Understand Custom Microsoft Copilot Agents: Unlock Tailored AI Solutions for Your Business
Disclaimer: This article was updated on November 22, 2024, to include announcements made at Microsoft Ignite 2024 about the general availability of Microsoft Copilot agents and newly introduced features.
Microsoft Copilot agents, which are now generally available, mark a major milestone in AI accessibility for businesses of all sizes. These agents will bring AI-powered assistance directly into the tools teams use every day. Whether it’s creating custom workflows, automating tasks, or responding to specific user queries, these agents are built to streamline processes and enhance productivity.
This article will provide an overview so you can get the most business value for these assistants.
We will cover:
To learn more about Microsoft Copilot more broadly, be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide to Copilot!
What is a Microsoft Copilot agent?
Microsoft Copilot agents are specialized AI assistants designed to enhance the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copiot by connecting to your organization’s knowledge and data sources. These AI-driven agents assist users in performing a variety of tasks, working alongside you to offer suggestions, automate repetitive tasks, and provide insights to help you make informed decisions.
The feature, Copilot Actions, allows agents to perform more complex workflows and directly execute tasks across connected applications. They seamlessly integrate with the tools and workflows you already use, such as Microsoft 365, project management software, customer support platforms, or research databases, enhancing their functionality and usability.
Diving Deeper: What is a Microsoft Copilot agent in SharePoint?
Every SharePoint site now includes an agent for the site’s content.
With Copilot agents in SharePoint, the idea is you can provide a tailored AI assistant to say, your team or to a new employee.
This agent is trained to provide trusted and precise answers on a set of content in a site. The agent could be grounded in an entire SharePoint site, a specific document library, or even a single file.
For example, you can create the agent for a document library with the button ‘Create a Copilot agent’ as seen in the screenshot below:
Create a Copilot agent for a SharePoint library.
After the initial setup, you can edit sources and preview what it will look like for the end user:
Edit settings for the SharePoint Copilot agent.
A key benefit of using these agents is they are scoped to a set of SharePoint resources. You can create a Copilot agent in SharePoint on a site, document library or even a single file.
These agents work on your behalf to answer questions about what's in the site, summarizing content in the site, and acting like a well-informed colleague.
Organizational Use Case Scenarios & Benefits
When might you use a Copilot agent in SharePoint?
Let's say you're running a project, and it's been going on for a while, it's getting more visibility, and more people are asking you about it.
An agent could help people external to the project understand what the project is all about, learn out about milestones or what's been delivered, and highlight future plans without you keeping a page or another document up-to-date.
Other scenarios where this might be useful include:
HR Content: Copilot agents can be incredibly useful in HR scenarios. For instance, they can provide information related to employee benefits, working hours, and other HR policies. For example, the "Hours of Work" document outlines the standard hours of work, flexible hours, and policies around disconnecting from work. This can help employees quickly find answers to their questions without having to sift through a long document.
IT Help Bot: An IT help bot can assist employees with common technical issues, such as resetting passwords, troubleshooting software problems, or providing guidance on using company tools. This can significantly reduce the workload on IT support teams and ensure that employees get timely assistance.
Enhanced Tools for IT Teams: Agents have tools tailored specifically for IT teams as well, providing seamless integration with SharePoint, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services.
Policy agent: A policy agent can allow employees to ask plain questions like "What is our policy around x y z?" and get immediate answers. This can be particularly useful for ensuring compliance and helping employees understand company policies. For example, the "Accounting Policies Updated June 2024" document provides detailed guidelines on various policies, which can be easily accessed through a policy agent.
General intranet or employee portal agent: Intranets or employee portals are often large sources of information within organizations, and an agent can be another option to help people find specific information or an answer to a question. Copilot agents support hub sites – so when you select a hub site as a knowledge source, the agent automatically includes the hub site’s associated sites as knowledge sources of the agent. We don’t believe the Copilot Agent can fully replace a good information architecture though – as browsing an intranet is still a valid use case! 😊
Budget Manager: A budget manager agent can provide quick updates on budget status, spending limits, or recent expenses. This helps project managers monitor financials without needing to dig through multiple reports.
Customer Support: A customer support agent can assist with routine questions, such as FAQs or troubleshooting steps, directly from the knowledge base. This reduces the workload on support teams and speeds up response times.
Contracts Agent: A contracts agent can quickly pull up contract terms, renewal dates, or payment schedules, ensuring legal and procurement teams have easy access to essential information for compliance and review.
The key benefits of these agents are to save you time on repetitive questions, emails, and support tickets and give end-users more autonomy to find the answers they need.
Copilot agents: Behind the Scenes
Of course, any Copilot agent respects the security settings in SharePoint, so no one will see information they don’t have access to through the user interface or search already. In addition, an agent includes Microsoft Graph data such as your work emails, calendar, and Teams chats. If you do not have permission to specific content, even if this content is included in the agent’s sources, you will not see information from this content in your chat with the agent.
You can have multiple Copilot agents for a site, and they show up in the dropdown menu of the Copilot chat interface:
Multiple Copilot agents in a drop-down menu.
Behind the scenes, each one of these is saved either as a .copilot or .agent file (for a custom Copilot) in the local document library where the agent was initiated:
Copilot files in a document library.
These files can be shared, moved, copied etc. like any other file in a SharePoint library. They can also be ‘Approved’ by site owners where they get a special icon and set as the default agent for that site. Learn more about setting that up.
Another really important question is: can an Admin turn off the Copilot agents functionality? At the time of this writing the capability is not in M365, but it’s a common ask from Microsoft’s early release program. We’re hopeful this functionality will be added for two scenarios soon — the ability to hide the Copilot agent button on sites, and the ability to exclude some sites in Copilot agents.
Potential Drawbacks with Copilot agents
Copilot agents, especially in SharePoint, are quite visible and accessible.
This could lead to confusion about why people should create agents, or where they create value. If we are just spinning up Copilot agents nonstop on every file, document library, and site - what is the real value and goal we are looking to accomplish? This is an area where change management and education are key to focus on the scenarios that are useful for organizations.
While Copilot agents are a great starter to quickly get up and running, they do have some limitations.
A Copilot agent in SharePoint is a starting point really – it’s not a true autonomous agent. The standard configuration relies on a person entering a prompt, the bot generates answers and that's the end. With SharePoint, the Copilot agent is essentially a more scoped chatbot than Copilot for Microsoft 365.
An AI agent usually takes the chatbot concept a step further – instead of a human building a prompt, the agent builds the prompt and takes action, say through a workflow.
With a custom agent using Copilot Studio, you can include workflows, alerts, drop a message in Teams, continue the conversation with a real person, and so forth. This means that while Copilot agents are useful for basic tasks, building out a truly relevant bot to the organization that drives real value requires the advanced capabilities of Copilot Studio.
Do agents help with a messy SharePoint implementation?
We say it constantly: AI is not a magic wand…at least not yet 😊
AI, including Copilot Agents can alleviate some of the short-term pain or searching or finding content.
However, long term you'll still have a problem with maintaining a trusted repository of content. AI models and agents don't know what content is draft, abandoned, expired or not relevant, so the agent could potentially include incorrect or incomplete information.
In addition, an agent doesn’t solve the problem of having a governance process to archive information, manage access, and comply with regulation through records management and retention rules.
While agents help with finding information, they aren’t natively about collaborating on, tracking, and developing new content effectively. Your team still needs to create new offerings, plans, policies, procedures, contracts, projects and more. In these cases and more, a proper structure and working environment is still required for productivity and effective collaboration.
In short, all the good practices that come with planning for a scalable and usable information architecture are still critical for most organizations.
What is the licensing required for Copilot agents?
Any user licensed for SharePoint can build a Copilot agent.
However, to use or test the agent, an additional license is required. There are two options:
Through a Copilot Studio license, where organizations pay for usage
Microsoft 365 Copilot user license, where usage of agents is included. This license is CAD $40.70 user/month at this time of writing
Summary
Microsoft Copilot agents offer a powerful way to enhance productivity and efficiency within your organization. However, for more advanced functionality and to truly drive value, leveraging Copilot Studio may be required.
If you need Copilot support, contact the Gravity Union team, or check out our Copilot Accelerator Program to learn more about our Microsoft Copilot services:
