Microsoft Copilot Studio was introduced to revolutionize the development process for AI assistants, making it accessible to both technical and non-technical professionals. It empowers users to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots through a low-code tool. This flexibility enables the creation of bespoke conversational capabilities, including custom GPTs, generative AI plugins, and manual topics.
In this article, we will explore the world of Microsoft Copilot Studio, exploring its definition, features, and benefits. We will guide you through the process of creating your own copilot, explain how it works, and discuss its seamless integration with Microsoft 365.
Table of Contents:
Plugins
Microsoft Graph Connectors
Introduction to Microsoft Copilot Studio
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a low-code/no-code tool that allows you to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots. It brings together a set of powerful conversational capabilities—from custom GPTs to generative AI plugins, and manual topics.
Microsoft Copilot Studio was introduced to bring key information, common tools, and trusted processes to where people increasingly gather, learn, and work. It aims to make copilot more accessible to everyone and has foundational capabilities, like the ability to answer questions, create content, and reason over data.
Copilot Studio can handle a variety of requests across different platforms and channels. Whether it's on websites, mobile apps, Facebook, Microsoft Teams, or any channel supported by the Azure Bot Framework, Copilot Studio is there to assist.
You don't need to be a data scientist or developer to create powerful copilots with Copilot Studio. Its intuitive interface makes it easy for anyone to design and deploy AI-powered assistants tailored to their specific needs.
Copilot Studio is available in two forms:
Standalone Web App: Access Copilot Studio through a dedicated web application.
Integrated with Teams: Utilize Copilot Studio directly within Microsoft Teams for seamless integration with your existing workflow.
Benefits:
Here are some of the benefits of using Microsoft Copilot Studio:
Increased Productivity: Copilot Studio can help increase productivity by automating repetitive tasks and accelerating development cycles.
Improved Quality of Work: Users have reported that Copilot Studio has improved the quality of their work.
Time-Saving: In experiments, users were 29 percent faster overall across a series of tasks and caught up on missed meetings nearly four times faster.
Responsible AI Approach: Copilot Studio is committed to responsible AI, ensuring that the AI copilots created with it are ethical, fair, and transparent.
Microsoft Copilot Studio Features
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a powerful tool that brings a set of conversational capabilities, allowing you to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots.
1. Customization and Extension of Copilot
Microsoft Copilot Studio allows you to extend the capabilities of your copilots by
Using plugins
Microsoft Graph connectors
Plugins
Plugins are reusable building blocks that work across Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365. When you create or change a plugin and publish it, the changes are pushed to all your copilots that use the plugin. You can create plugins in Microsoft Copilot Studio to use in your copilots across Microsoft products. These plugins can call connected services, perform actions, and provide answers for your copilot users without needing to manually author complex conversation flows.
To create a plugin in Copilot Studio:
STEP 1: Go to Microsoft Copilot Studio and navigate to "Plugins (Preview)".
STEP 2: Click on "+ New AI Plugin".
STEP 3: Select an AI Plugin type to get started.
STEP 4: For example, I have selected the "Generate content or extract insights" Plugin.
Enter the following information:
Name of the prompt
Write or paste your text or start from a prebuild prompt.
Below are the pre-build prompts available:
Respond to a complaint
Classify text
Extract information from the text
Summarize Text
For example, I have selected the Summarize text option.
STEP 5: Click "Save Custom Prompt".
Microsoft Graph connectors provide a platform for you to ingest your unstructured, line-of-business data into Microsoft Graph, so that Copilot for Microsoft 365 can reason over the entirety of your enterprise content. By using Microsoft Graph connectors to ingest your external content into Microsoft Graph, your users can use Copilot for Microsoft 365 to find, summarize, and learn from your line-of-business data through natural language prompts.
To create your own custom Microsoft Graph connection:
Use the Microsoft Graph connectors APIs to build custom Microsoft Graph connections that index content from line-of-business data sources into Microsoft Graph.
Create and manage external Microsoft Graph connections, define and register the schema of external data types, ingest external data items into Microsoft Graph, and sync external groups.
Remember, during the preview, plugins you build with Copilot Studio can only be used in Copilot for Microsoft 365. You can’t use plugins you build in custom copilots that you’ve created in Copilot Studio
2. Build your own copilot
The “Build your own copilot” feature in Microsoft Copilot Studio allows you to create a customized AI assistant tailored to your specific needs. You can design the copilot’s responses, behaviors, and capabilities to better suit your enterprise workflows.
This feature provides a high degree of customization and versatility, making the copilot more useful for a variety of tasks. It’s like having a personal assistant that understands your business needs and can help automate repetitive tasks, detect and fix bugs, suggest optimal solutions, and much more.
Once you’ve set up your copilot, you can start adding topics to it, test content changes in real-time, and deploy your copilot to a test page. After deployment, you can analyze the performance of your copilot.
3. Extend your copilot as per your scenario
Copilot extensibility is all about making your team’s workspace more efficient. It does this by bringing important information, commonly used tools, and trusted processes right to where your team is already working, learning, and collaborating. You can either create something completely new for Copilot or integrate an existing app.
Here are some real-world examples of what you can create for your organization:
Scenario 1: Issue Tracking for Engineering Team
Let’s say your engineering team uses project management software. You can create a custom tool that lets users keep track of open tickets. For example, a user can ask for information on all the issues assigned to them, and Copilot for Microsoft 365 can fetch and display this data from your plugin.
Scenario 2: Product Inventory for E-commerce
If your business is in commerce, you can create an internal inventory tool by linking it to your product database. For instance, a user can ask Copilot to check the availability of specific items, making your internal processes more efficient.
Scenario 3: Enterprise Knowledge Sharing
Imagine a multinational corporation with a lot of knowledge and insights stored in different formats - like documents, emails, chat transcripts - and spread across multiple systems. Microsoft Graph connectors can help bring all this data together, making it searchable from one single interface. This ensures that your organization’s collective knowledge is easily accessible.
Pricing
Quotas
Quotas” are like limits set on how many messages can be sent to a copilot. These limits are there to prevent the service from getting overwhelmed with too many requests at once, and also to prevent the user from using up too much resources unexpectedly.
When you buy a Microsoft Copilot Studio plan, these quotas are applied to your copilots. This is in addition to the capacity constraints that come with your plan.
The quotas are measured in terms of “requests per minute” (RPM).
For Copilot Studio copilots’ Dataverse environment, the quota is 800 RPM per environment. This includes any message from a user or integrations, such as Azure Bot Framework skills, to a single copilot.
If the quota for messages to a copilot is reached, the user chatting with the copilot will see a failure notice when they try to send a message. They will be asked to try again later.
Limits
“Limits” here refer to the maximum capacities set for different features of the Copilot Studio web app and the Copilot Studio app in Microsoft Teams.
When using Copilot Studio in Omnichannel, there’s a limit on the size of the data that can be sent through the ACS channel - it’s capped at 28 kilobytes.
If you’re transferring to Omnichannel and the total size of all the variables (both local to the topic and copilot variables available in the conversation) exceeds this limit, the transfer will complete but the variables won’t be passed.
If you notice that the context isn’t being passed, you might need to check for a large number of variables and clear them before making the transfer.
There are also specific limits for the Copilot Studio web and Teams apps:
For the web app, there’s no limit on the number of copilots, but you can have up to
1000 topics per copilot in Dataverse environments
200 trigger phrases per topic
100 skills per copilot.
For the Teams app, you can have up to
50 copilots per team
250 topics per copilot in Dataverse for Teams environments (or up to 1000 per copilot in Dataverse environments after upgrade)
200 trigger phrases per topic
100 skills per copilot, but you need a standalone Copilot Studio subscription to use skills in a Teams app-created copilot.
For Copilot Studio subscriptions, there are also some limits:
For the standard subscription, there’s no limit on sessions, but you can make up to 250,000 Power Platform requests every 24 hours.
For Teams (select Microsoft 365 subscriptions), chat sessions are unlimited per tenant every month, but there’s a service limit of 10 sessions per user every 24 hours across all copilots in a tenant. You can make up to 6,000 Power Platform requests every 24 hours.
Remember, these are just the default limits - you can contact your admin to increase the Copilot Studio Power Platform requests limits by purchasing the Copilot Studio Chat Session add-on.
How to Create Your First Microsoft Copilot Studio
Creating your first Microsoft Copilot Studio involves the following steps:
STEP 1: Go to the Microsoft Copilot Studio introduction website.
STEP 2: On the website, select Try free and sign in with your work email address. Note that personal Microsoft accounts are currently not supported.
STEP 3: After you sign up, a default Power Apps environment is made for you. For most users, this default is sufficient. However, to specify a custom Power Apps environment, select another one, using the environment picker.
STEP 4: Once signed up, you land on the Home page. Click on "+ Create a copilot".
STEP 5: Enter the name of your Microsoft Copilot.
In the "What language do you want your copilot to speak?" field, select a language. The language dropdown is prepopulated with the browser locale.
After that, add a URL to the Boost your conversations with generative answers field.
STEP 6: (Optional) You can make customizations and enhancements before finalizing your copilot. click on "Edit advanced options" at the bottom of the page.
Copilot Icon: Select a copilot icon to give your copilot a personality and represent your business scenario.
Solution: This is a container that you can use to bundle, manage, and deploy changes to Microsoft Copilot components. When you select a solution for your copilot, it directly utilizes the prefix from the selected solution.
Schema Name: This is the name of the schema that your copilot will use. The schema defines the structure of the data that your copilot will handle.
STEP 7: Click "Create".
Integration with Microsoft 365
Microsoft Copilot Studio can be integrated with various Microsoft 365 applications, including:
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Loop
Microsoft Word
Microsoft PowerPoint
In addition to these, Microsoft Copilot Studio also integrates with several other Microsoft services:
Microsoft Azure OpenAI Studio: Copilot Studio integrates with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Studio, which provides a suite of tools to build, train, and deploy AI models.
Azure Cognitive Services: Copilot Studio can leverage Azure Cognitive Services, a collection of AI services and cognitive APIs that help build intelligent applications.
Azure Bot Service: Copilot Studio integrates with Azure Bot Service, a managed bot development service that helps you easily connect to your users via popular channels.
Microsoft Power Platform: Built on the foundations of Power Virtual Agents and other Microsoft Power Platform technologies, Copilot Studio can leverage these tools to meet the needs of both IT professionals and makers.
Furthermore, with Copilot Studio, you can connect Copilot to other data sources, including pre-built or custom plugins and GPTs, to tap into any system of record—from SAP, Workday, and ServiceNow—and even your own proprietary business solutions.
Conclusion
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a powerful tool that integrates seamlessly with a wide range of Microsoft 365 applications and other Microsoft services. Its ability to connect with various data sources, including pre-built or custom plugins and GPTs, makes it a versatile solution for tapping into any system of record. Whether you’re an IT professional or a maker, Copilot Studio offers a no-code, user-friendly platform to create, manage, and deploy AI models.
By leveraging the capabilities of Copilot Studio, businesses can enhance their operations, improve customer engagement, and drive innovation. It’s a significant step forward in the realm of AI and cognitive services, opening up new possibilities for intelligent application development.