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Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility

  • Artikel

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-powered productivity tool that keeps users in the flow of their work across Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook, Teams, and Word, grounding with Microsoft Graph data.

It offers knowledge, such as emails, chats, and documents that users have permission to access, and skills, such as understanding, summarizing, predicting, recalling, translating, and generating content.

Visual representation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot system: models, orchestrator, knowledge, skills, and UX

Copilot extensibility is the ability to customize and extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with additional knowledge and skills.

As a developer, you can extend Microsoft 365 Copilot to build Copilot agents to bring custom knowledge, skills, and process automation into Microsoft 365 Copilot, tailoring it to suit the unique needs of your customers.

Copilot agents are fundamentally composed of Custom Knowledge (via instructions and grounding data), Custom Skills (including Actions, Triggers, and Workflows), and Autonomy (including planning, learning, and escalation).

Visual representation of the Copilot agents: models, orchestrator, knowledge, skills, anatomy, and UX

Additionally, IT Admins can configure appropriate Copilot connectors in Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Power Platform Admin Center to expand knowledge available to all users ​in their tenant, respecting data access limitations from the knowledge ​source itself.

Chart with organizational 'Knowledge' as the x-axis and user 'Skills' as the y-axis

What are agents?

In essence, agents are a scoped version of Copilot. They are designed to automate and execute specific business processes on your behalf. Each agent is an expert in one or two specific tasks, such as retrieving information, summarizing data, and even taking actions like sending emails or updating records. Agents can be customized to meet specific business needs, such as:

  • Human Resources agent
  • Analytics agent
  • Project management agent
  • Legal agent
  • Image creation agent

Here are some practical examples of what you can develop for your organization:

  • Project management agent for engineering team

    Take, for example, an engineering team that relies on project management software. You can build an agent that enables users to monitor open tickets. For instance, a user can request information on all issues assigned to them, and your agent can seamlessly retrieve and present this data from your API.

  • Product inventory agent for E-commerce

    If your business operates in the realm of commerce, you can build an internal inventory agent by connecting it to your product database. For example, a user can ask Copilot to verify the availability of specific items, streamlining your internal processes.

  • Image creation agent for marketing campaign

    If you need images for your marketing, you can create an agent that assists in developing marketing assets specifically tailored to your campaign.

Persona 1 - I am a developer, who manages the product database at an e-commerce company, and I want to build an inventory catalog agent that brings the product information for internal org. Persona 2 - I am a marketing manager, who aims to launch a new campaign for my products. And I want a tool that helps developing marketing assets tailored to the campaign.

Types of agents

Copilot agents can be built using either a declarative or custom engine approach. While the difference may not be noticeable to end-users, the development methods are distinct, giving you, as a developer, the flexibility to choose how you want to build them.

Declarative agents are essentially a collection of custom knowledge (via instructions and grounding data), and custom skills (including Actions, Triggers, and Workflows) hosted on top of Copilot orchestrator and foundation models powering a conversational experience. These agents can be integrated within Microsoft 365 and can utilize Copilot connectors to light up advanced functionality.​

On the other hand, custom engine agents are developed using custom foundation models and orchestrators and can be tailored to specific enterprise needs with your own stack. These include agents built with Copilot Studio, Teams AI library, Azure AI, etc. Custom engine agents work as standalone Teams apps, and in the future as Copilot agents.

This illustration shows types of extensibility options, Graph connector, plugins, and declarative agents

To find out which agents work the best for you, learn the differences at Your agent options for Microsoft 365.

Types of extensibility options

As you just learned, declarative agents comprise a collection of custom knowledge and custom skills. You can seamlessly integrate it within Microsoft 365 using Copilot connectors to call standard REST APIs to integrate with other applications or add your own functionality.

Declarative agents have:

  • Familiar user interface, which look like and work like Microsoft Copilot
  • Domain-specific knowledge applied for specific tasks, such as travel planner or nutrition assistant
  • Ability to integrate with plugins and connectors to call specialized services and access domain expertise

📖 Learn more: Declarative agents

Copilot connectors

Copilot connectors allow developers and IT admins to apply Custom Knowledge and to build Custom Skills and to Microsoft Copilot’s out-of-box features via Copilot agents. ​

There are two types of connectors—Microsoft Graph connectors, and Power Platform connectors.

Graph connectors

Graph connectors enable you to extend Microsoft Copilot by integrating external data sources into Microsoft Graph, enhancing Copilot's ability to reason over your enterprise content and provide more comprehensive responses. This integration allows Copilot to access and utilize a broader range of organizational knowledge.

With Graph connectors, you can:

  • Make the most of your external data by giving Copilot the ability to access and summarize your diverse datasets from different sources, enabling more comprehensive insights
  • Use Copilot as a research aid, letting Copilot find, summarize, and perform Q&A natively by using the dataset of your choice
  • Surface the intelligence of Copilot in Microsoft Search, ContextIQ, and more to enhance the ways your users are already searching for answers

📖 Learn more: Graph connectors overview

Power Platform connectors

Power Platform connectors are essential components that enable Power Platform applications, such as Power Automate, Power Apps, and Logic Apps, to interact with external services and data sources. They also enhance the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot by enabling it to integrate with a wide range of external services and data sources, perform custom actions, and access a broader range of data types.

Unlike Graph connectors, Power platform connectors are real-time data retrieval with read/write actions. For example, you can create a connector that allows your users to track an issue in real-time, also let them create actions, such as creating a ticket for the tracker.

📖 Learn more: Connect and extend with Copilot Studio

Plugins

Plugins are available as actions for declarative agents to interact with other systems to read or write information in near real-time.

  • Access real-time information such as finding the latest news coverage on a product launch
  • Retrieve relational data such as reporting on service tickets assigned to a given team member
  • Perform actions across apps such as creating a new task in your organization's work tracking system

There are a few different ways to create plugins—API plugins, Teams Message extensions, and various Copilot Studio Actions.

📖 Learn more:

Important

API plugins are only supported as actions within declarative agents. They are not enabled in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Copilot agent in-app experience

When you build Copilot agents, you can tailor the user experience by providing In context and immersive experiences.

  • In-context experience: For example in Business Chat (BizChat), users can @-mention the agent and interact with it within the chat conversation with Microsoft 365 Copilot
  • Immersive experience: This allows users to chat directly with the agent, providing an embedded experience

This illustration shows two distinct copilot user experiences

Note

Business Chat (BizChat) is the full featured and secure chat experience available to Microsoft 365 Copilot. BizChat is available on the web via the Microsoft 365 App, Teams, and Outlook.​

To build in-context experiences, you can use plugins and declarative agents. In-context experiences bring additional information to the chat experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot, allowing it to reason over and provide responses in the context of the conversation. This also enables Microsoft 365 Copilot to interact with external systems. ​

To build an immersive experience, you use declarative agents. When a user activates a Copilot agent with an immersive experience, the conversation is a 1:1 interaction with the agent, tailored to its capabilities and scope.

Next step

Learn more about the two main paths for AI-driven business transformation: extending Microsoft 365 Copilot and building custom AI solutions from the ground up.

Frequently asked questions

If you're ready to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot, learn more about your extensibility options.

Choose your Copilot extensibility path