Not to be confused with the wider term Microsoft Copilot which encapsulates many of Microsoft 365 AI offerings, Microsoft Copilot Studio allows you to build your own generative AI powered custom copilots for your organisation. Here at Compete366, we believe that this new offering has huge potential for our customers and we are excited to share more details here.
An important point to note is that Copilot Studio allows you to build both external copilots for customers and partners and publish them externally, as well as building copilots for internal use too.
Overview
Copilot Studio is a software as a service platform, which means there’s no infrastructure for you to deploy or manage, and it’s a low code, no code solution which means that you can design, build, publish and manage your copilots using the graphical user interface and the Copilot Studio, without needing to write a single line of code.
And for those of you familiar with Power Virtual Agents, it has been enhanced with the addition of generative AI capability and re-branded to Copilot Studio.
You can also use Copilot Studio to customise Copilot for Microsoft 365 (read our related Copilot for 365 blog post) if you have that, but that is a separate topic and we won’t cover that in this blog.
4 steps to create and manage your own copilot
- Buy a Copilot Studio tenant license
- Access the Copilot Studio web portal – use the portal to create, design, test and publish your Copilot
- Use the portal to monitor your copilots to check on usage and engagement and identify any problems.
- Manage and improve your Copilots in the same studio portal.
Microsoft Copilot Studio Elements
1. Knowledge Sources
Microsoft Copilot Studio allows you to configure what information sources the copilot uses. For example, you can configure the copilot to use your public facing website, your internal CRM, Databases or SharePoint content. This is extremely powerful as it means you can control the knowledge sources and ensure that the copilot only provides accurate information that is under your control.
2. Topics
Topics define how you manage the conversation, allowing this to be controlled. In the pre-AI days, you would have had to create many different questions, answers and outcomes . But with the power of generative AI, you can allow AI figure out the intent of user’s questions and what information to provide them with. You can have tight control over the conversation by using topics to list trigger words, define the exact response and conversation branches for the copilot chatbot or you can use GenAI to allow the copilot bot to decide that for you.
3. Actions
Actions define what things you want your copilot chatbot to be able to do. So for example it could be to send an email, get data from a database, update data in a table, amend a record in CRM, open a case in a ticketing system etc.
4. Where to publish?
Once you have created your copilot chatbot, you need to decide where to publish it to. There are many different options that you can publish to – for example Teams, Facebook, Telegram, Slack, Twilio, websites and more. You can publish both to internal and external systems.
5. Security and Authentication
Microsoft provides a range of authentication options. If you are creating a copilot chatbot for your external website you would choose no authentication, for other user cases select the authentication you require (Entra ID, or any OAuth2 protocol).
Typical Use Cases
Internal Use
Sales Support / Customer Service
A copilot chatbot that can help answer questions on all your products and services for example when your sales team is on a customer call. There could be variations created for accounts, marketing, legal, customer service to help to respond to specific queries in these areas. Publish this as an app in Teams for easy access by everyone.
Technical Helpdesk
Built a Copilot chatbot to assist your in-house technical team when they’re looking for information and instructions, using sources such as your internal Technical SharePoint documentation library, your own company website or external technical websites that you have pre-selected as you know they provide trusted content.
Employee onboarding
Taking this one step further, how about creating a Copilot that can act as an agent for you? The employee onboarding process is a great opportunity to use a copilot agent to automate the process, and here is a demo of this built by Microsoft. This agent capability is currently in preview.
External Use Cases
Website chatbot
Allow your customers to look for answers easily on your website by creating a Copilot chatbot that uses your website as the knowledge source. This could be extended to cover access to your technical documentation sources too. If you visit the blogs section of our website you can use the one that we have built.
Customer Returns
Use a Generative AI powered copilot chat bot with actions to enable customers to return items on an E Commerce website for example. You can use actions to retrieve and update data in back-end databases (for example the customer and order information) and send confirmation emails to the customer.
Licensing
Copilot Studio is a consumption-based license in Microsoft 365. It is licenced at the tenant level license with no need for paid for user licensing.
The consumption licence is based on the number of messages that you consume per month. as a capacity pack, the smallest unit is 1 capacity pack which is £192.00 a month (as of June 2024) for which you get 25,000 messages per month. A message is defined as any request or message sent to the Copilot that triggers an action or response from the Copilot. And if you’re using GenAI in the response, then the response would count as a message too. And the message consumption is automatically shared across all the copilot bots that you have live in your tenant.
In Summary
Microsoft Copilot is an exciting, flexible and cost-effective way to use AI in the real world to deliver an enhanced experience for both your team members and customers.
If our blog has sparked ideas for you on how you might use Copilot Studio to improve what you offer your customers or your team, then please do get in touch for a free initial consultation.
Contact our Microsoft specialists
Phone or email us to find out more – or book a free, no-obligation call with our technical consultants using the contact form.
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