In the dynamic landscape of Microsoft 365, agents play a vital role in enhancing productivity and streamlining workflows. Agents are intelligent software tools designed to assist users. They can automate routine tasks, provide insights, and facilitate seamless communication. For example, they can schedule meetings, manage emails, and deliver real-time data analysis and personalized recommendations.

Agents in Microsoft 365 leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to understand user behavior and preferences. This capability allows them to deliver solutions tailored to individual needs, making daily operations more efficient. Whether you’re collaborating with colleagues, organizing your calendar, or analyzing complex datasets, agents are essential for creating a smarter, more connected work environment.

An agent takes the power of AI even further: instead of simply assisting you, it can work alongside you—or even on your behalf. Agents can perform a wide range of tasks, from answering questions to handling more complex or multi-step missions. What sets them apart from personal assistants is that they can be designed to possess specific expertise.

For example, you could create an agent that knows your company’s entire product catalog so it can draft detailed responses to customer inquiries or automatically compile product information for an upcoming presentation. Other agents might act on your behalf, such as helping to process sales orders. In doing so, they free you up to focus on building new customer relationships. By handling some of these routine needs, agents can increase productivity across industries—from manufacturing and research to finance and retail—helping businesses save time and money.

Types of Agents

The following sections describe the different types of agents supported by Microsoft 365 Copilot:

• Prebuilt Agents
• Ready-to-use Agents for SharePoint Sites
• Business User Agents
• Advanced Agents

Prebuilt Agents

A prebuilt agent is created either by Microsoft or by a Microsoft-approved vendor. Non-Microsoft agents go through a rigorous approval process led by Microsoft’s dedicated team of AI and machine learning experts to ensure they meet industry standards and best practices. If you find an agent you’d like to use, you can add it to your personal agent library. If you select a non-Microsoft agent connected to a licensed service, you must have the appropriate license to use it.

Prebuilt agents are designed to integrate seamlessly into existing workflows and deliver immediate value without requiring extensive configuration or customization. Compared to custom agents created by users, prebuilt agents offer the advantage of rapid deployment and reduced development costs. They are ready to use, with standardized features that can be easily adapted to meet specific business needs.

Examples of Prebuilt Agents Created by Microsoft:

• Prompt Coach: This agent is designed to help users craft well-structured and effective prompts. It excels at generating new prompts and analyzing existing ones, ensuring they align with your goals. It offers helpful feedback, examples, and actionable suggestions for continuous improvement.
• Writing Coach: This agent is a dedicated expert assistant that provides detailed and constructive feedback to help you excel in any writing task. Whether you’re refining an email, writing a story, or developing a white paper, Writing Coach guides you every step of the way.
• Idea Coach: This agent acts as a personal brainstorming companion designed to spark creativity. With a collaborative and playful tone, Idea Coach helps you plan and structure your thinking process, ensuring you stay focused and organized.
• Visual Creator: This agent enables users to create stunning images and videos using natural language prompts. Users do not need to add this prebuilt agent to their agent library.

Ready-to-Use Agents for SharePoint Sites

A ready-to-use agent for a SharePoint site is an AI-powered tool embedded within the site. It can automatically analyze site content and interact with it, providing users with insights, summaries, and assistance tailored to the site’s data. It leverages Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities to enhance productivity by understanding and processing the information present in the SharePoint site.

Not all SharePoint sites have a ready-to-use agent automatically linked to all site content. When a SharePoint site is created, Microsoft 365 Copilot automatically creates a ready-to-use agent for the site if certain conditions are met. These conditions include the user meeting Copilot licensing requirements, having the appropriate permissions, and the organization properly configuring the Microsoft 365 environment. Therefore, while some SharePoint sites have a ready-to-use agent automatically linked to their content, this feature is not universal.

When Microsoft 365 Copilot creates a ready-to-use agent for a newly created SharePoint site, the agent is automatically limited to the site’s content. This agent can answer questions about the site’s content, help users understand documents, and provide insights based on the data available on that site.

Agents for Business Users

Business users without programming or technical knowledge can create and manage agents in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. These agents are AI-powered chatbots that offer basic functionality and personalized assistance. When a business user creates an agent, they can either rely on a predefined template with preconfigured options and rules or build an agent based on options and rules they define themselves.

These agents do not include advanced features like generative AI, which require more complex algorithms and processing capabilities. Instead, they include the following key characteristics:

• Ease of use: Users can create and manage agents directly within SharePoint and Copilot Chat without coding skills.
• Personalized assistance: These agents provide support tailored to the specific content and context assigned by the user.
• Permission compliance: Agents respect the permissions set in Microsoft 365, ensuring users only see content they are authorized to access.

Advanced Agents

Developers can use Copilot Studio and the Visual Studio Code/Teams Toolkit to create custom agents with advanced capabilities. For example, developers can integrate advanced AI models and custom data connectors to build highly sophisticated agents. Unlike business user agents, creating advanced agents requires programming skills.

Key features of advanced agents include:

• Advanced customization: These highly tailored agents offer advanced capabilities, such as integration with over 1,000 prebuilt and custom data connectors.
• Generative AI: Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence capable of generating content (text, images, code, etc.) based on the data it was trained on. In the context of agents, it enables the production of sophisticated responses and actions by understanding and processing natural language inputs.
• Centralized administration: Copilot Studio and the Visual Studio/Teams Toolkit enable secure deployment, centralized administration, and compliance management.

Agents in Copilot Chat and SharePoint

Now that we’ve introduced the different types of agents available in Microsoft 365 Copilot, let’s take a closer look at the agents that business users can create in Copilot Chat and SharePoint. These agents are at the heart of this learning path.

Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat represents a major advancement in enterprise productivity tools. As an integrated component of Microsoft 365, Copilot Chat harnesses the power of AI to provide users with personalized assistance across various tasks. In doing so, Copilot Chat can transform how teams collaborate and manage information.

In Copilot Chat, agents act as intelligent virtual assistants designed to streamline workflows and enhance the user experience. Powered by advanced AI algorithms, these agents can understand and respond to user requests in a natural, conversational manner. They play a key role in helping users navigate complex digital environments, ensuring relevant information is accessible and actionable.

In Copilot Chat, you can use any prebuilt agent you’ve added to your personal agent library. You can also use Copilot Studio to create agents and share them with other users if desired.

Agents in Copilot Chat can provide real-time assistance during conversations, automate responses, and even anticipate user needs based on the context of the discussion. This synergy between agents and Copilot Chat fosters a more interactive and responsive user experience, boosting productivity and efficiency.

Agents in SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint is a core content management platform for businesses, powering OneDrive, SharePoint sites, Teams, Loop, Stream, and more. It supports team collaboration, business processes, knowledge management, and employee communication through robust content services. Each day, approximately 2 billion documents are added to Microsoft 365 SharePoint and OneDrive, and 2 million new SharePoint sites are created.

While this massive amount of knowledge is essential to organizational success, it’s often difficult for employees to find, understand, and effectively use all this information. Business users need a fast and accurate way to filter digital content and retrieve the information they need. With AI-powered agents in SharePoint, site owners, members, and visitors can quickly access useful insights and information for their projects and tasks.

Agents in SharePoint assist you and your team with workflows, projects, content discovery, and knowledge sharing, based on the content of SharePoint sites, pages, and selected files. As previously mentioned, each SharePoint site has a ready-to-use agent specific to that site. Microsoft 365 Copilot creates this agent when the site is created. If you have edit permissions or higher, you can create custom agents for the site to get more specific responses tailored to your needs.

Case Study

Consider the following example. It illustrates the journey of a user assisted by AI, starting with a site’s ready-to-use agent and ending with the creation of a custom agent in SharePoint.

SharePoint Agent Case Study

A sales manager at Contoso Camera wants to use Copilot to generate a sales pitch for the company’s latest video camera, the Digital Mega-300. He wants Copilot to use product proposals and performance reviews from the Mega-300 document library on the marketing team’s SharePoint site. The manager accesses the Mega-300 SharePoint site and enters the following prompt into Copilot, which uses the site’s default ready-to-use agent:

Create a 5-minute sales pitch for the Contoso Digital Mega-300 video camera that I can present to a customer.

After reviewing the pitch generated by Copilot, the manager feels it doesn’t sufficiently differentiate the Mega-300 from the company’s previous model, the Digital Mega-200. He realizes that by using the ready-to-use agent from the Mega-300 SharePoint site, Copilot’s pitch is limited to information from that site only.

To solve this, the manager decides to create a custom agent for the marketing team’s Mega-300 document library that also accesses two other SharePoint sites: Contoso’s Research & Development site and the Digital Mega-200 document library. He then uses this custom agent to respond to the following prompt:

Create a personalized sales pitch comparing the latest Contoso Digital Mega-300 video camera to the company’s Digital Mega-200 camera. In the comparison, highlight the rigor of the research and development applied to the Mega-300 and provide a detailed list of additional features and product benefits that differentiate it from the Mega-200.

This agent enabled Copilot to access all three SharePoint sites and aggregate the necessary information to create a more effective sales pitch for the Mega-300, especially in comparison to the older Mega-200 model.

Tools Used to Create Agents in Copilot Chat and SharePoint

Creating agents is a key aspect of improving productivity and automating tasks in Microsoft 365. Two tools support this process for business users without programming experience:

• Copilot Studio for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
• Agent Tool in SharePoint for SharePoint Agents

Each tool offers unique capabilities suited to different environments and use cases. While these tools are explored in more detail in a later training, here’s a brief overview:

Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio is a unified platform that allows developers and business users to create agents for Copilot Chat.

• Developers can use Copilot Studio’s powerful tools to build advanced agents that act as intelligent assistants specialized in specific tasks.
• Copilot Studio is also designed for business users without programming experience. It offers an intuitive and user-friendly development experience, enabling non-technical users to easily create and customize their own Copilot agents directly within Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.
• Using natural language and guided prompts, users can define an agent’s purpose, connect it to relevant data sources, and tailor its responses to their specific business needs—without writing a single line of code.
• Copilot Studio empowers more people within an organization to harness AI capabilities, enhancing real-time communication and productivity.

Agent Tool in SharePoint

This tool is a Microsoft 365 Copilot feature integrated into SharePoint. It allows business users to create agents and embed them directly into SharePoint sites.

• These agents are primarily designed to enhance functionality and user experience in SharePoint by automating tasks, providing content insights, and facilitating document management.
• While the SharePoint tool also supports integration with other Microsoft 365 services, its main strength lies in optimizing workflows and content management specific to SharePoint.

These tools will be explored in more detail in the upcoming training on creating agents in Copilot Chat and SharePoint.

Next unit: Who Can Create and Use Agents?