Last month, Microsoft announced the availability of the ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio and 10 autonomous agents in Dynamics 365. Those AI agents include Sales Qualification, Supplier Communications, Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management agents. Microsoft also stated that its Copilot Studio, and the agents it creates, are run with guardrails and other protections in place.

Today at Microsoft Ignite 2024 in Chicago, IL, Microsoft has announced more AI Agents that will be included in Microsoft 365 Copilot. These Agents are intended to work alongside people and/or autonomously handle tasks. (For context, check out this backgrounder: What is an AI Agent?)

Today’s news from Microsoft Ignite is extensive, but we’ve focused on three aspects: AI Agents, Copilot Studio (used to build agents) and some of the updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The New AI Agents

The new, out-of-the-box agents include the following:

Agents in SharePoint

Users can create their own agents, tailored to specific SharePoint files, folders or sites that support common business processes. These agents can be shared across emails, meetings and chats, with users being able to ask the agents questions and getting real-time responses. Agents in SharePoint follow existing SharePoint user permissions and sensitivity labels. These new agents in SharePoint are now generally available.

Source: Microsoft

Employee Self-Service Agent

Available in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat (BizChat), these agents can retrieve benefits and payroll information, start a leave of absence, request a new laptop with IT and even get assistance for Microsoft 365 products and services. This agent is in private preview.

Facilitator Agent

This agent works within Teams meetings and chats. In meetings it will take real-time notes; in chats, it will share a summary of ‘important’ information. This agent is in preview.

Interpreter Agent

This agent enables real-time interpretation in Teams meetings in up to nine languages so each participant can speak and listen in the language of their choice. Meeting participants can also have the Interpreter simulate their personal voice for a more inclusive experience. This agent will be in preview early next year.

Project Manager Agent

Available in Planner, this agent can automatically create a new plan from scratch or use a pre-configured template. The Project Manager agent then oversees the entire project, including the assignment of tasks, progress tracking, reminders and notifications and status reporting. It can also complete tasks, including content creation. This agent is in preview.

Updates to Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio is used to build agents. Today’s announcements include the following:

• Access to third-party sources: Users can now build agents that can access third-party sources, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. Copilot Studio only semantically indexes the metadata from these third-party data sources. The data itself is not moved out of those sources.
• Increased transparency: Users now have access to the latest GPT models and visibility into what data sources are used by the agents, what types of user questions remain unanswered, and what the accuracy of responses are. They can also see analytics like usage rates and error reporting. A new ‘knowledge tuning’ capability will suggest additional knowledge that should be added so the agent becomes more accurate.
• Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry will now be more integrated. Through Copilot Studio, those building agents will be able to access knowledge sources stored in Azure AI through. This can help better ‘ground’ agents on business data and help improve their accuracy. Because of this integration, those building agents will be able to access the 1,800 AI models in the Azure AI catalog as well as any custom, fine-tuned models the business itself may have created.

Copilot Studio now also include voice capabilities, so AI Agents can be embedded into an interactive voice response (IVR) system. The ‘voice-enabled’ agents can recognize speech, handle interruptions, detect silence, and offer re-prompts to improve user satisfaction. Speech enabled agents can be embedded into applications, standalone kiosks, concierge systems, web sites, etc.

Copilot Studio now supports image upload so that users can upload images to Copilot and then ask questions about those images. This feature is powered by the GPT-4o foundation model. Copilot Studio also includes templates for commonly used agent scenarios such as leave management, sales order and deal acceleration agents.

Updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is the AI assistant built into Microsoft 365 applications – Teams, Word, Excel, etc. Today’s announcements include Copilot Actions and the Copilot Control System.

Copilot Actions

This feature allows users to automate everyday tasks with simple, fill-in-the-blank prompts. For example, users could automatically receive a summary of their most important action items, create an action to gather inputs from coworkers in advance of a meeting or automatically summarize customer history in advance of a sales meeting. This capability is in private preview.

Copilot in Teams

Copilot in Teams will be able to understand, recap, and answer questions based on visual content shared onscreen in addition to the transcript and chat. Users can ask Copilot for a quick summary of a file shared in a chat to get all its main points without having to open the file. Public preview coming in early 2025.

Copilot Control System

This system is designed for IT staffers so they can protect enterprise data, govern access and usage of Copilot and AI Agents, and track adoption patterns and ROI from the use of Copilot and Agents via Copilot Analytics.

Want to know more?

Check out these other articles about Microsoft’s products:

• Lessons Learned from Recent Microsoft Teams Deployments: These five quick lessons can keep expenses down, reduce the number of surprises when moving to the collaborative platform, and help a migration go smoothly.
• Microsoft Debuts Dynamics Contact Center: The new product – and its ability to support other CRM applications – is a sign that Microsoft is preparing to go head-to-head with leaders in the CCaaS market.
• Microsoft Copilot Compared to Apple Intelligence: Microsoft’s AI-powered digital assistant has made enterprise inroads. Apple’s new AI-powered features in Siri could add another copilot to users’ everyday computing experience.
• What to Know About the Cost and Value of Microsoft Copilot: Copilot for Microsoft 365 provides AI capabilities within the Office suite of applications, but it comes with a price tag. Read on to learn what you get for each user’s annual $360 expense.