Deliver business process transformation with Copilot Studio

  • 5 minutes

As your teams begin to master using Copilot, they’ll likely see opportunities to refine what it generates and find new ways to reengineer processes across your business. Copilot can help you explore those possibilities with a built-in extensibility tool: Microsoft Copilot Studio. It’s included with your subscription to help you to customize Copilot to your organization’s unique needs with plugins.

Copilot Studio is a low-code tool that enables you to:

  • Connect Copilot to your data everywhere: Copilot Studio comes with more than 1,200 connectors, which can be used to build plugins for Copilot. This allows it to tap into data outside Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Graph. Connect Copilot to your other systems of record including databases, custom backends, and even on-premises legacy systems. Consider those that are core to your business, such as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, finance, or human resources. It can also connect to your custom line-of-business solutions and non-Microsoft systems such as Adobe, SAP, SharePoint, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle, Salesforce, SQL, Slack, or Zendesk plus all Azure data services.
  • Customize Copilot to your unique business needs and workflows: Once Copilot is connected to your data and apps, extend it to your business processes and the systems you use every day. With Microsoft Power Automate capabilities in Copilot Studio, you can create ways for Copilot to help with functions such as expense management, HR onboarding, and IT management. Copilot Studio is also where you can design plugins for tailored responses within Copilot. These custom copilot chats could be for nuanced topics such as legal requests, sensitive HR subjects, or finance and compliance inquiries. For example, if you were to give Copilot access to your travel policy in SharePoint and your ongoing expense budgets in SAP, it could give an accurate, self-service answer to an employee question such as, “How much of my team’s travel budget is left in this quarter?”
  • Control and manage customizations easily: Your organization only needs to build customizations once. Once built, plugins can be centrally managed by IT and secured with the right access, user controls, and analytics. IT remains in control.
An example of customizing Copilot for Microsoft 365 with Copilot Studio

Copilot answers based on your enterprise data but cannot natively answer other queries. Improve Copilot's ability to understand and respond to a broader range of queries and perform more complex tasks.

  1. Extended in Copilot Studio –Add reusable AI plugins (based on pre-built/custom connectors, AI prompts, and Power Automate flows) or build Conversational Plugins.
  2. Build a Conversational Plugin –Use the state-of-the-art dialog builder. Using 1000s of connectors, combine multiple data sources and manipulate data.
  3. Publish back to Microsoft Copilot – Publish and enable your new plugin in Microsoft Copilot in minutes.
  4. Ask again – Microsoft Copilot is now instantly capable of handling the previously unanswered query.

Build your own copilots

If you’re interested in building your own custom copilots to provide generative AI experiences that Copilot for Microsoft 365 isn’t designed for, there’s a separate Copilot Studio license available. With it, you can embed a conversational copilot into your website to serve customers, build a copilot to assist employees with HR or IT inquiries on a SharePoint page, or even create copilots for frontline workers who don’t use Microsoft 365. And those are just a few possibilities.

To dive deeper with Copilot Studio and creating copilots, take the course Create copilots with Microsoft Copilot Studio - Training | Microsoft Learn and Extend and manage Microsoft Copilot Studio copilots - Training | Microsoft Learn.