Today we're automating a task by building a custom
copilot agent that starts off in Outlook and
moves the activity to SharePoint, Word, and ends
in Teams. It's super powerful and easy to make
and you can follow along step by step. My name
is Shervin Shafi and I'm a Copilot Principal
Engineer at Microsoft. Welcome to Collaboration
Simplified. Let's do a quick demo. Here we're
looking at the email for Albert Einstein. He's
about to send an email off to Arnold asking him
for help for someone that he's trying to hire
on the team. Hey Arnold, do you think we have
anyone that matches this job posting? And this
job posting is actually live on the Microsoft
site. And then he wants me to discuss. When he
sends this off to Arnold, I'm going to switch
over to Arnold's inbox. It comes into Arnold's
inbox without Arnold lifting a finger. This agent
is autonomous. It starts up and it does all the
heavy lifting for Arnold. So Arnold can go work
out while this agent's doing all the work for
him. This is the job posting. It's on the Microsoft
site for a principal. product manager but we're
gonna switch back to albert einstein's inbox
because we're gonna wait for the magic of this
autonomous agent to happen the email from arnold
or more like from his agent says hey albert thanks
for sharing the job posting for the principal
product manager role i've reviewed the description
with our current bench of candidates please find
the attached document that includes a detailed
analysis here's a document but in summary zoe
petroni is the strongest fit with jose gonzalez
as a strong secondary i have also scheduled a
meeting to discuss with you further let's go
ahead and click on this document i've designed
it so that initially it gives an executive summary
it talks about zoe it talks about her experience
and it also talks about jose as a secondary option
as well as other candidates that are not suitable
but they were considered and it also has the
resumes for each of these people so this is kind
of like the whole document the word document
that was sent and you can see that for each person
there is information about the technical ability
leadership culture fit and then an overall fit
for zoe it's excellent for jose it's very good
and then for the other folks like jessica lynn
it's either moderate or low so there's less information
for those but if you wanted to you can always
click on jordan avery's full resume or any one
of them so here's jordan's and you can do it
for the other people as well if we go back here
to the email this is also the follow -up invite
that was sent and the invitation here is a discussion
on the principal product manager role and candidate
recommendation so we're going to go ahead and
accept this this entire workflow of someone asking
for a candidate gets automated with deep analysis
emails word document generation outlook invitation
all of that happens now we're going to dive into
actually how we built this so on the building
side as i mentioned i use microsoft copilot studio
and if you're curious if this is your first time
i've done other videos that kind of steps you
through how to get access, how to log in. First,
I gave this agent a name. I called it the matchmaker
and I also gave it a logo. So all of this, if
you select edit, you can go ahead and make some
changes. So here I can change the name. I can
change the icon. You also have to give it a description.
So I gave it a description here that says, this
is an autonomous agent that receives emails related
to job posting, matches the candidates to the
posting and ranks them. all right the description
is not super important other than when you share
it then people know what this agent does but
it doesn't affect the function of the agent now
one of the more important things is that i actually
selected the model of the agent to be GPT -5
when i select this drop down i have choices of
gpt5 five reasoning that takes more time and
then also some cloud we're using gpt5 now if
we scroll down a little bit the key to making
this an autonomous agent is this trigger component
so here i have a trigger set up for when a new
email arrives version three so really all you
gotta do if this is your first time doing it
you just select add trigger and then you get
all the options of triggers initially you're
looking at the feature section But you want to
go ahead and go to all. And then when you go
to all, instead of 11 triggers, we end up with
869 triggers. You can also search over here.
The one that I use actually is in the feature.
It's easy to find. and it's this one right here
the bulk of this is really in the instructions
which as usual i'll just copy and paste it and
put it in the comment section so you can just
copy and paste it for yourself i'll come back
to it in just one second let's skip it and go
down to knowledge what i've done for this knowledge
section i have this hiring bench folder part
of sharepoint so if i select it there's not much
to it other than the fact that it's just a folder
except that I have given it a description saying
that this folder contains the resumes of all
candidates that are to be hired. So this is helpful
for the agent to know what's in this. If it's
your first time doing it, all you do is if we
go back to overview and we scroll down to knowledge,
you select add knowledge right here. So you select
add knowledge and then you have your choices
of where the agent is getting its knowledge from
public websites, SharePoint and so on. Or you
can even upload files from your OneDrive. So
in this case, what I did was I selected SharePoint
and then I selected browse on the left hand side.
Your folder should show up in here. And for me,
it was my hiring bench that I selected. that
has all the folders that I've dropped in of different
candidates that I've vetted out in the past.
So these are all the folks that you saw before
in that Word document. To kind of back up a second,
I wanted to show you that I do have a SharePoint
site for human resources. And in here, that hiring
bench is basically a folder where I've dropped
everything in. So when I go to Copilot Studio,
it knows because it's my same login and credentials
and what I have access to. So going back to Copilot
Studio. You put your knowledge source in, which
for me was essentially just that entire folder.
And the next thing to do is to fill out the tools
that we're using for this agent. For the tools,
I've opted to use this newer technology that
we have, which is MCP. And I have this Outlook
Mail MCP, Word MCP, and Meeting Management MCP.
So three different tools. Under each of them,
there's a lot of different functions that they
have. And I found... mcp a lot more comfortable
to use than the other connectors that we have
so as an example if you're going to add a tool
initially you just select add tool in normal
fashion you have all you have featured you have
connectors you have all these different things
but you also have mcp so if you select mcp then
you'll see those three different tools that i've
selected just go ahead and find them in here
like there's a microsoft word mcp so find them
and match them to what this agent is using and
just add them to your agent. If I click on one
of them, for example, this Outlook Mail MCP server,
it uses your credentials to connect. You get
this green checkbox. If you scroll down, you'll
see all the different tools that are part of
the MCP server. What makes MCP incredible is
that it's not just able to do one thing, but
it can, this Outlook one, can add attachments.
It can update a draft's recipients. It can create
and send an email. It can do so many things as
part of one MCP connection. So I'm using this
one to draft the email and send it and attach
the Word document. And then I'm using the Word
document one to create the Word document and
use the information from the SharePoint repository.
So you can see all the tools for the Word document
like create a new one. And then I'm also using
this meeting management to set up that calendar
invitation. The one tip here is that as I went
through all the functions, all the tools. Today,
it can create a meeting calendar invite, but
it doesn't provide a Teams meeting link in there.
So you add these three MCP tools. Once you've
done that, if we go back to overview, that's
about it other than the instructions. There's
nothing else that I've done here. There's nothing
I've done in topics, nothing in suggestive prompts,
nothing on agents, the multi -agent orchestration.
What is it that I've done in the instructions?
Instructions. When a new email arrives, determine
if it's related to hiring or job postings if
it is see if there's a job description link in
the email and review the job description in the
link okay so we're kind of setting it up telling
the agent what to do next compare the job description
to the candidates that are on the hiring bench
in the sharepoint site of your knowledges then
using the word mcp tool create a detailed document
that compares each resume in the folder to the
job description and compares them for technical
ability, leadership, culture, fit, and other
factors. You saw those bullets in the word document
because we're telling it, and this is your chance
to modify the instructions. If you're looking
for something else, then put those in there and
also provide an overall rating in terms of the
job fit for each candidate. You can say percentage
we were using words like excellent or moderate
do not use a table but instead write a detailed
paragraph along with bullets for each candidate
for each candidate provide a link to their full
resume that's how the link shows up and at the
top of the document create an executive summary
that you saw highlighting who you recommend and
why you recommend them then Using the Outlook
MCP tool, create a professional email reply to
the sender and let them know that you looked
at the job posting and are attaching a document
with potential candidates. Make sure the email
is formatted in HTML and send it to them as soon
as you've created it. The reason why I said this
is because I noticed during my testing that if
I don't say send it right away, Sometimes the
agent just kind of gets stuck. This also happens
to the meeting invitation, which you'll see in
the next section. Using the meeting management
MCP server tool, find an opening between nine
to five PST in the next seven days. And without
asking for permission, again, just do it. Create
a meeting for 30 minutes and let them know that
I'll update the invite with a Teams meeting link
after they've accepted it. And that's ultimately
all there is to it. AI for automation isn't about
replacing jobs. It's about taking those mundane
things that you do and making it so that it's
done automatically. And then you can go do bigger
and better things. Maybe train yourself on AI
and agents. Or maybe like Arnold, go hit the
gym while the agent is doing all the heavy lifting.
for you thanks again for watching and i'll catch
you on the next one