At Microsoft, we understand that every organization is unique, and to get the most out of AI, you will want to customize it for your business’s specific needs and processes. Whether you’re a user, developer, or IT professional, Microsoft Copilot Studio offers a comprehensive platform for creating, managing, and deploying AI agents.
At Microsoft, we understand that every organization is unique, and to get the most out of AI, you will want to customize it for your business’s specific needs and processes. That’s why we’re excited to announce Copilot agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Whether you’re a user, developer, or IT professional, Microsoft Copilot Studio offers a comprehensive platform for creating, managing, and deploying Copilot agents.
Broadly, an agent uses AI to automate and execute business processes, working with you and on your behalf. Agents can build capacity for every individual, team, and organization—from sales to marketing to customer service, and more—enabling you to scale impact like never before.
Agents come in all shapes and sizes. They help you retrieve information from grounding data and reason over it to summarize or answer questions. More capable agents take actions when asked and the most advanced agents are autonomous, operating independently to create and perform plans, orchestrate other agents, and learn when to escalate to an employee for help.
With Copilot Studio, you can create and publish Copilot agents to all kinds of channels, including Microsoft Teams, websites, or mobile apps. We have already seen incredible customer adoption, with over 50,000 organizations having used Copilot Studio to-date.
We are excited to announce two new capabilities for Copilot Studio:
These new features will be rolling out in general availability to all Microsoft 365 Copilot customers over the coming weeks.
Publish Copilot agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot
Copilot agents enable you to enhance Copilot’s capabilities by connecting to your organization’s knowledge and data sources. These agents can draw from valuable data in SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics 365, or your line of business systems, and help Copilot become significantly smarter about your business and its processes. You can also expand the capabilities of agents by equipping them with new skills, such as sending emails, updating records, or creating support tickets. And Copilot agents can integrate with your existing line of business systems, enabling your employees and customers to easily take action in their flow of work.
Users can find Copilot agents in a new store in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat, Teams, and the Microsoft 365 app, and they can use them by @ mention in a chat or by interacting directly with them. IT admins can curate the store catalog from the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Empower users of any skill level to create Copilot agents
When it comes to building Copilot agents, we are introducing a new, lightweight Copilot Studio experience that makes it simple for users of any skill level to build Copilot agents directly within BizChat and SharePoint. We think everyone will need to be able to create agents in the future, much like how everyone can create spreadsheets or presentations in Microsoft 365. This new experience will roll out in general availability to all customers through October.
With the new experience, you can tell Copilot Studio what you want your Copilot agent to do using natural language, and easily choose which knowledge sources you’d like to integrate from across your organization’s data, whether it’s specific documents or entire databases. When you are ready, the Copilot agent can be used by you, shared with a select group, or deployed to an entire organization. Building a Copilot agent in SharePoint is even easier with a few clicks and no coding skills required.
You can continue to customize any Copilot agent in the full Copilot Studio editor, adding more advanced capabilities including autonomy. As we announced at Build 2024, we believe autonomous agents will fundamentally change business processes. We’re actively working with enterprise customers who are aleady building autonomous agents in Copilot Studio as part of our early access program, and and we look forward to sharing more later this year.
Manage Copilot agents with centralized controls
We believe organizations that embrace AI will create and use many Copilot agents. There will be as many agents as there are documents or SharePoint sites in an organization. Copilot Studio provides a trusted environment that delivers confidence through comprehensive policies, access controls, and agent management, all available within a centralized admin center. This includes the ability to control agent creation, sharing, and use, which allows organizations to meet their security, compliance and governance goals.
Furthermore, the data used to ground agents remains securely within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary, adhering to your organization’s labeling and policy guidelines. When extending your agents through Copilot Studio, your data remains in the Microsoft Azure tenant boundary with security layers to prevent invalid authentication and authorization and data loss prevention (DLP) policies for additional control. And all of this is built on Microsoft’s Responsible AI and Enterprise Data Protection standards.
Ultimately, in a world where AI is rapidly transforming how we work, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio offer new opportunities for applying AI to your unique business needs. By empowering users to create, tailor, and deploy Copilot agents of all types, Microsoft is making advanced AI accessible and valuable to everyone.