In October 2024, Microsoft announced an exciting new feature: Copilot Agents.
Building on the extensive AI development Microsoft have already worked on and made public in recent years, Copilot Agents takes things a step further. These are autonomous agents that can perform tasks for you, rather than just answer questions. This promises enhanced timesaving and productivity benefits for businesses.
Copilots Agents are publicly available from November 2024, with Microsoft introducing 10 pre-configured agents covering core business areas, alongside the ability for users to create their own.
Our Chief Innovation Officer, Tristan Shortland, sums up everything you need to know about Copilot Agents, hot off the press. Or keep reading to find out the key facts.
How do Copilot Agents expand on Copilot’s abilities?
Those who are already familiar with Microsoft Copilot will know its natural language processing and generative AI capabilities. This allows you to submit a prompt, get a response and even use organisational data to enhance that response.
By doing this, you can generate content using a large language model. The model has access to the Internet, as well as organisational data, which opens opportunity. You can create pitch decks from proposal documents, update or manipulate data in Excel and much more.
Copilot Agents is the next step along. They have additional capability to automate processes or parts of processes. This is very similar to the concept of calling action in Copilot Studio, where you could get Power Automate to complete a task for you.
Copilot Agents are fully autonomous. Effectively, Copilot acts as the user interface while the agent works in the background. There’s a connector architecture so that agent can access other systems and data to execute tasks on your behalf. And it’s all brought together under Copilot and Copilot Studio.
How can Copilot Agents help users?
Today, lots of people are becoming more familiar with AI and exploring ways to use it within their roles. Copilot Agents can solve specific problems, with a range of potential use cases.
Copilot has been proven to support when writing proposals, responding to emails, creating presentations and countless other content generation tasks. However, this relies on you prompting the AI and ignores potential process issues.
Let’s say you send an email has been sent with a document attached, and want another team to be alerted so they can follow up. This requires automation and process engineering.
Copilot Agents combine AI and automation. It means you can tackle multiple problems and start to look at overall business processes.
Another example would be examining the sales process and automating potential sub-processes within it. One of the pre-made agents Microsoft has released is a qualification agent which will take lead or prospect data and look at the background information on the company, such as size and industry. This can help you determine if it’s a good fit for you.
Copilot Agents automate the knowledge gathering, streamlining part of the sales process.
It’s best to think of the agents as small, unique apps that can plug into different processes. Teams across your organisation are going to have specific use cases, so you’ll need a library of agents to serve these varying needs.
Best practice for using Copilot Agents
Copilot Agents can help you automate a lot of things. But it’s important to think about the process from end-to-end and break it down into parts. This can help you to identify where automation can add value and take a slow, sensible approach.
Often, the best place to start is wherever there is admin that can be removed, such as manual handovers between teams, as this is where Copilot Agents are invaluable.
As your automated agents have a user interface in the form of Copilot, there can also be a two-way conversation with an agent. You can connect it to your system architecture so it can log tickets when required, qualify leads or run a stock check.
As the AI understands the context of your question, they can instruct the right agent to do the right task.
By bringing together the connector architecture and a simple UI, your teams will find it easier to get the information they need without having to execute the process themselves.
What are the 10 pre-made Copilot Agents released by Microsoft?
- Sales Qualification Agent: Created for Dynamics 365 Sales, this can free up time for the seller to spend on high value activities. It researches inbound leads and can develop personalised sales emails to them.
- Sales Order Agent: Available in Business Central, this automates the order intake process from entry to confirmation by interacting with customers.
- Supplier Communications Agent: Built for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, this autonomously manages communication with suppliers to confirm order delivery and avoid unexpected delays.
- Financial Reconciliation Agent: Within Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance, this helps teams prepare and cleanse data sets to ease financial-end reporting.
- Account Reconciliation Agent: Created for Dynamics 365 Finance, this automates the matching and clearing of transactions between subledgers and the general ledger for faster reporting.
- Time and Expense Agent: Available in for Dynamics 365 Project Operations, this autonomously manages time entry, expense tracking and approval workflows.
- Customer Intent Agent: This enables self-service by understanding intents from past and current customer conversations and mapping resolutions.
- The Customer Knowledge Management Agent: This helps ensure knowledge articles are kept consistently up to date by analysing case notes, transcripts and summaries to uncover insights.
- Case Management Agent: Built for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, this automates tasks throughout the case lifecycle to reduce handle time.
- Scheduling Operations Agent: Created for Dynamics 365 Field Service, this enables dispatchers to provide optimised schedules for technicians, even as things change throughout the day.
Next steps for Copilot Agents
Copilot Agents advances the capabilities that have previously existed through Power Automate, bringing AI-infused functionality. It’s a mature technology that can drive great results for businesses who know how to use the agents properly.
Of course, this is a brand-new feature for Microsoft, so you’ll want to learn more and identify your use cases before you commit.
If you’d like to explore Copilot Agents for your business and understand how Infinity Group can help you identify uses and plan implementation, get in touch.
