Plan and prepare for Microsoft Copilot Studio in 2025 release wave 1

Important

The 2025 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2025 to September 2025. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Overview

Microsoft Copilot Studio is a cloud-based service designed to create AI agents for several applications. It allows you to build standalone agents for customer and employee care scenarios, extend Microsoft 365 Copilot, or develop autonomous agents that use AI and actions to perform sophisticated, long-running operations on behalf of the user.

With Copilot Studio, you can design, test, and publish agents using the comprehensive authoring canvas. You can easily create generative AI-enabled conversations and autonomous agents, provide greater control to responses for existing copilots, and accelerate productivity with specific automated workflows.

With Microsoft Copilot Studio's first run experience, you can describe their agent conversationally and easily add knowledge sources. From there, you can add topics, use actions, add additional data sources, tune its behavior, and then publish the agent to a variety of channels supported by Copilot Studio.

Creating agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot is a native capability of Copilot Studio. In minutes, author an agent, describe how it is used and what capabilities it provides, and publish it to Microsoft Copilot—all within the governance controls of Microsoft 365. Extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with lightweight agents created using the Copilot Studio agent builder and add fully customized agents created within Microsoft Copilot Studio for greater sophistication.

Microsoft Copilot Studio agents automatically complete tasks autonomously connecting their tenants, enterprise-specific Power Automate Flows, or other actions to the agent. The agent understands the user's request or autonomous trigger, 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 of the agent for any additional information the agent needs to complete the request.

Microsoft Copilot Studio integrates the latest models from OpenAI, bringing the power of these models into fantastic tools to build or extend agents.

Copilot Studio offers extensive governance capabilities, now with end-user activity auditing via Microsoft Purview and Sentinel integration, extended tenant-wide inventory in the Power Platform admin center, and customer managed encryption keys. It also supports the latest managed environment capabilities, such as environment groups and policies.

2025 Release Wave 1 brings:

• Support and integration for custom agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Enhanced capabilities for the Copilot Studio embedded builder in Microsoft Copilot.
• Support for actions.
• Additional enterprise knowledge sources.
• The ability to upgrade a Copilot agent to an independent Copilot Studio custom agent that can access additional capabilities and be published in other channels.
• New conversational channels for custom agents, including WhatsApp and SharePoint.

Updates to Microsoft Copilot Studio 2025 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 produce eloquent, appropriate responses to your users' questions and issues. Copilot Studio integrates the latest in generative AI technologies using GPT models to create more conversational agents.

The generative answers capability in Microsoft Copilot Studio lets you specify existing internal and external sources that an agent can use to answer a user's questions. The capability uses AI to intelligently create fully conversational responses to your users' queries—without your 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 agent with the appropriate plugins and then, using generative AI, the system automatically determines which plugins are relevant, what information is needed from the user, and orchestrates the conversation and execution of the plugins until the desired request has been completed.

Copilot configuration
Configuring an agent involves setting all options and capabilities that allow a creator to define their target audience. This includes choosing publishing channels, extending existing copilots, managing resource allocation across creators and environments, and setting up system behaviors for analytics, logging, and data retention.

Core authoring
Creating an agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio is easy to do with the low-code authoring canvas, and there are several 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 agent 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 agent more capable of understanding your users, and rich content makes your agent 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 agents for their employees, other businesses, and their customers. With Copilot Studio, customers can build and extend agents, all running within the Copilot Studio service.

Copilot Studio is available globally and in 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.

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
Release plan	View all capabilities included in the release.
Licensing	Improve your understanding of 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.