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

Important

The 2024 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2024 to September 2024. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Overview

Microsoft Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) is used to extend Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft 365 and build custom copilots for interna and external scenarios. With Copilot Studio, makers can design, test, and publish copilots using the comprehensive authoring canvas. Makers can easily create generative AI-enabled conversations, provide 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 using generative AI, describe how it will be used and what capabilities it provides, and publish it to Microsoft Copilot - all within the auspices of Microsoft 365’s governance controls.

Microsoft Copilot Studio AI capabilities can automatically complete tasks for your users - a copilot maker can simply expose their tenant APIs, enterprise-specific Power Automate Flows or other actions to the copilot. The copilot understands the user's request, looks through its library of actions, and identifies the ones that can fulfil the request. It then self-assembles and chains them together – and even prompts the user for any additional information it needs to complete the request.

Microsoft Copilot Studio will also integrate and interoperate with OpenAI’s Custom GPTs, bringing the power of these models into fantastic tools to build or extend Copilots. We're making it easy for enterprises to import and configure their GPT models from the OpenAI store into their Copilots. The Copilot will be able to select and call on the right models in the appropriate sequence based on the end user query and orchestrate across these and other Copilot building blocks. In addition, we're bringing AI Builder models and new prompt and plugin capabilities to Microsoft Copilot Studio. With this, copilot and plugin authors can pull data from external sources using numerous Power Platform connectors, allowing for more accurate and context-specific AI responses. Prompt building will enable authors to design, build and test generative AI prompts, and makers can save prompts to facilitate reusability, archiving and future improvements on their prompts. Saved prompts will support application lifecycle management (ALM) safe deployment practices and updates. Prompts can be invoked in Copilots via plugins.

2024 release wave 1 brings:

• Native capabilities for extending Microsoft Copilots
• IVR support in conjunction with Dynamics Customer Service
• General availability for generative actions, geo-expansions to UAE, 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, specific controls over transcript viewership

Updates to Microsoft Copilot Studio 2024 release wave 1

Investment areas

Copilot and AI innovation
Microsoft Copilot Studio has always been at the forefront of how AI can be leveraged to product eloquent, appropriate responses to your copilots users' questions and issues. Copilot Studio integrates the latest in generative AI technologies using GPT models to create more conversational copilots.

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

Generative actions dynamically create conversations by letting AI find and connect the appropriate plugins in real time. Makers configure their copilot with the appropriate plugins, and then using generative AI, the system automatically determines which plugins are relevant, what information they need from the user, and then orchestrates the conversation and execution of the plugins until the user's desired request has been completed.

Copilot configuration
Configuration of a copilot includes all the settings and capabilities a maker uses to determine what audience their copilot would address (such as the channels to publish to or copilots to extend), how to allocate resources across makers and their environments, and how to configure behaviors of the system for analytics, logging, and data retention.

Core authoring
Creating a copilot with Microsoft Copilot Studio is easy to do with the low-code authoring canvas, and there are a number of ways you can manage how topics interact, how you want the conversation to flow, and what it should feel like.

It's easy to test the copilot without having to fully deploy it whenever you make a small change. There are also lesson topics that guide you through topic authoring from simple to complex scenarios as well as default system topics. You can choose what language you want your copilot to use, too. Variables and entities make your copilot more capable of understanding your users, and rich content makes your copilot more relatable and easier to use.

Service, runtime, and governance
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a high-scale, highly-available, secure system that customers can use to deliver copilots for their employees, other businesses, and their customers. With Copilot Studio, customers can build and extend copilots, all running within the Copilot Studio service.

Copilot Studio is available in geographies around the world, as well as Government Community Clouds. Copilot Studio is integrated with the Power Platform and Power Platform admin center, which is a one-stop shop for an organization's governance needs to ensure enterprises can trust makers to build and deploy safely, ensuring enterprise data is protected.

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

Copilot Studio provides a no-code to pro-code authoring experience for voice interactions such as barge-in control, single and multi DTMF input, silence detection, and more. Businesses can craft intelligent voice copilots with those capabilities that understand end user's intent and automate transactions.

For scenarios where businesses do not require explicit dialogues, Copilot Studio provides generative AI capabilities to cover the long tail of inquiries that the user may have. Increasing the copilot's coverage and minimizing the operation cost for businesses by minimizing copilot maintenance cost and reducing escalation to human agent.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Copilot Studio below:

Check out the release plan

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Microsoft Copilot Studio

Helpful links	Description
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Product documentation	Find documentation for Microsoft Copilot Studio.
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