Introduction

Microsoft Copilot Studio is a part of Microsoft’s suite of AI-powered tools designed to assist users in various tasks, integrating seamlessly with Microsoft’s software ecosystem. Here’s a breakdown of what it entails:

1. Integration with Microsoft 365: Microsoft Copilot Studio is integrated within Microsoft 365 applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It enhances these applications with AI-driven features that help with writing, data analysis, presentations, and email management.
2. AI-Powered Assistance: Leveraging advanced AI models, Microsoft Copilot Studio helps users by suggesting text, generating content, automating repetitive tasks, and providing insights from data. It aims to improve productivity by reducing the time spent on mundane tasks.
3. Natural Language Processing (NLP): Microsoft Copilot Studio uses NLP to understand user inputs and provide contextually relevant suggestions. This allows for more natural interactions with the software, making it easier for users to accomplish their goals.
4. Customization and Extensibility: Users can customize Microsoft Copilot Studio to fit their specific needs. It allows for the creation of custom AI models and extensions that can be tailored to specific tasks or workflows within an organization.
5. Data Security and Privacy: Microsoft emphasizes strong data security and privacy measures. Copilot Studio is built with these principles in mind, ensuring that user data is protected and used responsibly.
6. Collaboration Features: Microsoft Copilot Studio includes features that facilitate collaboration among team members. It can help with brainstorming sessions, project management, and real-time document collaboration, making teamwork more efficient and effective.
7. Continuous Learning and Improvement: The AI models in Microsoft Copilot Studio continuously earn and improve from user interactions and feedback. This ensures that the suggestions and automations become more accurate and useful over time.

Overall, Microsoft Copilot Studio aims to empower users by integrating intelligent assistance into everyday tasks, streamlining workflows, and enhancing productivity with AI.

Capabilities in Microsoft Copilot Studio

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, 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.

• Asynchronous orchestration of complex tasks. The first is the ability to use generative AI-powered planning 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.

• 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 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, 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 Microsoft Copilot connectors can transform copilot experiences for specific personas or functions:

1. 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.
2. HR Helper. Assist employees with accessing essential resources for benefits and PTO policies, and even book time off directly through Copilot.
3. Incident Report Coordinator. Workers can locate the right documentation, report incidents, and track them efficiently, all within the context of the chat.
4. 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 by 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.

Capabilities in Microsoft Copilot that unlock business value

Microsoft Copilot is already helping people save time and be more productive and creative. With the announcements at Microsoft Build 2024, an entirely new set of capabilities that unlock Copilot’s ability to drive bottom-line business results for every organization is envisaged:

1. Team Copilot expands Copilot beyond a personal assistant to work on behalf of a team, improving collaboration and project management.
2. Agents: custom copilots enable customers to orchestrate and automate business processes.
3. Copilot extensions and Copilot connectors make it easy to tailor and extend Copilot to meet unique business needs.

Team Copilot—a valuable new member of the team

Team Copilot expands Copilot beyond a personal assistant to act as a valuable team member—participating and contributing along with the team. And of course, you’re always in control—assigning tasks or responsibilities to Copilot so the whole team can be more productive, collaborative, and creative, together. It’s available where you collaborate—in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Loop, Microsoft Planner, and more:

• Meeting facilitator: Copilot enables a more productive discussion in meetings by managing the agenda and taking notes anyone in the meeting can coauthor.
• Group collaborator: Copilot helps everyone get more out of chats, surfacing the most important information, tracking actions items, and addressing unresolved issues.
• Project manager: Copilot ensures every project runs smoothly by creating and assigning tasks, tracking deadlines, and notifying team members when their input is needed.

Agents: New custom copilots that automate business process

There are efficiencies to be gained and new value to unlock across every business process—and no two are the same. The new capabilities in Microsoft Copilot Studio to build custom copilots that act as agents that work independently under your direction to: 

• Automate long-running business processes.
• Reason over actions and user inputs.
• Leverage memory to bring in context.
• Learn based on user feedback.
• Record exception requests and ask for help.

Copilot extensions and connectors: New capabilities to enrich Copilot

With new Copilot extensions, it is easy for anyone to customize Copilot actions and extend Copilot to their data and line of business systems. Developers can build these extensions using either Copilot Studio or Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio. Introducing Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio shall make it easier and faster for developers to create Copilot extensions.

Vistas Cloud goes the extra mile by equipping businesses with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively utilize Microsoft Copilot to its fullest potential as they are pioneers in Microsoft Dynamics Business Central. This commitment ensures that each business can tailor the solution to their unique requirements, fostering sustainable growth and long-term success. In summary, Vistas Cloud’s unwavering dedication to excellence, combined with their expertise and ongoing support, makes them the ideal partner for small businesses looking to optimize their operations and provide exceptional customer experiences through Microsoft Copilot Multicloud solutions.