What are agents?

  • 7 minutes

In the dynamic landscape of Microsoft 365, agents play a pivotal role in enhancing productivity and streamlining workflows. Agents are intelligent software tools designed to assist users. They can automate routine tasks, provide insights, and facilitate seamless communication. For example, they can schedule meetings, manage emails, and offer real-time data analysis and personalized recommendations.

Agents in Microsoft 365 use cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to understand user behavior and preferences. This functionality allows them to deliver tailored solutions that adapt to individual needs, making everyday operations more efficient and effective. Whether you're collaborating with colleagues, organizing your calendar, or analyzing complex data sets, agents are integral to creating a smarter, more connected work environment.

An agent takes the power of AI a step further, because instead of just assisting you, agents can work alongside you or even on your behalf. Agents can do a range of things, from responding to questions to more complicated or multistep assignments. What sets them apart from a personal assistant is that they can be tailored to have a particular expertise.

For example, you could create an agent to know everything about your company's product catalog so it can draft detailed responses to customer questions or automatically compile product details for an upcoming presentation. Other agents can act on your behalf, such as helping to fulfill sales orders. In doing so, they free you up to focus on building new customer relationships. Having agents handle some of these routine needs can boost productivity across industries, from manufacturing and research to finance and retail, helping businesses save time and money.

Types of agents

The following sections describe the different types of agents supported by Microsoft 365 Copilot:

  • Prebuilt agents
  • Ready-made SharePoint site agents
  • Agents for the everyday business user
  • Advanced agents

Important

This training unit introduces you to all the agent types that are available in Microsoft 365 Copilot so that you understand the differences between them. However, the remainder of this training course focuses on prebuilt agents and agents for the everyday business user.

Prebuilt agents

A prebuilt agent is an agent that either Microsoft or a Microsoft-approved vendor created. Non-Microsoft agents undergo a rigorous approval process by Microsoft's dedicated team of AI and machine learning experts to ensure they meet industry standards and best practices. If you find an agent that you wish to use, you can add it to your personal agent library. If you select a non-Microsoft agent that's connected to a licensed service, then you must possess a corresponding license to be able to use it.

Prebuilt agents are designed to integrate seamlessly with existing workflows and provide immediate value without requiring extensive configuration or customization. Compared to custom, user-created agents, prebuilt agents offer the advantage of rapid deployment and reduced development costs. They come ready to use, with standardized features that can be easily adapted to specific business requirements. Examples of prebuilt agents created by Microsoft include:

  • Prompt Coach. This agent is designed to help users craft well-structured, effective prompts. This agent excels in both generating new prompts and analyzing existing ones, ensuring they align with your goals. With a focus on guiding users through the entire process, Prompt Coach offers valuable feedback, examples, and actionable suggestions for continuous improvement.
  • Writing Coach. This agent is an expert assistant dedicated to providing detailed, constructive feedback and helping you excel in any writing task. Whether you're refining an email, crafting a story, or developing a whitepaper, Writing Coach helps guide you every step of the way.
  • Idea Coach. This agent acts as your personal brainstorming companion designed to inspire creativity. With a fun and collaborative tone, Idea Coach helps you plan and navigate the brainstorming process, making sure you stay focused and on track.
  • Visual Creator. This agent allows users to create stunning images and videos using natural language prompts. Users don't need to add this prebuilt agent to their agent library. Prebuilt agents are covered in greater detail in a later training module.

Note

Several of these prebuilt agents, including the Prompt Coach and Writing Coach, are also presented as templates that everyday business users can select from when creating agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and SharePoint.

Ready-made SharePoint site agents

A ready-made agent for a SharePoint site is an AI-powered tool that's integrated within the site. It can automatically analyze and interact with the site's content, providing users with insights, summaries, and assistance tailored to the site's data. It applies Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities to enhance productivity by understanding and processing information within the SharePoint site.

Not every SharePoint site comes with a ready-made agent that's automatically grounded in all the content within the site. At the time a SharePoint site is created, Microsoft 365 Copilot automatically creates a ready-made agent for the site if certain requirements are met. These requirements include the user meeting the Copilot license requirement and possessing appropriate permissions, and the organization having a properly configured Microsoft 365 environment. Therefore, while some SharePoint sites have a ready-made agent automatically grounded in their site's content, this characteristic isn't a universal feature for all SharePoint sites.

When Microsoft 365 Copilot does create a ready-made agent for a newly created SharePoint site, the agent is automatically scoped to the content within the site. This agent can answer questions about the content on the site, help users understand documents, and provide insights based on the information available on that site.

Note

When Microsoft 365 Copilot automatically creates a ready-made agent for a site, it also assigns the agent as the site's default agent. However, the site owner or administrator can later set a custom agent as the site's default agent if they choose.

Agents for the everyday business user

Everyday business users with no programming or technical background can build and manage agents in both SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. These agents are AI-driven chatbots that provide basic functionalities and personalized assistance. When an everyday business user creates an agent, they can either base it on a predefined template that contains preconfigured options and rules, or they can create an agent based on options and rules that they define.

These agents don't include advanced features like generative AI, which require more complex algorithms and processing capabilities. Instead, they include the following key features:

  • Ease of use. Everyday users can create and manage agents directly within SharePoint and Copilot Chat. You don't need any coding skills to create these agents.
  • Personalized assistance. These agents provide tailored assistance based on the specific content and context the user assigns to the agent.
  • Permission compliance. Agents adhere to the permissions set within Microsoft 365, ensuring users only see content they're allowed to access.

Advanced agents

Developers can use Copilot Studio and the Visual Studio Code/Teams toolkit to create customized agents that provide advanced functionality. For example, developers can integrate advanced AI models and custom data connectors to enable highly sophisticated agents. While agents for the everyday business user require no programming background, programming expertise is required to create advanced agents.

Key features of advanced agents include:

  • Advanced customization. These highly customized agents provide advanced capabilities, such as integrating with over 1000+ prebuilt and custom data connectors.
  • Generative AI. Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence that can generate new content, such as text, images, or even code, based on the data the AI model is trained on. In the context of agents, generative AI enables the creation of sophisticated responses and actions by understanding and processing natural language inputs. These agents can apply generative AI to provide more sophisticated responses and actions.
  • Central administration. Copilot Studio and Visual Studio code/Teams toolkit provide the means for secure deployment, central administration, and compliance management.

Agents in Copilot Chat and SharePoint

Now that we've introduced the various types of agents that are available in Microsoft 365 Copilot, let's examine more closely the agents that can be created by everyday business users in Copilot Chat and SharePoint. These agents are the focus of this training course.

Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat represents a significant leap forward in the realm of enterprise productivity tools. As an integral component of Microsoft 365, Copilot Chat harnesses the power of AI to provide users with tailored assistance across various tasks. In doing so, Copilot Chat can transform the way teams collaborate and manage information.

In Copilot Chat, agents serve as intelligent virtual assistants designed to streamline workflows and enhance the user experience. These agents are powered by advanced AI algorithms and are capable of understanding and responding to user inquiries in a natural, conversational manner. They play a critical role in helping users navigate the complexities of digital workspaces, ensuring that relevant information is accessible and actionable.

In Copilot Chat, you can use any of the prebuilt agents that you added to your personal agent library. You can also use Copilot Studio to create agents, which you can share with other users if you choose.

Agents in Copilot Chat can provide real-time support during conversations, automate responses, and even predict user needs based on the context of the discussion. This synergy between agents and Copilot Chat fosters a more interactive and responsive user experience, ultimately driving greater productivity and efficiency.

Agents in SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint is a foundational content management platform for enterprises powering OneDrive, SharePoint sites, Teams, Loop, Stream, and more. It facilitates team collaboration, business processes, knowledge management, and employee communication with robust content services. Every day, about 2 billion documents are added to Microsoft 365 SharePoint and OneDrive, and 2 million new SharePoint sites are created.

While this expansive amount of knowledge is key to an organization's success, it's often hard for employees to find, absorb, and act efficiently with all this information. Business users need a quick and accurate way to sift through this digital content and get the information they need. With AI-powered agents in SharePoint, site owners, site members, and site visitors can quickly access valuable information and insights for their projects and tasks.

Agents in SharePoint support you and your team with your workflows, projects, content discovery and knowledge sharing, based on the content in SharePoint sites, pages, and selected files. As previously mentioned, every SharePoint site comes with a ready-made agent specific to that site. Microsoft 365 Copilot creates this ready-made agent at the time the site is created. If you have Edit permissions or higher for the site, you can create custom agents for the site to get more specific answers tailored to your specific purpose.

Consider the following case study. It provides an example of a user's AI-assisted journey, which starts with a SharePoint site's ready-made agent and ends with the creation of an agent in SharePoint.

Case study of an agent in SharePoint

A sales manager at Contoso Camera wants to use Copilot to generate a sales pitch for the company's latest video camera, the Digital Mega-300. The manager wants Copilot to use the product proposals and performance reviews from the marketing team's Mega-300 SharePoint document library. The sales manager navigates to the marketing team's Mega-300 SharePoint site and enters the following prompt in Copilot, which uses the site's ready-made, default agent:

Create a 5-minute elevator pitch about the Contoso Digital Mega-300 video camera that I can present to a client.

After reviewing the sales pitch that Copilot created, the sales manager felt that it didn't do enough to differentiate the Mega-300 camera from the company's current video camera, the Digital Mega-200. The manager then realized that by using the ready-made site agent for the marketing team's Mega-300 SharePoint site, the sales pitch that Copilot generated was limited to that information only.

To address this situation, the manager has decided to create a custom agent for the marketing team's Mega-300 document library that also accesses two other SharePoint sites - Contoso's Research & Development site and its Digital Mega-200 document library. The sales manager then uses this customized agent to answer the following prompt:

Create a custom sales pitch that compares Contoso's latest Digital Mega-300 video camera to the company's Digital Mega-200 camera. When doing so, identify the rigor of research and development that Contoso applied to the Mega-300 and provide a detailed list of the other product features and benefits provided by the Mega-300 to differentiate it from the Mega-200.

This agent allowed Copilot to access the three SharePoint sites and aggregate the information needed to create a more effective sales pitch for the Mega-300 camera, especially in relation to the company's older Mega-200 product.

Tools used for creating agents in Copilot Chat and SharePoint

Creating agents is an essential aspect of enhancing productivity and automating tasks within Microsoft 365. Two tools facilitate this process for everyday business users with no programming experience: Copilot Studio for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and the agent tool in SharePoint for SharePoint agents. Each tool offers unique capabilities tailored to different environments and use cases. While later training examines these tools in greater detail, here's a summarized view of each tool:

  • Copilot Studio. Microsoft Copilot Studio is a unified platform that enables both developers and everyday business users to create Copilot Chat agents.
    • Developers can use Copilot Studio’s powerful tools to create advanced Copilot agents that can act as intelligent, task-specific assistants.
    • Copilot Studio is also designed for the everyday business user with no programming experience to create agents. Copilot Studio provides an intuitive, user-friendly development experience that enables non-technical users to easily create and customize their own Copilot agents directly within Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. By using natural language and guided prompts, users can define an agent’s purpose, connect it to relevant data sources, and tailor its responses to fit their unique business needs—all without writing a single line of code. Copilot Studio empowers more people across an organization to harness the capabilities of AI, enhancing real-time communication and productivity.
  • Agent tool in SharePoint. This tool is a Microsoft 365 Copilot feature built into SharePoint. It allows everyday business users to create agents and integrates them directly into SharePoint sites. These agents are primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and user experience within SharePoint by automating tasks, providing content insights, and facilitating document management. While the SharePoint tool also supports integration with other Microsoft 365 services, its main strength lies in optimizing SharePoint-specific workflows and content management.

Keep in mind that while each application (Copilot Chat and SharePoint) uses a different tool for creating its agents, their user interfaces look somewhat similar, and they basically capture the same information in their agents. Besides some minor UI differences, the primary difference between the two tools is that Copilot Studio allows users to enable some features for Copilot Chat agents that aren't applicable to SharePoint agents. These tools are examined in greater detail in the upcoming training on how to create agents in Copilot Chat and SharePoint.