Microsoft upgrades Copilot Studio agent builder tools

Microsoft at this week’s Ignite conference unveiled new Copilot Studio features aimed at both expanding the functionality of AI agents created with the application and improving the accuracy of outputs.

Copilot Studio was unveiled at last year’s event as a way to customize Microsoft’s generative AI (genAI) “copilot” assistants for different business use cases. Since then, the company has stepped up its messaging around AI agents that can perform a wider variety of tasks on behalf of workers.

Among the latest updates to Copilot Studio is the ability to connect agents to third-party applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. The goal is to provide access to “real-time knowledge” that helps answer complex questions, Microsoft said. That feature is now in preview. 

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In addition, Copilot Studio now integrates with the new Azure AI Foundry to enable access to a wider range of data within an organization, Omar Aftab, vice president of conversational AI at Microsoft, said in a blog post. “By connecting all their data sources, organizations can see that agents are more grounded in their business data and provide specific, high-quality responses,” he said. 

There are also new “multimodal” AI enhancements to Copilot Studio agents. Users can embed an agent built in Copilot Studio into an interactive voice system (used in automated voice calls for customer service, for example) to create “speech enabled agents,” said Aftab. These can also be embedded in various “applications, standalone kiosks, concierge systems, and more,” he said. And Copilot Studio agents can now analyze images, allowing users to upload files and ask questions about them.

Microsoft has also opened access — in a public preview — to autonomous agent builder tools in Copilot Studio, as announced last month. “Makers can now build agents that work on their behalf, without having to prompt the agent, saving human hours and increasing efficiency,” said Aftab. “They can create these agents from scratch or configure agents that are prebuilt in Copilot Studio.” 

There’s an agent library to help users get started, too, (also in public preview), with pre-built agents tailored to common work processes such as leave management, sales orders and deal acceleration, Microsoft said. 

Among the other announcements Tuesday is the ability to build customized agents with a “streamlined Copilot Studio experience” that’s now embedded in the BizChat interface of Microsoft 365 Copilot. These agents are created using natural language directions, and can be given access to enterprise data held in apps such as Dynamics 365 and SharePoint. There are also pre-built agents, including an Employee Self-Service agent. 

Copilot Studio can address some of the shortcomings of a “horizontal” tool such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, which often requires a lot of guidance to access the right data, and may produce hallucinations, said J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.

“The Copilot Studio tools help to fill this gap by allowing organizations to create more finely tuned solutions that nevertheless are a lot easier and cheaper than training a model from scratch,” he said. 

Improved tuning and sourcing in Copilot Studio allows more retrieval augmented generation (RAG)-based approaches, said Gownder, which specifies data more precisely, reducing the likelihood of “both vague outputs and hallucinations.” The ability to use custom Azure AI Search indexes as a knowledge source for custom RAG scenarios — another of the Copilot Studio updates at Ignite — allows for more “specific, contextual, and accurate outcomes,” he said. 

“Being able to then take these Copilot Studio agents and plug them into Microsoft 365 Copilot could democratize some of these innovations, allowing employees to tap into them right in their flow of work,” said Gownder. “This heightened context, accuracy, and specificity could solve some of the problems that enterprise leaders have cited as downsides to M365 Copilot.

“Microsoft has rolled out a lot of Copilot solutions with sunny story lines that enterprises aren’t always able to replicate in their own environments,” said Gownder. “So, while the Copilot Studio announcements sound promising, we must wait and see if they truly work as advertised to create value.”