Copilot Studio Archive | Microsoft Copilot Blog (2024)

There have beennumerous updates announced at Microsoft Build 2024showcasing the capabilities of Microsoft Copilot Studio as the single Conversational AI tool to create your own custom copilots or extending Microsoft Copilot experiences.

Bill Gates had the vision to put a computer in every home almost 30 years ago and since then, technology has become ubiquitous in modern society. As seen at Microsoft Build, Microsoft Copilot is on a journey to become more ubiquitous with work and life with its ability to assist us in typical tasks, boosting productivity and creating efficiency.

Copilot Studio is at the forefront of this technology, where copilots are not just doing work for you, but also with you, such as copilots being mentioned within Microsoft Teams, just as a person would be able to be mentioned. Copilot Studio has been used by 30,000 organizations across the world, and with these latest features and improvements to the Conversational AI Platform, including Copilot Connectors, Analytics and Templates, there has been tremendous adoption of this technology across numerous industries where it enables organizations to achieve and demonstrate value that supports their objectives and organizational goals.

Student and Education Support

Within the education industry,Victoria University of Wellingtonrealizedstudents are bombarded with information when they begin their journey at university. Despite having access to numerous resources, it is hard for students to navigate the large amount of information—when they search, the students were given links and not actual answers. Victoria University of Wellington has the ambition to create a ‘single pane of glass’ experience whereby students can answer questions using the Copilot Studio built-in Generative AI capabilities through Knowledge, using the University’s data sources to provide natural language responses to questions. The feedback from our Pilot was overwhelmingly positive with over 90% of the students reporting a positive experience and 95% saying they would use it again. The University is now looking to utilize this technology to expand support for students.

BYU Pathway Worldwidehad a manual Copilot Studio support bot in place for years, but as soon as they infused generative AI, they saw an immediate time savings of over 150 human hoursper week.This savings allows the team to provide better customer service, spread support across other areas, and focus on higher-value-add efforts.

Financial Services Innovation

Financial services organizations have been at the forefront of innovation, where organizations likeRabobankandPaypalhave been utilizing Copilot Studio.Virgin Money’sCopilot, ‘Redi’, was featured at Microsoft Build, their Credit Card Copilot experience that recently won an award at theCard & Payments Awards for the ‘Best application of AI in Financial Services’where it supports credit card customers 24/7 within the Virgin Money Credit Card app.

Local Government & Services

There has been similar innovation in local government with City of Burlington and City of Kelowna utilizing the Copilot Studio platform. City of Burlingtoncreated ‘CoBy’ and are using it in production today. The digital assistant demonstrates the ability to discover, digest, aggregate, and abbreviate information-heavy content and provide the City’s residents with easy-to-understand and human-friendly responses. Questions regarding City services and/or regulatory requirements are answered, based on the content published on Burlington.ca. The addition of CoBy is expected to enhance customer service by providing 24/7 support and more opportunities for the public to engage with the City.TheCity of Kelownahave also utilized Copilot Studio to provide outcomes for their citizens helping build homes faster within the province together with the integration with Azure OpenAI, where ‘Using Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI Services as tools to improve our building permit application process supports the work the City of Kelowna is doing to address the housing crisis by delivering more homes, faster’(John Brennan, Director of IT, City of Kelowna)

Transportation

LondonHeathrow Airportruns a passenger experience program called “Here to Help” where non-operational colleagues spend time in airport terminals to assist customers with commonly asked questions. Using Copilot Studio, they have enabled “Here to Help” colleagues with a collaborative custom copilot to provide real-time answers to customer questions in Microsoft Teams. Copilot Studio enabled developers to quickly pull together information from a range of sources – the public website, internal FAQ documentation and even bus timetables – to support colleagues using AI instead of relying on manual searches, other colleagues or phone calls. This will enhance passenger experience and the confidence of the “Here to Help” team who may only work in the terminals 4 or 5 times a year.

Supporting Non-Profit Vision

In the non-profit industry, there are numerous use cases being identified to help bring innovation to benefit the world such as through making volunteer management easier or for nonprofit organizations likeCentro de la Familia, whoare excited to explore agent capabilities that support teachers and case workers, allowing them to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time working with children, ultimately leading to better child outcomes.

Enterprise Transformation Journeys

Copilot Studio is also being used insideMicrosoftitself. Microsoft’sHR teams createa lot of content in service ofemployees and the organization.HRWeb, a portal that hoststhis wide-ranging content, receives an average of 8 millionvisits per year. But even with all this information at employees’disposal, the HR team still received 800,000 service ticketsthat needed to be addressed manually. The custom copilot deflects 60% of incoming queries enabling employees to gain 21,000+ hours of productivity and reduce 27% of incoming service tickets.

Accenturehas also been on a journey working with Copilot Studio that has been transformative, where Karen Odegaard, Managing Director, shares they are ‘leveraging generative AI-powered solutions and democratizing custom copilot creation. Streamlining mundane tasks like checking status to multi-turn agentic conversation with scoped knowledge is now easier than ever.”

What’s next?

It is clear to see that innovation is happening across industries and Copilot Studio is at the center.

We even saw what is on the horizon, with themes such as multi-modal interfaces and users being able to share context of what is being worked on or even show real life objects in the space with you. Additionally, the ability to use context and memory to delegate work using asynchronous agents that keep the personalization of an interaction.

For more information about the Microsoft Build 2024 sessions on thelatest announcementsandcustom copilot demonstrations,check out the blogandread about Partners delivering customer impact with Copilot Studio.

The post Delivering Organizational Value with Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

At Microsoft Build 2024, we’re excited to announce a host of new powerful capabilities inMicrosoft Copilot Studio—the single conversational AI tool you can use to create your very own custom copilots or extend Microsoft Copilot experiences with your own enterprise data and scenarios.
The first of these are copilots that can now act as independent agents—ones that can be triggered by events—not just conversation—and can automate and orchestrate complex, long-running business processes with more autonomy and less human intervention.

For instance, consider the potential of a copilot that can react when an email arrives, look up the sender’s details, see their previous communications, and use generative AI to trigger the appropriate chain of actions in their response. From understanding the intent of the email, to looking up the sender’s details and account, seeing their previous communications, checking inventory,responding to the sender asking for their preferences, and then taking the appropriate actions to close a ticket—orchestrating and shepherding an entire process over days.

With such capabilities, copilots are evolving from those that work with you to those that work for you. They can be designed to handle specific roles or functions, such as IT, marketing, sales, customer success, and finance across various industries, including travel, retail, and financial services.

With these new capabilities, here are some examples of the kinds of copilots our customers can build:

• IT help desk.IT support is complex, involving tickets, order numbers, approvals, and stock levels. Opening and closing a ticket can be a long-running task that spans days. A copilot can now handle this process, interfacing with IT service management applications, resolving IT tickets with context and memory, creating purchase orders for device refresh, and reaching out and getting managers approvals—all independently.
• Employee onboarding.Onboarding new employees is often expensive and slow. Now, imagine you’re a new hire. A copilot greets you, reasons over HR data, and answers your questions. It introduces you to your buddy, provides training and deadlines, assists with forms, and sets up your first week of meetings. Throughout all of this, the copilot is in touch, guiding you through the weeks-long onboarding and account set up processes.
  
• Personal concierge for sales and service.Balancing exceptional customer experience while meeting ambitious revenue goals can be challenging. When a copilot serves guests, it can use the memory of previous conversations with guests to remember their preferences, make reservations, handle complaints, and answer questions related to the products and services on offer. The copilot learns from its interactions and proposes new ways of handling customer scenarios. By doing so, copilots can increase upsell and attachment rates, driving revenue for the resort while simultaneously enhancing guest experience, satisfaction rates, and repeat business.

Let’s dig deeper into a few of the underlying capabilities that make all this possible:

• Asynchronous orchestration of complex tasks. The first is the ability to use generative AI-poweredplanning and reasoning to manage complex, multistep, long-running tasks. For example, reacting to a new order means determining the need to verify inventory, triggering the right payment processes, pinging a supervisor for approval if the amount is above a certain threshold, and replying with a confirmation. Many of these events can take hours—or even days—to complete, but the copilot will run through them, maintaining the necessary state and context to do so.
• Memory and context. One of the frustrating things about support has traditionally been having to repeat information: who you are, what your policy number is, what your address is. There is no continuity of conversation. Copilots will now learn from previous conversations from the users and utilize this knowledge to continually personalize interactions. A copilot may not need to ask you for your laptop model or your address when you call again for the same issue. Conversations will thus become long-running, contextual, and deeply personalized.
• Monitor, learn, and improve. Copilots can now learn and adapt, offering monitoring and teaching capabilities to make their interactions better. Each copilot records a comprehensive history of its activities, providing transparency into its performance, including user interactions, actions taken, and feedback received, and you can see what decisions it made—and correct and teach them—with just a few clicks.

• Delegation with confidence and guardrails. When developing copilots with agent capabilities, establishing clear boundaries is paramount. Copilots operate strictly within the confines of the maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions. The data sources linked to the copilot adhere to stringent security measures and controls, managed through the unified admin center of Copilot Studio. This includes data loss prevention, robust authentication protocols, and more.

These advanced new capabilities in Copilot Studio are currently accessible to customers participating in an Early Access Preview where organizations such as Centro de la Familia are excited to explore agent capabilities that support teachers and case workers, allowing them to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time working with children, ultimately leading to better child outcomes. Based on feedback from program participants, we will continue to iterate and refine these capabilities for broader access in a preview planned for later this year.

Additional innovations with Copilot Studio

There’s a lot more to share at Microsoft Build with Copilot Studio, and we’ll touch on just a few of our new capabilities here. To learn more—just sign up and try it out for yourself here.

It’s easier than ever to create copilots.With Copilot Studio, creating and testing copilots is now incredibly simple. You can create your copilot with our brand new conversationally driven experience—simply describe what you want it to do, and what knowledge you want it to have, and Copilot Studio will create your very own copilot. You can then immediately test it out, add additional capabilities, such as your own actions, APIs, and enterprise knowledge—and then publish it live with a few clicks.

Connect all your enterprise data with Copilot connectors.Customers want copilots connected with data from their own enterprises business systems and apps. Copilot connectors enable anyone to ground their copilot in business and collaboration data. This makes it possible for copilots to use various data sources, including public websites, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Dataverse tables, Microsoft Fabric OneLake (coming this calendar year), Microsoft Graph, as well as leading third-party apps. You can even create your own custom generative prompts to configure how a copilot handles a response from an API or connector.

Here are a few examples of how Copilot connectors can transform copilot experiences for specific personas or functions:

• Legal and Compliance. Navigate complex legal landscapes with a Copilot extension that queries specific legal datasets, ensuring controlled and compliant responses without overwhelming users with extraneous information.
• HR Helper. Assist employees with accessing essential resources for benefits and PTO policies, and even book time off directly through Copilot.
• Incident Report Coordinator. Workers can locate the right documentation, report incidents, and track them efficiently, all within the context of the chat.

Starting in June 2024, developers can access the public preview for Copilot connectors and stay informed on updates here.

Conversational analytics (private preview):One of the most common asks from customers has been the need for deeper insight into what their copilot is doing, how generative AI is responding, when it was unable to give the right answers and why—and recommendations on what to do to improve it.

Our new conversational AI analytics and insights will help to deepen makers’ understanding of their users’ satisfaction, provide insights into the kinds of questions users are asking, which generative answers are helpful and which are not—and where adding new and updated knowledge sources or creating custom topics can help.

Templates: If simply describing your copilot to build it wasn’t easy enough, Copilot Studio will now also include a variety of pre-built copilot samples for departments and industries. Some templates—such as Safe Travels for comprehensive travel support, Organization Navigator for organizational clarity, Kudos Copilot for fostering recognition, Wellness for employee health insights—are available now, with many more releasing in the coming months.

Enhanced security and controls (public preview): Administrators can now configure advanced settings beyond the default security measures and controls. With Microsoft Purview, Copilot Studio administrators gain access to more detailed governance tools, including audit logs, inventory capabilities, and sensitivity labels. They will be able to review comprehensive audit logs that cover tenant-wide usage, inventory (with API support), and tenant hygiene (such as data loss prevention violations and inactive copilots), enabling them to effectively monitor business impact. Both creators and end-users will be able to view sensitivity labels when responses are generated using AI-powered answers based on SharePoint documents.

With all the amazing innovations, numerous organizations are using Copilot Studio to build transformative generative AI-powered solutions. Check out this story from Nsure on how they are using Copilot Studio:

Get started today with Copilot Studio

This is just a glimpse of all the exciting innovation around copilots and Copilot Studio—we have a host of exciting new capabilities to share in our sessions at Build. So, join us in watching the sessions below, and try out Copilot Studio yourself and build and share your very own copilot in minutes.

Watch the sessions at Microsoft Build:

• “Microsoft Build opening keynote”
• “Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud”
• “Shaping next-gen development: the future of Copilot in Power Platform”

Deeper dives:

• Breakout: “What’s new with Microsoft Copilot Studio”
• Breakout with demos: “Build your own copilot with Microsoft Copilot Studio”
• Breakout with demos: “Build Microsoft Copilot extensions with Copilot Studio”
• Demo (live only): “Build your own Copilot extension with Microsoft Copilot Studio”

The post Microsoft Copilot Studio: Building copilots with agent capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Learn how you can use Copilot Studio to build your own copilot, available on multiple channels, designed for your audiences, and tailored specifically to your business processes and workflows.

In November, we introduced Microsoft Copilot Studio, a conversational AI platform that allows you to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build your own copilot.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 offers AI assistance to create, find, and ask for information across Microsoft 365 apps and provides a Copilot chat available across several employee experiences like Microsoft Teams, Windows, and Bing. However, sometimes you may want generative AI assistants that can reach users on multiple channels outside of those, like embedding on your internal websites, mobile apps, and social channels. You may want to design individual AI assistants that can serve employees, customers, and partners. Or you might want a custom copilot that you can tailor to specific roles and functions, where you can control the orchestration of your large language model using the dialog manager for managed topics with specific workflows.

When you create your own copilot with Copilot Studio, you are building intelligent chat experiences using ready-made large language models, a dialog manager, 1200+ data connectors, and more within a low code SaaS. These custom copilots are AI assistants that help humans with complex cognitive tasks using your organization’s knowledge, connectors to LOB applications, and your own custom topics. For example, a copilot for IT support, a copilot to help your customers choose the right product, or even help your suppliers track the status of orders.

How Copilot Studio works

Let’s talk through the steps to building your own copilot. You can start by logging in to Copilot Studio which will spin up all of the required services for you so it’s ready for building in a matter of minutes.

Imagine you wanted to create a custom copilot to serve customers on your website, for example assisting with product knowledge questions and order management.

First, start by grounding your copilot in your data. Using generative answers, you can enable multi-turn chat over your organizations real-time data—from local files to SharePoint sites, from public websites to data in your own custom backends creating the ability to chat over a wide set of topics within minutes. For this scenario, you would use your public website including your product information.

For critical topics such as account management, which involves handling customer details, you can design the specific conversational flow that you want Copilot to follow. You have the option to use visual authoring or natural language to design these prioritized topics before proceeding to generative AI. For instance, consider a topic that collects user details, authenticates the user, and interacts with your order management systems following a specific sequence of steps. Another example of a managed topic is discounting, where responses may involve legal and compliance matters, and therefore, you provide the managed response.

With generative actions, you can now provide a list of plugins to the copilot, selecting from 1200+ data connectors like SAP, Workday, Salesforce etc, and these will be dynamically executed to help the copilot take action. This allows copilot to effortlessly handle complex queries that were unforeseen or not previously constructed.

For developers that want more custom development, you can use Azure models and services with Copilot Studio. This hybrid approach of low code with custom pro code integrationallows you to bring custom language models, Azure OpenAI on your data, knowledge bases, image generation with DALL-E, telemetry, and more into your Copilot Studio copilot.

When you’re ready, you can publish your copilot to multiple channels which can be internal or external facing to interact with users across different platforms, such as websites, Microsoft Teams, social apps, mobile apps, Azure Bot Service channels and more. You can also escalate the conversation to 1st party Dynamics 365 and 3rd party tools like Genesys, LivePerson, Salesforce and ServiceNow when the copilot requires human assistance.

Once the copilot is live, be sure to review the copilot performance with the built-in analytics dashboard that helps makers monitor key metrics, evaluate performance, and find new copilot topics. Secure and manage your copilot with governance and control features with the central admin center to protect copilot data with data loss prevention policies, role-based access control, environment management and more.

These are just some of the foundational steps to getting started, but there are many other features you can include in your copilot.

How Copilot Studio will evolve in the future

When you build custom copilots using Copilot Studio today, you are designing chat-based experiences to support users with knowledge discovery, such as finding answers to their queries, and task/business process completion, such as calling APIs and following workflows.

We are continuously enhancing the capabilities of Copilot Studio in the upcoming months through several key areas of focus:

• Generative AI knowledge sources– Generative Answers currently supports several data sources to ground your Copilot. Today, you can chat over unstructured data by providing your URLs and data sources. We are expanding both the number of sources and sizes over time. Learn about the existing capabilities today.
• Multi-modality – You can design powerful text-based Copilots today, and even create copilots optimized for speech, which can be used with Dynamics 365 or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) ISVs. Over time, we will provide even more ways to interact with your chat-based experiences.
• Generative AI availability – Copilot Studio is available across several regions, languages, and data centers which we are expanding here.

Be sure to read the Copilot Studio in Copilot for Microsoft 365 blog for information on plugins.

We appreciate your ongoing feedback and suggestions as we continue to improve the experience. Stay tuned for more updates at Microsoft Build.

What else can you do with Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio offers features that can be consumed both within your custom copilots and Copilot for Microsoft 365 via plugins, such as 1200+ data connectors, workflow design, and generative answers all through the low code authoring canvas. The difference is in the channel and audience in which the copilot/plugin is consumed.

If you have invested in Copilot for Microsoft 365 today, you may look to use Copilot Studio to bring in your data outside of Copilot for Microsoft 365 into the Copilot chat, design custom workflows or help control the conversation for specific topics. You would achieve this by designing plugins in Copilot Studio which is included in the Copilot for Microsoft 365 user license for customization of Copilot for Microsoft 365 only. Custom copilot development requires a standalone license. There is no dependency to purchase Copilot for Microsoft 365 to make your own custom copilot.

With Copilot Studio in Copilot for Microsoft 365, you can create plugins for various transactional scenarios. For example, if you want to know how much travel budget is left for the rest of the quarter, you can design a plugin to query a SAP connector to retrieve the information. For sales data, you could ask “What are the sales targets for the fiscal?” querying a data source like Salesforce or Dynamics 365, or even query HR data in Workday and ask questions like “How many vacation days do I have left?”.

And the best part is, you only need to build your plugin once, and it can be reused across your organization after being approved by IT in the admin center.

Get inspired with use cases

Copilot Studio provides you with the platform to build a copilot for your specific needs, for your industry, department, with your data. These custom copilots can cover Business to Employee (B2E) Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C).

Business to employee examples:

• Copilot for IT Service Management: “Check the progress of my current IT ticket” or “Initiate a request for device upgrades” connected to ServiceNow.
• Copilot for Human Resources: “Start the onboarding sequence for our new team member” or “Show me the remaining training budget for this quarter.” Using your HRM systems like Workday.
• Copilot for Frontline workers: “How do I find the manual for Contoso Blender” or “How do I fix the printing machine model XB100”
• Copilot for Legal and Compliance:“Summarize the latest updates to our brand usage guidelines” or “Explain the company’s stance on intellectual property rights.”

Business to business examples:

• Copilot for Project Management:“Give me a summary of completed tasks for Project X’s second phase” or “List the pending deliverables for phase two.”
• Copilot for Supplier Management:“Show the fulfillment status of purchase order #452” or “Track the shipment of our recent bulk order.”
• Copilot for Sales Enablement:“Generate a quote for a large-scale supply of office essentials” helping your business assess the lead potential for a prospective client.

Business to consumer examples:

• Copilot for Customer Support: Guide a customer through the product return process or requests like “Help me with account recovery.”
• Copilot for Product Consultation:“Recommend the best laptop for travel-intensive users” or “Compare the latest smartphone models for photography enthusiasts.”
• Copilot for Service Booking: Navigate a customer through scheduling a service appointment with queries like “Check availability for in-store consultations next Thursday.”
• Copilot for Travel Assistance:“Help me book a trip for a family of four with top-rated family resorts for this summer” connected to your travel booking system.

Check out some of the use cases from customers such as Paypal, AnPost, HP and more.

Get started with Copilot Studio today

We are eager to keep delivering the newest advances to Copilot Studio and we can’t wait to see the amazing solutions you create. Be sure to take advantage of the training content like Copilot Studio in a day and the learning paths to begin your skilling journey.

To learn more about Copilot Studio, visit aka.ms/copilotstudio. To try it for yourself, go to aka.ms/trycopilotstudio. And don’t miss out Microsoft Build, where we’ll share more announcements and demos.

Additional Resources:

• Copilot Studio website: https://aka.ms/copilotstudio
• Blog: https://aka.ms/copilotstudioblog
• Demo: https://aka.ms/copilotstudiodemo
• Product documentation: https://aka.ms/copilotstudiodocs
• Community page: https://aka.ms/copilotstudiocommunity
• Implementation guide: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioImplement
• Responsible AI: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioResponsibleAI
• Analyst report: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioIDC
• Learning resources: https://aka.ms/CopilotStudioLearn

The post Building your own copilot with Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

We are excited to share the recent addition to the Copilot Studio Samples repository – a code sample demonstrating how to publish a custom copilot to a SharePoint site, with a seamless single sign-on experience.

Many organizations use SharePoint to power their employee-facing websites, delivering experiences that streamline the way employees interact with the organization and with each other. SharePoint is also the content management platform behind OneDrive, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.

In 2023, we announced Generative AI features in Microsoft Copilot Studio that transform the traditional model of bot development and allow makers to build copilots that respond to questions, simply by pointing the copilot at knowledge sources like public websites or content stored in SharePoint and OneDrive. Given all the content that is already managed in SharePoint, the Generative Answers capability makes it easier than ever to create an employee-facing, conversational AI experience, that can answer questions on topics like personal time-off, perks and benefits or company policies.

Copilots created with Copilot Studio can be easily published to Microsoft Teams and other channels. However, many use cases would benefit from copilots deployed directly on SharePoint sites, allowing a conversational experience grounded in the sites’ pages and documents. For example, think about a SharePoint site consolidating HR related information, with an embedded copilot answering employee questions and referencing the relevant HR policies.

This can be achieved using the new code sample: the component included in the sample allows copilots created with Microsoft Copilot Studio to be wrapped and published to SharePoint sites as a floating widget. The component also supports SSO, so users would do not have to provide their credentials or use the validation code required by the standard copilot canvas.

How does the new code sample work?

This sample includes a SharePoint Framework Extension (SPFx) component which acts as a wrapper for copilots created with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

A user accessing a SharePoint site has already signed-in using their Microsoft Entra ID credentials. The SPFx component, embedded natively in SharePoint sites, acquires a token for the user, and exchanges the token with the copilot, allowing the copilot to access protected data sources, like SharePoint and OneDrive, on the user’s behalf.

For example, a user with access to a SharePoint site dedicated to Perks and Benefits will be able to interact with an embedded copilot, by asking questions like “do we get reimbursed for professional training?”. The copilot will answer the user’s questions based on the site’s pages and documents, but only those to which the user already has access. Most of this flow is made possible by the Generative Answers capability, with the SPFx component handling single sign-on, so users do not have to enter credentials or a validation code.

Creating a wrapper for Copilot Studio that can be deployed in SharePoint, with SSO support, can be somewhat of an involved process. It requires an understanding of the SPFx framework, as well as setting up the required permissions in Azure.

Luckily, the code sample comes with a step-by-step guide, with detailed instructions on how to:

• Set up the app registration configurations required for SSO.
• Set up a Generative Answers node for your copilot, over a SharePoint or OneDrive data source.
• Build the SPFx component from scratch and bind it to your copilot.
• Upload the component to the tenant app catalog and deploy on a site.

Suggest feedback or report issues related to the sample here

The post Deploy a custom copilot to SharePoint, with a seamless single sign-on experience appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Happy new year! It’s an exciting time for Microsoft Copilot, and we are thrilled to share all of the latest news, early customer testimonials and resources to get you started. At Ignite, we announced the General Availability of Microsoft Copilot Studio. Power Virtual Agents is now part of Copilot Studio, enabling you to create custom copilots – a new generation of intelligent conversational experience that goes beyond traditional chatbots. With Copilot Studio, you can ground your copilots on multiple knowledge sources and leverage generative AI to build natural and contextual conversations.

We’re grateful to our early customers who have already adopted Copilot Studio and are building amazing solutions for their end-users. Here are just a few highlights:

“Copilot Studio enables us to build and make quick updates to an employee facing copilot that can reason over multiple knowledge sources and provide consistent and relevant answers. Copilot Studio has helped us reduce the workload and costs of our support team, while increasing the engagement and loyalty of our employees.”

— Ramesh Murugan, Director, Employee Technology & Experiences

The City of Kelowna in British Columbia, Canada is building a copilot as part of a solution that makes it easier to apply for building permits. The copilot asks citizens what they want to build, and Power Automate feeds these responses to Power Apps, which then populates the official building permit forms on behalf of the user. The first phase of the solution is focused on swimming pool permits and is set to launch in March 2024. The city plans to extend the capabilities of the app to eventually cover all permit types.

“City of Kelowna has built copilots using Microsoft Copilot Studio, specifically to support our building application process, revolutionizing the way we serve both the citizens and also builders. These copilots have enabled us to create a streamlined and user-friendly interface where applicants can easily submit and track their building permit.”

— Jazz Pabla, Director of Information Services

Copilot Studio and Microsoft Copilot Service enables the team at RSM, a Microsoft Partner, to provide unified conversational experiences without changing applications. By providing actions, surfacing insights, and automating actions, team members are able to reduce onboarding time while dramatically improving client experiences and reducing mean time to resolution.

“At RSM, we use a range of Microsoft AI technologies, including Microsoft Copilot Studio, to create copilot experiences that deliver compelling outcomes for our clients and team members. The easy-to-use and extensible features of Copilot Studio allow us to adapt to a range of different and changing needs and help us identify new opportunities to serve our customers and teams.”

— Mike Gillis, Owner/Principal

Holland America will use Generative AI in Microsoft Copilot Studio to power an online concierge to support bookings. Available at any time on HollandAmerica.com, the Concierge agent will be available to answer any questions customers have and will be available throughout the digital journey.

“Booking a cruise can be tough due to room options, packages, and entry requirements. We think generative AI can guide customers effortlessly, matching the perfect vacation from booking to cruise for each guest.”

— Scot Pettit, Sr Director E-commerce

An Post, the provider of postal services in Ireland, chose Microsoft Copilot Studio to create an easy way for customers to get answers to their questions about postal products and services. The copilot can also be used to track packages, improving efficiency for both An Post and its customers.

“Copilot Studio has enabled An Post to deliver a valuable self-service automated digital solution. The use of Generative AI technology will allow us to elevate the customer experience and increase our speed-to-market delivering on our Digital Strategy to support more customers online.”

— Des Morley, Chief Digital & Technology Officer

HP will use Copilot Studio to provide product recommendations. For example, small business customers can identify which products are the best fit for their specific software and business needs. Customers can use natural language to accomplish tasks in far fewer clicks than a decision tree or filter-based design. HP will take advantage of Copilot Studio’s ability to reason over the content already on its website to quickly create this experience. With instant access to a wealth of product information surfaced through the Generative AI capabilities of Copilot Studio, HP provides a richer experience for its customers.

“We are using Microsoft Copilot Studio to build a copilot for HP’s customer-facing website to engage customers at scale and educate them on the right products for their needs, and more. Copilot Studio enables real-time responses to customer queries using Generative AI. The better we communicate about our products, the more trust and business opportunities we can create.”

— Mohamed Zohny, Global Head of Social Media & Digital Innovations

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is one of the largest combined natural gas and electric energy companies in the United States. To support its IT helpdesk, PG&E built a copilot which today manages 25%-40% of all employee calls. These optimizations save the company more than $1.1 million annually. Using generative answers in Copilot Studio, the copilot will soon be able to access the company’s knowledge based automatically and return answers back—no scripting required.

Read the full story here.

“With Power Platform, we’re not only saving money, we’re helping drive a renewed joy of innovation across the company.”

— Alla Gogerman: IT Leader, Intelligent Process Automation and Digital Productivity COE

Do you have a similar story or experience to share? We are excited to learn more about how organizations like yours are using Copilot Studio and other AI capabilities in Power Platform! Submit your story athttps://aka.ms/ShareAIStory

In the meantime, you can learn more about Microsoft CoPilot Studio through these resources:

• Copilot Studio website
• Product documentation

The post How early adopters are transforming their organizations with copilots appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

We are excited to share that Microsoft is a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General Purpose Conversational AI Software 2023 Vendor Assessment. With Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft brings together a set of powerful conversational capabilities, including generative AI, plugins, and custom GPTs, enabling organizations to both customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots. The IDC MarketScape report highlighted Copilot Studio’s generative AI capabilities and noted that “Customers praised Microsoft’s overall engineering expertise and its industry and use case expertise in conversational AI, particularly the accuracy of its speech-to-text offerings.”

SOURCE:“IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General Purpose Conversational AI Software 2023 Vendor Assessment”, by Hayley Sutherland, Andrew Gens, and David Schubmehl; November 2023, IDC #US49988023.

Since its launch in November, Copilot Studio has introduced an enhanced conversational AI solution that includes the evolution of Power Virtual Agents, a new prompt and plugin designer, and several new generative AI capabilities, all integrated into a single SaaS experience.

Copilot Studio empowers IT teams to tailor copilots to the unique needs of their organizations, enabling the intuitive creation of generative AI experiences, manual topics, plugins, and custom GPTs, while offering flexibility and visibility throughout the process. Users can build, deploy, analyze, and manage Copilots all from within the same web experience. And users can even integrate Copilot Studio with Azure AI Studio, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure BotService, and other Microsoft conversational AI technologies.

Copilot Studio is already being used across entire organizations to enhance employee experiences with dedicated intelligent employee and HR copilots; to boost productivity with customized marketing and sales readiness copilots and to provide customer service at scale with customer facing copilots across websites and social media.

Thank you for the engagement and feedback from the community, customers, and partners. Your fresh ideas and feedback made Copilot Studio the transformational product it is today. We could not have done this without you.

We can’t wait to see what you create next!

Read the IDC MarketScape excerpt here
Copilot Studio resources to learn more:

• Website
• Product documentation
• Learning resources
• Ignite on-demand session
• Implementation guide
• Community page

IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor’s name.

The post Microsoft Named a Leader in the 2023 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide General Purpose Conversational AI Software appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

We are excited about the enthusiastic adoption and successful deployment of Microsoft Copilot Studio by organizations across the world, and while it only takes a few clicks to set up and publish a copilot, organizations are looking for in-depth guidance, best practices, and reference architectures. As Copilot Studio’s capabilities continue to expand and generative AI’s transformative effect on conversational AI intensifies, the demand for such materials has been further highlighted.

Following this feedback, we’re thrilled to announce the Copilot Studio implementation guide. This detailed guide is designed to help customers, partners, and Microsoft teams review copilot projects and architectures for a smooth and effective implementation journey.

Get ready for a comprehensive review of your Copilot Studio project

The Copilot Studio implementation guide provides a framework to do a 360-degree review of your project. Through probing questions, it highlights potential risks and gaps, aims at aligning the project with the product roadmap, and shares guidance, best practices and reference architecture examples.

Users of the implementation review are guided at each step of the journey with the side pane that provides more context on the questions or features, shares best practices, and includes links to additional resources.

Inspired by the Success by Design framework – a tried and tested Microsoft methodology used for Business Applications implementations – this review aims to detect bad patterns, identify risks, share best practices, and showcase example implementations.

Key principles behind the review

The Success by Design framework, the backbone of this review process, is centered around three critical principles:

1. Early Discovery: Identifying and dealing with potential issues at the earliest stage.
2. Proactive Guidance: Giving robust advice ahead of issues emerging, preventing potential problems.
3. Predictable Success: Providing a roadmap for success, using tested strategies and methods, and avoiding common pitfalls and anti-patterns.

Areas covered by the review

The Copilot Studio implementation guidecovers these chapters:

• An overview of the project
• Architecture overview
• Language
• AI functionalities
• Integrations & channels
• Security, monitoring & governance specifications
• Application lifecycle management
• Analytics & KPIs
• Gaps & top requests
• Dynamics 365 Omnichannel (optional)

How is the implementation review typically delivered?

While it was initially delivered by Microsoft, the Copilot Studio implementation guidecan now be used autonomously by customers and partners. It is designed to be a living document that can be updated throughout the project lifecycle.

Get the Copilot Studio implementation review today!

Download the Copilot Studio implementation review and provide feedback directly on GitHub, using this issue template.

We are confident that this tool will be beneficial to those implementing Copilot Studio and eagerly anticipate your feedback. Here’s to empowering more successful transformations with Microsoft Copilot Studio!

The post New Microsoft Copilot Studio implementation guide appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

The excitement generated at Microsoft Ignite 2023 marked the beginning of Microsoft Copilot Studio. Copilot Studio is the low-code conversational AI platform where you can seamlessly connect copilot to your data using pre-built or customized plugins and GPTs, orchestrate workflows, craft standalone copilots tailored specifically for your organization and manage it in one centralized location. For Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers, Copilot Studio offers customization to tailor responses and workflows for unique scenarios. Power Virtual Agents has provided the foundations for and will become part of Copilot Studio, together with Microsoft’s leading conversational AI technologies. You can read more about the announcement here.

The excitement and anticipation soared as we unveiled new generative AI features which changed how you both create copilots and respond with them. However, organizations worldwide have been eagerly awaiting harnessing these powerful AI capabilities in their own regions.

Today, we are pleased to share that we have expanded Copilot Studio’s designated region availability for generative AI capabilities beyond the United States, complete with robust admin controls.

This expansion brings these cutting-edge capabilities to various locations, including:

• Europe
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• France
• Australia
• India
• Japan
• Asia Pacific
• South America
• Switzerland

What’s more, in the coming months we’re poised to introduce additional generative AI features across even more geographical areas, empowering users worldwide to fully leverage Copilot Studio’s potential.

You can keep up to date with the latest availability here: Enable copilots and generative AI features.

To build your own copilot with these latest generative AI capabilities, read this guide.

Admins have newfound control over data movement in non-US geographical environments through the Power Platform admin center controls. Learn more.

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio, visit these resources:

• Copilot Studio website
• Start a trial
• Try a demo
• Watch the video
• Product documentation
• Catch up on the Ignite on-demand session
• Join the community

I am looking forward to seeing your innovations come to life with Copilot Studio, which is available worldwide.

Thank you once again from the entire Copilot Studio team for your continued support and enthusiasm.

The post Microsoft Copilot Studio Expands Region Availability For Generative AI appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

When we announced the general availability of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents in December 2019, a little under 4 years ago, we did not imagine the tremendous shifts that have happened in the conversational AI and chatbot market. The advancements within the sphere of large language models that can perform a variety of tasks using AI; including text recognition, generation, translation and more, are not just radically changing what is traditionally known as a chatbot or bot, but fundamentally changing how humans work and interact.

Over the last year alone, Generative AI has changed chatbots in many ways, but one of the most significant is that it has enabled them to produce natural and engaging responses that go beyond simple pre-defined rules or templates. By using advanced natural language models, chatbots can generate context-aware and personalized answers that match the tone, style and intent of the user. Generative AI also allows chatbots to learn from data and feedback, improving their performance over time and adapting to changing user needs and preferences. Generative answers in Power Virtual Agents is a great example of how generative AI has saved makers significant time, and also made the chatbot more useful and intuitive for users.

Microsoft Copilot, combining the power of large language models with your organizations data is already one of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet – and it’s just getting started. And, to respond to our customers’ needs as they adopt Copilot within their organization to ensure they do this successfully, we are excited to share that Power Virtual Agents will now play an even more important role in Conversational AI.

Today, we are announcing Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code comprehensive conversational AI solution that unlocks new Copilot capabilities: connect copilot to your data using pre-built or custom plugins and GPTs, create and orchestrate workflows and manage your copilots in one central place and ultimately build standalone copilots for your organization. Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers will be able to use Copilot Studio for customization to provide tailored responses and workflows for unique scenarios. Power Virtual Agents has provided the foundations for and will become part of Copilot Studio, together with Microsoft’s leading conversational AI technologies.

You can read more about the announcement here.

We want to personally thank every Power Platform community member, customer and partner who has used Power Virtual Agents over the years, creating innovative solutions, transforming both employee and customer experiences for the better and enabling us to get to this point today.

For existing Power Virtual Agents customers, there will be no interruption to your experiences or solutions. You will be able to use the same capabilities now found within Microsoft Copilot Studio – and all your existing bots will light up within Copilot Studio, just as they did in PVA.

We’ve been inspired by so many of the innovative solutions that customers have built using Power Virtual Agents.

The Miami Dolphins, well known in the world of American Football, uses Power Virtual Agents on its web properties to streamline the thousands of requests it gets from fans for information on events and facilities. By resolving 97% of conversations with the bot, service agents can focus on providing exceptional customer service and increasing ticket sales.

When the world changed at the beginning of COVID-19, Kobe, a city in Japan started receiving a massive amount in calls from concerned citizens that they couldn’t handle. Using Power Virtual Agents, in two weeks, they built a solution that reduced the number of calls by 90% and ensured that citizens received the critical information and support that they needed.

And, Rabobank, a multinational banking institution in the Netherlands, made the innovative concept of conversational banking real, enabling connected customer engagement and continuous conversations across all channels, blending human and artificial interactions, with up to 80000 calls per month handled entirely through automation.

As Power Virtual Agents enters the era of Copilot, I am incredibly excited to see what amazing copilots you will build next, with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Thank you again, the Power Virtual Agents team.

The post Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Join us at the second annual Power Platform Conference, sponsored by Microsoft, this October in Las Vegas!
Discover, connect, and explore in-person across keynotes, sessions, breakouts, and more – dedicated to Microsoft Power Platform products (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Pages, and Power Virtual Agents) and featuring the latest on AI-infused experiences, including Copilot. You don’t want to miss this unique opportunity to learn directly from leaders and community experts!
Kicking off October 1 and 2 with pre-conference workshops, the event runs October 3-5. 2023, ending with post-conference workshops on October 6. In addition to featuring more than 100 speakers and more than 70 sessions, you will have the opportunity to connect – and reconnect – with users from around the world, building personal and professional relationships, while gaining valuable insight into what’s new and next for Microsoft’s business applications – including AI.
Below are some key sessions and speakers for Power Virtual Agents. I am personally looking forward tothe vision of future of bots and bot buildingand how Conversational AI is evolving in the market with new industry trends and concepts.

Power Virtual Agents sessions

• Vision of the Future of Bots and Bot Building
• What’s New and Coming for Power Virtual Agents
• Best Practices Around Conversational AI Design Principles (How to Build Engaging Bots)
• Bot Meets Knowledge Base – Secure and Intelligent Chat Bot with GPT in Power Virtual Agents
• Unlocking the Power of Chatbots: An Introduction to Power Virtual Agents!
• Bot Authoring Deep Dive – Advanced Bot Building Concepts
• Power Platform Architecture Internals
• Power Platform and Azure: Better Together
• Transforming Bot Building Using Generative Actions
• Unleash the Power of Virtual Agents!
• An Espresso Shot of Being a Power Platform Admin and the Tools
• Unlock the Power of Power Virtual Agents with Power Automate

And more!

Featured Power Virtual Agents speakers

• Omar Aftab (Vice President for Conversational AI | Microsoft)
• Kendra Springer (Principal Design Lead for Power Virtual Agents and Conversational AI | Microsoft)
• Bas Brekelmas (Partner Architect, Power Virtual Agents | Microsoft)
• Gary Pretty (Principal Product Manager, Power Virtual Agents | Microsoft)
• Dewain Robinson (Principal Program Manager | Microsoft)
• Henry Jammes (Principal Program Manager, Power CAT| Microsoft)
• Jack Rowbotham (Senior Product Marketing Manager| Microsoft)
• Uday Adhikari (Power Platform Lead – North America | Accenture)
• Dian Taylor (Dynamics 365 Goddess | RSM)
• Laura Rogers (Microsoft MVP | CEO | IW Mentor)

Don’t delay—sign up for the Microsoft Power Platform Conference today—we can’t wait to see you in Las Vegas!
Click here to register: https://aka.ms/MPPC23/Agents/Register
Click here for hotel reservations: https://aka.ms/MPPC23/Agents/Hotel

The post Join us at the second Power Platform Conference this October in Las Vegas appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.