risk profile and then channel them through permission reviews. For example, simple connectors associated with Microsoft Teams or SharePoint that operate in the Microsoft Personal Productivity environment need no permissions before pushing to production. On the other hand, a Dataverse connector built in the Microsoft Pro Dev environment requires an employee to request permission to access that environment or to change their environment before going live.

And of course, you can’t govern what you can’t see, so our teams have set up a thorough oversight apparatus to support these efforts. There’s a comprehensive tenant inventory, a reporting suite, cost and utilization monitoring, and compliance telemetry.

All of these governance policies aren’t meant to hinder citizen development, but help it move forward safely and quickly.

“Ultimately, good governance is employee empowerment with guardrails,” Johnson says.

Power Platform success stories

Thanks to our enablement and governance activities, low-code/no-code development is spreading rapidly across Microsoft. Recently, we crossed the threshold of 1 million Power Platform citizen development assets within the internal ecosystem at Microsoft—and that number continues to rise. All told, our employees have built more than 18,000 environments, 170,000 Power Apps, 50,000 Power Automate flows, and 1,200 chatbots.

But the numbers aren’t the whole story. The variety and creativity our employees have developed continues to increase.

We’re definitely looking to push this technology further. There are so many different data sources for us to analyze and so many workflows we can support.

—Bert Byerly, solution manager, Power Platform and Microsoft Fabric

Here are a couple of examples of important experiences our citizen developers have built internally at Microsoft:

• Cosmic: A revenue processing tool featuring data capture via optical character recognition (OCR), data validation through a business rules engine, and data entry using robotic process automation (RPA) that has yielded around $14.2 million annually in savings.
• AV design standards: A Real Estate and Facilities team app that helps configure AV equipment across 16,000 Microsoft conference rooms worldwide by simplifying the equipment ordering process.

And we’re only just beginning this journey. With so many connectors and the portfolio expanding every day, the possibilities are endless.

”We’re definitely looking to push this technology further,” Byerly says. “There are so many different data sources for us to analyze and so many workflows we can support.”

As this journey unfolds, we’ll continue to see Microsoft employees flexing their creativity and innovation through accessible citizen development with Power Platform.

Here are some tips for getting started with citizen development and the Power Platform at your company:

• Start with simple wins like automating approval flows to build up your users’ confidence.
• Establish some very secure baseline defaults to act as controls, then expand from there.
• Understand that your lines of business will adopt this technology on their own, so it’s best to guide their adoption through guided enablement.
• Take advantage of training material from Microsoft, especially the Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit.
• Put thought into your environment and tenant architecture, key personas, and scenarios before adoption.
• Identify the security needs and regulatory compliance that are specific to your organization and use built-in governance controls available for Dataverse for Teams and Personal Developer environments.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel: Use the open APIs and connectors that Microsoft already offers.

Try the Microsoft Power Platform at your company.

• Unpack how a revamped Microsoft business intelligence platform boosts data handling and builds trust.
• Discover powering decision making at Microsoft by analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI.
• Explore building a content management system at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Platform.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Empowerment with good governance: How our citizen developers get the most out of the Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.