During its AI tour in London this morning, Microsoft announced that all Microsoft 365 Copilot customers will soon be able to create custom co-pilots with agent capabilities. These new agents were launched in private preview earlier this year and will be available in public preview in Microsoft Copilot Studio starting next month.

While Microsoft 365 Copilot already provides intelligent assistance in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, Microsoft Copilot Studio allows organizations to add agents to the Microsoft 365 apps their employees already use. These agents are custom co-pilots created using natural language prompts or a GUI, and they can be configured to automate business processes.

“Think of agents as the new applications of an AI-powered world,” said Jared Spataro, director of marketing, AI at Work at Microsoft. “Each organization will have a constellation of agents, ranging from simple prompt and respond to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate business processes. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents, and they’ll do everything from accelerate lead generation and order processing to automating your supply chain.

With this new paradigm, Copilot is the personal assistant that any employee with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can use, and it will be supported by various agents configured with Copilot connectors to access custom data sources. Organizations will also be able to create triggers to automatically make these agents react to certain events or signals.

Today, the company also announced the addition of 10 Autonomous Agents in Dynamics 365 to help sales, service, finance, and supply chain teams operate more efficiently. One of these agents can optimize supply chains by tracking supplier performance, detecting delays, and more.

“Agents created in Copilot Studio include guardrails and controls established by manufacturer-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions,” Spataro explained. “Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use. »

The public preview of Agents in Copilot Studio will launch at the Microsoft Ignite 2024 conference November 19-22. The conference session catalog is already available and you can view it here.