Plan and prepare for Microsoft Copilot Studio in 2024 release wave 1

Important

The 2024 release wave 1 plan covers new functionalities that Microsoft plans to deliver to the market from April 2024 to September 2024. In this article, you see the product overview and what's new and planned for Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Overview

Microsoft Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) extends Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft 365 and builds custom copilots for internal and external scenarios. With Copilot Studio, makers can design, test, and publish copilots by using the comprehensive authoring canvas. Makers can easily create generative AI-enabled conversations, give greater control to responses for existing copilots, and accelerate productivity with specific automated workflows.

Creating extensions for Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a native capability of Copilot Studio. In minutes, a maker can author a topic by using generative AI, describe how the topic is used and what capabilities it provides, and publish it to Microsoft Copilot—all within Microsoft 365 governance controls.

Microsoft Copilot Studio AI capabilities automatically complete tasks for your users. As a copilot maker, you simply expose your tenant APIs, enterprise-specific Power Automate flows, or other actions to the copilot. The copilot understands the user's request, searches its library of actions, and identifies the actions that fulfill the request. It assembles and chains these actions together. If the copilot needs more information to complete the request, it prompts the user for that information.

Microsoft Copilot Studio integrates and works with OpenAI’s Custom GPTs. This integration brings the power of these models into the tools you use to build or extend Copilots. Enterprises can easily import and configure their GPT models from the OpenAI store for their Copilots. The Copilot selects and calls the right models in the correct sequence. It uses the models based on the end user query and orchestrates these models with other Copilot building blocks. Microsoft Copilot Studio also includes AI Builder models and new prompt and plugin capabilities. With these capabilities, copilot and plugin authors can pull data from external sources by using numerous Power Platform connectors. This data access allows for more accurate and context-specific AI responses. Prompt building lets authors design, build, and test generative AI prompts. Makers can save prompts to make reusability, archiving, and future improvements easier. Saved prompts support application lifecycle management (ALM) safe deployment practices and updates. Copilot plugins invoke prompts.

2024 release wave 1 includes:

• Native capabilities for extending Microsoft Copilots
• IVR support with Dynamics Customer Service
• General availability for generative actions and geo-expansions to UAE and Germany
• Software lifecycle management capabilities, including topic-level import and export and role-based access control (RBAC)
• Improvements to governance and administration, including more granular AI management controls, audit logs in Microsoft Purview, and specific controls over transcript viewership

Updates to Microsoft Copilot Studio 2024 release wave 1

Investment areas

Copilot and AI innovation
Microsoft Copilot Studio leads the way in how AI can create eloquent and appropriate responses to your users' questions and issues. Copilot Studio uses the latest generative AI technologies with GPT models to build more conversational agents.

The generative answers capability in Microsoft Copilot Studio lets you specify existing internal and external sources that an agent uses to answer a user's questions. This capability uses AI to intelligently create fully conversational responses to your users' queries without your makers needing to manually create individual topics for every eventuality.

Generative actions dynamically create conversations by letting AI find and connect the right plugins in real time. Makers configure their agent with the right plugins. Then, using generative AI, the system automatically determines which plugins are relevant, what information it needs from the user, and how to orchestrate the conversation and execution of the plugins until it completes the request.

Copilot configuration
When you configure an agent, set all the options and capabilities that let you define your target audience. Choose publishing channels, extend existing copilots, manage resource allocation across creators and environments, and set up system behaviors for analytics, logging, and data retention.

Core authoring When you create an agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio, you use a low-code authoring canvas. You can choose how topics interact, how the conversation flows, and what the experience feels like.

You can easily test the agent without deploying it when you make a small change. The system includes lesson topics that guide you through topic authoring, from simple to complex scenarios, as well as default system topics. You can choose the language for your copilot. Use variables and entities to help your agent better understand users. Add rich content to make your agent more relatable and easier to use.

Service, runtime, and governance
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a high-scale, highly available, secure system. Use it to deliver agents for your employees, other businesses, and your customers. With Copilot Studio, you can build and extend agents. All agents run within the Copilot Studio service.

Copilot Studio is available globally and in Government Community Clouds. The Power Platform and Power Platform admin center integrate with Copilot Studio. The admin center provides a one-stop shop for an organization's governance needs, so enterprises can trust makers to build and deploy safely while protecting enterprise data.

Speech and IVR
Voice interaction is the most natural way for humans to communicate. It remains a critical medium in copilot engagements. With Copilot Studio, businesses can easily create and customize agents that interact naturally with customers through voice by accepting speech and DTMF input from telephony. It provides natural text-to-speech capabilities so end users can hear the response from the agent.

Copilot Studio provides a no-code to pro-code authoring experience for voice interactions, including barge-in control, single and multi-DTMF input, and silence detection. Businesses can craft intelligent voice-responsive agents with capabilities that understand the agent user's intent and automate transactions.

For scenarios where businesses don't need explicit dialogues, Copilot Studio uses generative AI to handle a wide range of user inquiries.

To learn more about the capabilities delivered in this release wave, see the release plan for Microsoft Copilot Studio:

Check out the release plan

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
Application administrators review user-impacting features. This review process helps manage release changes and supports successful onboarding of new capabilities. For the complete list, see all features tagged Users, automatically in the release plan.

Features that application administrators must enable
This release wave includes features that administrators, makers, or business analysts must enable or configure for their users. For the complete list, see all features tagged Users by admins, makers, or analysts in the release plan.

Get the most out of Microsoft Copilot Studio

Helpful links	Description
Release plan	View all capabilities included in the release.
Licensing	Learn how to license Microsoft Copilot Studio.
Product documentation	Find documentation for Microsoft Copilot Studio.
User community	Engage with Microsoft Copilot Studio experts and peers in the community.
Upcoming events	Find and register for in-person and online events.
Product trials	Get started with Microsoft Copilot Studio.