Microsoft’s AI tools in the Microsoft 365 world have been in the market for well over a year without much notice. Microsoft 365 Copilot was initially a personal assistant for its user. However, the future of Copilot is more. What are agents and why do we need Microsoft Copilot Studio? I must spoil a bit: This is not about any 007 story.
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Microsoft 365 Copilot for dummies?
Microsoft 365 Copilot has been on the market for almost two years now. I must admit that here in Finland, its use was initially somewhat disappointing due to its linguistic and technical shortcomings. But we finally got Finnish language support. And the enormous technical investment that Microsoft has put into developing the tools has been mind-boggling. New features, such as GPT-5 support, are coming in a continuous stream. For many, AI tools are still purely basic question-answer type usage. And why not, as a personal assistant, it has slowly begun to serve us reasonably well as it develops.
But as the technical AI tools continue to develop, we can ask, could Microsoft 365 Copilot be more in the future? Could AI be an assistant for entire teams instead of a personal question-answer assistant? Could AI be an assistant that automatically performs concrete tasks based on various triggers, instead of just text-based answers? Perhaps your team too can have a virtual assistant organizing things in the future!
The Intelligent Future is Here
As digitalization accelerates, companies are constantly looking for new ways to enhance their operations, improve customer experience, and free up employees’ time for more strategic work. Microsoft’s Copilot Studio and the Copilot agents it offers are the answer to this need – they bring generative AI practically into everyday life. But what is Copilot Studio?
Copilot Studio is a low-code/no-code platform developed by Microsoft that allows organizations to build their own AI agents without deep technical expertise
Users can create agents that:
- Converse in natural language
- Retrieve and analyze information from different sources
- Automatically perform repetitive tasks
- Operate across different channels, such as Teams, websites, or mobile applications.
Copilot Studio integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft 365 environment and also supports third-party integrations, such as Dynamics 365 and Power BI. But what about the agents? What are Copilot agents?
Copilot agents are AI-based assistants designed to handle specific tasks or solve business challenges. They can function either as part of Microsoft 365 Copilot or independently
Types of agents include:
- Prompt-and-response agents: Answer user questions quickly and efficiently.
- Cognitive agents: Learn from user actions and provide tailored recommendations.
- Autonomous agents: Operate independently and can coordinate complex processes, such as inventory management or project scheduling.
What does all this AI hype cost then?
AI licenses for business use naturally cost money. And it’s worth paying for them to ensure, for example, the data protection of the information fed into the AI. In consumer use, the terms of use for AI might allow training the AI with the information input there. The paid Copilot Chat is already included in the Business Premium license rights, protecting company data shared with AI in business use. For the broader Microsoft 365 Copilot license that integrates your own cloud environment data for AI, a separate user-specific monthly fee is paid, which in retrospect seems like peanuts compared to the work time benefits achieved.
Using the agents themselves in Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Chat is free. You can utilize ready-made agents by Microsoft or third parties included in your license price. However, business needs may require more, and in this case, your organization might want to create customized workflows or extend AI’s small hands more tightly into the business-handled proprietary information, which may not be possible with ready-made agents.
Microsoft Copilot Studio is the solution to these needs. By paying for an organization-specific Copilot Studio license and acquiring free user licenses for developers, your organization can develop its own agents, utilize its own data, and publish them for use by the rest of the organization, for example in your own Teams environment or as public chatbots to be published on websites. One can only imagine what business opportunities this investment will open up!
Benefits for Business!
I must admit, in all honesty, that as a CEO, I’m not a super-skilled developer of AI agents or its workflows. My first Copilot Studio test in the spring was to create an assistant for myself that interpreted the newly published collective agreement for me. So I, too, still belong to this question-answer type of AI user group. However, I published the agent for all of us to access so that everyone could get answers to their burning questions about the collective agreement. All this felt relatively effortless. I can only imagine how easy it is for developers more skilled than me to create various automations and agents that serve teams more broadly!
Microsoft Copilot Studio and Copilot agents are not just technological tools – they are strategic partners that can revolutionize the way companies operate. Whether it’s customer service, internal support, or data analysis, these intelligent agents bring efficiency, scalability, and innovation to every team. So I give my warm recommendation: It’s worth starting to explore agents, and what you could get out of automating routine tasks for your own business!
“Above IT is a strategic partner developing your organization’s knowledge work. With us, AI and data protection responsibly go hand in hand!“