New agent capabilities in Microsoft Copilot unlock business value

Microsoft Copilot is already helping people save time and be more productive and creative. With the announcements at Microsoft Build 2024, we’re delivering an entirely new set of capabilities that unlock Copilot’s ability to drive bottom-line business results for every organization: 

• Team Copilot expands Copilot beyond a personal assistant to work on behalf of a team, improving collaboration and project management. 

• Agents: custom copilots enable customers to orchestrate and automate business processes. 

• Copilot extensions and Copilot connectors make it easy to tailor and extend Copilot to meet unique business needs. 

Team Copilot—a valuable new member of the team  

Team Copilot expands Copilot beyond a personal assistant to act as a valuable team member—participating and contributing along with the team. And of course, you’re always in control—assigning tasks or responsibilities to Copilot so the whole team can be more productive, collaborative, and creative, together. It’s available where you collaborate—in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Loop, Microsoft Planner, and more: 

• Meeting facilitator: Copilot enables a more productive discussion in meetings by managing the agenda and taking notes anyone in the meeting can coauthor. 

• Group collaborator: Copilot helps everyone get more out of chats, surfacing the most important information, tracking actions items, and addressing unresolved issues.  

• Project manager: Copilot ensures every project runs smoothly by creating and assigning tasks, tracking deadlines, and notifying team members when their input is needed. 

These capabilities will be available in preview later in 2024 for customers with a Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 license. 

Agents: New custom copilots that automate business process

There are efficiencies to be gained and new value to unlock across every business process—and no two are the same. We’re announcing new capabilities in Microsoft Copilot Studio to build custom copilots that act as agents that work independently under your direction to:  

• Automate long-running business processes.

• Reason over actions and user inputs.

• Leverage memory to bring in context. 

• Learn based on user feedback.

• Record exception requests and ask for help.

While we’re just getting started, we’re optimistic about the potential for these copilots to drive efficiencies and cost savings across every function. For example, an “order taker” copilot can handle the end-to-end order fulfillment process—from taking the order, to processing the order and making intelligent recommendations and substitutions for out-of-stock items, to shipping it to the customer. 

These capabilities in Copilot Studio are available for customers in a limited private preview. It’s early days, and we look forward to learning alongside our customers before wider availability later in 2024.  

We’re also making it easy to create custom copilots grounded in your SharePoint and OneDrive data—where so much of your organizational knowledge lives. With just a few clicks, custom copilots created from SharePoint can help your team get information they need from files in seconds and can be further edited and enhanced using Copilot Studio. This new capability is now available in a limited private preview, and will be available in preview later in 2024. 

Copilot extensions and connectors: New capabilities to enrich Copilot

With new Copilot extensions, we’re making it easy for anyone to customize Copilot actions and extend Copilot to their data and line of business systems. Developers can build these extensions using either Copilot Studio or Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio. We’re also introducing Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio to make it easier and faster for developers to create Copilot extensions. Learn more about these and other updates for Copilot Studio.

Learn more and get started with Copilot

Learn more about the announcements at Microsoft Build on the Official Microsoft Blog, and be sure to watch the opening Microsoft Build keynote presented by Satya Nadella, Rajesh Jha, and Kevin Scott.  

Additional resources:   

• Developers can join the more than 100 customers and partners already building Copilot extensions with Copilot Studio and Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio. Read our ecosystem blog to learn more and get started. 
• Read about the Microsoft Power Platform announcements that are enabling new innovations with agent capabilities and more. 
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Dev Center, Microsoft Graph Developer Center, and Windows Developer Center to access documents, blogs, tools, and more to start building apps. 

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