Today we're going to talk about co -pilot agents.
What are they? How do they work? Where can you
find them? And we'll even build some. Co -pilot
just turned one years old and agents are the
future. My name is Shervin Shafi and I'm a co
-pilot principal technical specialist at Microsoft.
Welcome to Collaboration Simplified. Let's look
at Copilot and Agents in a little bit more detail
before we jump into a demo and even build some
ourselves. Copilot really loves to embed itself
into your business process. And the whole idea
is how can we zoom in on a particular business
process and automate it using Copilot and artificial
intelligence. In your company, you probably have
a lot of different lines of business like legal,
marketing, finance, HR, customer service, and
sales. And these different lines of businesses
probably have different workflows that are ripe
for automation using AI. Take IT, for example.
You're probably opening up a help desk ticket
because you have an issue with your computer.
How could you automate that flow? Or in HR. Maybe
you're asking a question from your HR team about
your benefits or your vacation. And so there
is an opportunity there to automate that flow
using AI as well. Now, agents come in a spectrum.
And the spectrum is going from simple on the
left -hand side all the way to more complex and
advanced on the right -hand side. And there are
really three different categories of agents.
Agents that focus on retrieval. And these are
simple agents that are generally available today.
They're working based on grounded data that exists
inside your tenant. They reason over the data.
They summarize it, answer questions. Simple enough,
and we'll look at these ourselves. Then you have
more task -oriented agents. These are basically
taking action based on questions that you ask
them. And they're working on different workflows,
replacing repetitive tasks. I'll give you some
examples. And then on the right hand side, you
have the more advanced autonomous agents, which
are not out yet. But the whole idea is that they
operate independently of human beings. And here
you can actually have more autonomous agents
than there are people inside your company because
they're just running in the background, dynamically
planning, orchestrating other agents and learning
and escalating. Pretty awesome stuff coming in
the next few months, hopefully. Now, let's look
at some examples of this and we'll jump into
a demo very soon. On the right -hand side, on
the simpler side, we have an IT help desk agent
that you can just simply ask it questions and
it can access a knowledge base and provide you
responses. Or maybe you have a project tracker
that basically is able to provide you the status
update. of a certain project based on owners
and action items it's accessing a project plan
or an excel spreadsheet on the back end and then
using biz chat providing you those answers but
on the intermediate side we have this it help
desk where if you have a laptop that needs to
be refreshed it knows that you're able to get
a new laptop because it's time and it gives you
options of the types of laptops that are available
to you. Or maybe on the budget management agent
side, this is an intermediate agent that reviews
outstanding POs and begins some financial planning.
Solid examples, but what about these autonomous
agents? On the right -hand side, we have a lead
generation agent that's automatically running
in the background and identifying and researching
15 new leads. for you to review based on criteria
that you've programmed in the agent. And also
maybe a customer support agent that is basically
identifying new support issues and triaging them
to other agents that are able to autonomously
work on them and come to resolution for you.
Those are examples of different types of agents.
We'll do a demo of some of them soon. And finally,
I'll wrap by saying that there are different
agent tools where you can build them. We have
no code. And on the more advanced side, we have
Pro Code. And so on the simple side, for people
that are not really programmers, myself included,
we can use tools like Agent Builder that exists
inside Teams to develop the simple agents. And
a little bit more complex, you can use tools
like Copilot Studio to create those intermediate
agents. I've actually done a video on how to
use Copilot Studio to connect Copilot to ServiceNow
in the past. And then also, if you want to get
fancy and you're more on the programming side,
on the pro code side, this is the tool that you
need for the autonomous agents. So definitely
skill up on Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio
if you want to build your own autonomous agents.
So with that, let's jump into a demo. All right,
now let's get to the fun stuff. We're going to
build agents and learn this together. So what
you're looking at is my Teams environment. And
on the left rail here, I have Copilot pinned.
So we're inside Copilot. We're basically in the
work tab versus the web tab, right? Because work
allows us to be signed in, have access to all
our documents, our graph API. all the wonderful
Microsoft applications, Teams being one of them.
And the next thing you'll notice is on the right
-hand side over here, there's an arrow. And when
I select that arrow, it opens up this pane where
you'll see Copilot, Visual Creator, Get Copilot
Agents, and also Create Agents. And then also
the chat history where I can click on Show More
to get more information on my previous chats.
we've talked about bookmarking your chats and
scheduling in previous content now the most simple
thing to do is click on get copilot agents what
this does is it opens up the applications on
the left hand side and it takes you to copilot
agents it just kind of fast tracks that for you
and here you'll notice a variety of different
agents you'll see agents that are created by
microsoft And you'll see agents that are created
by other companies, third -party to Microsoft.
And depending on your IT team and what's published
to you, you may see more or less or none of these.
It just depends on your own environment. But
what I'm going to do here, since we clicked on
Get Agents, is I'll just show you two that I
found very interesting. One is this Copilot for
Help Desk, which is basically that example we
saw in the PowerPoint Essentially, you can ask
questions from IT about your computer and so
on. And then there's also this new hire onboarding
one. So let's select the help desk and select
add and click on add again. This basically adds
the agent to my Copilot profile. I'm going to
open it in Copilot. And pre -populated are all
these different prompts that I can just select.
But this one is a good one. Show my device status.
I'll select that. And what is the compliance
status of my devices, right? So let's see what
it comes back with. So it looks like I'm compliant.
Basically, I have two devices with Microsoft.
I have my laptop. And I have this older iPhone
mini, the 12 mini. Don't make fun. It still works
great that I'm using. So obviously, everything
is good on that side. Now I can select on select
view prompts here and I can check other things
like what's the status of a ticket that I have.
The cool thing about this is it goes back to
Microsoft's ticketing platform that the help
desk uses and it'll come back and tell me about
my ticket, my ticket number, status, all that
stuff. I don't have any tickets at this moment
so it basically comes back and it says you don't
have any active support tickets which is good.
So this is an example of an agent that's basically
focusing on your help desk. So instead of wondering
who to call, how to open a ticket, you just go
to co -pilot help desk, this agent that you got,
and then you interact with it in natural language.
When you're done, if you want, you can select
uninstall and get rid of it. Okay, now let's
try getting another agent. So again, on the right
hand side we're going to select get copilot agents
it'll take us to the applications and i want
to try this new hire onboarding one over here
so i'm going to select add and i'm going to select
add again and again this makes the agent available
on my profile i'm going to select open and copilot
and this is interesting so what's happened is
we kind of talked about this before but if you
look on the bottom here We have these four squares.
And if you select on them, plugins basically
are things that you can turn off and on here.
So depending on different plugins that you have,
I don't have many. I just have to add a bunch.
But this one, the new hire, I just added. So
I can unselect it. You can see it says new hire
onboard is off. Or I can select it. and now it's
on i can also turn off web so again just kind
of focusing copilot on the knowledge sources
don't let it go outside if you wanted to focus
on specific content and again because we're focusing
it on graph plus new ohio onboarding let's ask
it a question with this agent on we'll ask it
by the way i'm not a new hire i've been here
about four years but let's ask it Do I have any
new hire training to take? Maybe I missed something
from four years ago. We'll see. Oh, good. So
basically, it's come back and said, looks like
there are no new hire training sessions currently
assigned to you. That's good. Looks like I took
all the courses that I should have. Can you tell
me more about Perks Plus? I don't know if you
guys have heard about this benefit that Microsoft
has provided. It's called Perks Plus. Let's see
what it says about it here. Sure. The program
is designed to support your overall physical
and mental and emotional financial well -being.
What's covered is this. And Microsoft gives you
reimbursement of this amount and so on and so
forth. And then it takes you to... different
locations you can go to get more information
so basically if you have questions your new hire
your onboarding hr benefits this is a good agent
that you can create for your organization so
we looked at two agents right that are pre -canned
essentially onboarding and the help desk now
let's look at a different way and a way where
we can actually build agents ourselves in a simple
no code environment by the way before i do that
let me show you how to get rid of this agent
because this agent if you simply just turn it
off it turns it off but it's going to still be
there right so if you don't want it what you
do is you click on applications on the left hand
side and then you go to manage your apps and
here's all your apps all my apps at least and
when i select the drop down and there's a little
trash icon here On the right -hand side, I can
select or remove it. And that's how you remove
those types of applications versus the other
agent. Now, let's go back to Copilot. And here,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to select on
Create Agent. Now, before we dive into this,
I want to show you that up on top, first of all,
you'll see that This is a sub -component of Copilot
Studio that's been embedded inside Copilot that
you can access from the browser, from inside
Teams. And there's a section here, My Copilot
Agents, that when I select the dropdown, it'll
show you all the agents that I've created in
the past. So if you create an agent here, you
can always go back and select the pencil icon
to edit it so just fyi because that was that's
kind of hard to find if you don't know about
this now going back to creating the agent you
can either one describe the agent right natural
language what do you want the agent's name to
be what do you want it to do but in this example
i'm going to select configure and it's a little
bit more structured right so first what do we
want this to do what i've done in preparation
for this is i had copilot create this little
employee benefits guide it's all fictitious right
and it has information about 401k employee stock
time off sick time random stuff that is just
put in there so it's a it's a word document that
copilot made and then what i did was i uploaded
it to a team that i have a microsoft team that
has channels So what we're going to do is we're
going to call this like new hire agent. And it's
going to answer questions from new hire documentation.
And let's just reuse this. But I will say this
being AI, the more descriptive you are about
what it does, the better. then the more it knows
how to use the information, the data sources
that you've given it. We're being very generic
here just in the interest of time. Now, here's
where kind of like the rubber meets the road,
right? The knowledge portion. Again, the point
of agents is to focus them in on a subset of
information instead of saying, hey, go get the
information from my entire tenant on my organization.
There's just too much information, right? It
can give you the wrong stuff. So what we're going
to do here is, first of all, if you select on
learn more, it'll open up this site here that
tells you kind of how to build this out. But
there is a section here on known limitations.
And I definitely encourage you to kind of read
this because one of the things I noticed is,
for example, from a website perspective, it says
specifying a specific public URL as a knowledge
source isn't supported. It's not supported now.
Will it be supported in the future? Maybe, right?
But it's good to know what the limitations are.
So going back to this, what I'm going to do is
I'm going to, first of all, point out that there's
different document types that you can upload.
PowerPoints, documents, up to 20 different sources.
That's good. Just drop them in at OneDrive somewhere.
Point it to a SharePoint site or browse. I'm
going to click on browse. And here you'll see
some SharePoint libraries that I have access
to, as well as some teams. I can't show you all
of this, but there's different teams that I'm
a part of. But when I select Sherv's team, in
this library, I dropped that new hire file. So
I'm going to select that as the source. And again,
I can have multiple things in there, multiple
documents. But this simple one is in there right
now. i can remove it if i wanted to and so on
right so that's going to be the knowledge source
very simple and here it says actions coming soon
empower your agents with specific tasks and capabilities
so there's more functionality coming to kind
of up level this from where it is and when you
select that it'll just launch copilot studio
which again i've done a more detailed intermediate
agent with service now in a previous video then
you can put in starter prompts like 401k what
is my 401k benefit so you can add a bunch of
starter prompts to get your users going and if
this looks good let's just select create All
right, so the agent was created. We can go to
the agent. We'll just dismiss this, but I wanna
mention that you can also share this, copy this
agent as a link and share it with other people
in your organization. So I'm just gonna X out
of this. It should be done. So here it is. On
the right -hand side here, the new hire agent
we just created, and I'm gonna select it. And
basically, it just has that one question that
I put in there, right? What is my 401k benefit?
I'm gonna ask it. It should reference that document.
and boom this is the information right my 401k
benefit um the company matches contributions
dollar for dollar up to five percent of your
salary and let's cross reference this document
just for our sanity there it is match contributions
up to five percent of your salary um let's ask
you something else how much time off do i get
per year right let's see here so you have a generous
time off policy 15 days and then 10 days of holidays
than a personal sick time okay so let's go back
to our document and time off there's a holidays
it's 10 days of holidays vacation time is 15
and then we have some personal days as well which
i believe it mentioned so let's see here it says
granted three personal days per year let's go
back to this document oh three personal days
per year okay so sorry for not being trusting
i just wanted to make sure this is working and
um it is right so you can be comfortable and
confident that when you create the agent you
point it to a data source you're in the agent
in copilot it's doing its job making it easier
for your end users so This is a very simple way
of creating these agents and kind of going back
to the PowerPoint that I shared before This is
kind of more on the on this retrieval on this
simple site, right? We're basically using this
section Which is the agent builder no code that's
what we're doing and Previously I've done a session
where I use copilot studio and I created a connector.
I'll show you real quick what that looks like,
just so that you know, and if you're interested,
you can go in there. But the autonomous isn't
out yet. That's coming in the future. Okay, so
copilotstudio .microsoft .com is where you need
to go. We'll give this a second to launch. So
this is basically that intermediate level, and
maybe you can also use it for the autonomous
side, right, depending on your autonomous agents.
This is Copilot Studio and essentially what you're
going to do is you can click on Create or Agents
on the left -hand side here. And if you select
Agents, then you can go to Copilot for Microsoft
365. This is where you would start basically
from inside Teams. You're interacting from inside
Teams. That's what Copilot Studio is for M365.
And previously when I did one, I did a connector
using Actions. when you select connector we have
so many connectors that this little dot which
is the scroll wheel section is just tiny right
there's like thousands and thousands of these
connectors two different companies right from
google to salesforce to service now so the other
day i was doing something with google there are
the different google connectors there's the one
that i did for service now It's over here and
you basically select it and you go through the
steps to create this connector to another data
source. Thanks so much for watching. If you did
like this video, make sure you give it a thumbs
up and consider subscribing. Catch you on the
next one.