Your Guide to Microsoft Copilot Studio

The copilots in Microsoft 365 apps are excellent for specific tasks – Copilot in Word helps you build better content, Copilot in PowerPoint aids in creating powerful presentations, and Copilot in Outlook makes managing your inbox and communications easier.

However, certain use cases require additional features that may not be available in the ‘base’ copilots. That’s where Copilot Studio steps in.

Microsoft Copilot Studio lets you customise copilots available with your 365 subscription or build entirely new ones. You can also design plugins and automate processes in Copilot Studio to increase user engagement on your company’s website and social media channels.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through Microsoft Copilot Studio’s essential features to help you understand how it can transform your business.

Getting the Most Out of Microsoft Copilots with Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot for 365 performs a broad range of tasks in 365 apps. For instance, you can use it to generate marketing materials in Word, summarise meetings in Teams or draft emails in Outlook.

However, the integration and customisation options available for Copilot in 365 aren’t always optimised to meet the needs of every business.

Copilot Studio provides a graphic environment within which companies can customise copilots or create new copilots and plugins to adjust the AI companion to their needs.

Performing any of these tasks in Studio doesn’t require having advanced coding skills. Users can simply describe what they want the copilot or plugin to do in natural language and the AI will do all the heavy lifting.

That said, as with any of Microsoft’s copilots, Studio’s results depend on the prompt’s quality, so users should make sure to use straightforward, clear instructions to get the best results.

A Glance at Microsoft Copilot Studio’s Interface

Copilot Studio’s interface is intuitive, so it’s as easy as possible for users to get going. The platform’s environment is divided into four sections and you can quickly switch between tabs when building or deploying a Copilot. Here’s a quick overview of the platform’s tabs:

Canvas – The area where users can define the dialogue logic and flow by dragging and dropping nods or connectors onto the worksurface to create paths and branches Copilot will use to perform specific tasks.

Toolbox – This panel contains a broad spectrum of connectors, actions, variables, and conditions organised into categories users can add to new or existing copilots.

Properties – The tab offers a wide range of options that enable users to adjust the Copilot’s settings. Changing the nod’s or connector’s language, generative AI model or tone are among the options available in this panel.

Test tab – The section of the platform where you can deploy a Copilot to check if it’s functioning properly and detect errors you need to correct before launching it.

Although it is relatively simple, learning to customise or develop new copilots takes practice, so companies may have to provide training for their employees to help them understand how to use the tools Copilot Studio offers.

Key Copilot Studio Features

All options available in Copilot Studio can be roughly divided into a few categories. The platform’s tools can be used to:

• Customise a copilot or a plugin
• Build a new copilot
• Design dialogue scenarios
• Keep track of the AI assistant’s performance.

Let’s take a closer look at the features available in the Copilot Studio:

Customising Copilots

Copilot for Microsoft 365 comes with preset properties which means that it can access information from default sources like Microsoft Graph or authoritative websites.

Copilot Studio has 1,200 connectors that allow you to point Copilot to ERP or CRM systems and various other sources. Besides filtering the sources it uses to generate content, users can change the Copilot’s language, edit its topics and adjust the language it uses when answering prompts.

Connecting Copilot Studio to Microsoft Power Automate enables you to automate repetitive tasks like adding information collected with forms to the company’s database, generating invoices or creating customer feedback reports in Word and sharing them in Teams.

Connectors allow companies to integrate their IT, onboarding or budgeting processes into Copilot to automate their operations.

Building new Copilots

Creating a new copilot involves defining topics, dialogue scenarios, plugins and connectors the AI assistant should use to generate content.

The easiest way to approach this task is to write a prompt in simple, conversational language that describes what the copilot should do, but you may need to generate several iterations of a copilot before you get the result you like.

The Graphical view gives you a visual representation of all Copilot’s nods, plugins and connectors enabling you to drag and drop each element within a flow or a dialogue logic you’re developing.

Besides Copilots, users can build conversational plugins that expand an app’s behaviour and allow it to apply a specific business logic or add sources of information that aren’t included in Copilot’s access.

Studio users can also use Generative Actions to replace a Copilot’s default topic-triggering approach with a GPT that uses several plugin actions or topics to respond to queries. Enabling this feature is useful when setting up virtual agents because it allows the AI to choose the topic that best fits the particular conversation.

It’s worth noting that developers who need more robust tools to build Copilots can use Azure services and models in Copilot Studio.

Monitoring Performance

The comprehensive analytics tools in Copilot Studio give you insight into Copilot’s performance so that you can adjust the AI companion’s properties to improve its performance.

The Analytics page features several tabs that reveal how different topics affect the escalation, abandonment and resolution rates, and offer a visual representation of Copilot sessions over time and session outcomes.

Studio lets you keep track of customer satisfaction metrics and identify factors that drive customer satisfaction. Its analytics tools can provide you with a better understanding of the topics with the highest engagement rates and detect session patterns.

The Analytics page also shows the messages users exchange with Copilot which helps you determine which messages are included with your Microsoft 365 plan, free or billed.

Designing Custom Copilots with Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft’s AI assistant makes the work in Teams, Excel, Word and other productivity apps easier, but the Copilot’s capabilities aren’t tailored to meet the needs of all its users.

That’s why Copilot Studio is an integral part of the Copilot for Microsoft 365 package so that businesses can adjust it to the context in which they plan to use it. The platform’s tools allow companies to build custom copilots for their social media channels, websites, and countless other purposes.

Copilot Studio offers teams the freedom to build the copilots that best suit their needs, giving the already powerful features sets of Microsoft Copilot additional capabilities that can boost productivity and collaboration for businesses – whatever their industry and requirements.