Building your own Copilot with Copilot Studio

Introduction to the Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio empowers your teams to create agents or bots through a guided, no-code graphical interface. This chapter provides an overview on how to get started with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

• The Vision behind Copilot Studio
• Why build agents?
• Copilot for Microsoft 365
• Copilot Studio licensing
• An introduction to Environments
• Getting started with Copilot Studio
• LAB: Create your first agent

Adding Knowledge Sources to an Agent

To provide your agent with an extensive range of knowledge, you can provide links to external Knowledge Sources. Example Knowledge Sources are public Web Sites, SharePoint, Microsoft Graph, Dataverse and other enterprise data sources. Configuring these Knowledge Sources will maximize the amount of data you agent has access to.

• Overview of Knowledge Sources
• Adding Web Site Knowledge
• Adding Document Knowledge
• Adding Dataverse Knowledge
• Adding Knowledge via Graph Connectors
• Edit Knowledge Sources
• Configuring Generative AI in an agent
• Test Knowledge Sources
• LAB: Adding Knowledge Sources to an agent

Working with Topics

A topic is as a small individual conversation on a specific subject. An agent typically contains several topics, and these can be chained together to provide automated conversations. In this chapter you will learn how to define your own topics using trigger phrases and conversational paths.

• What are Topics?
• Create and edit Topics
• Defining effective Trigger Phrases
• Add Inputs and Outputs to a Topic
• Sending Messages and asking Questions in a Topic
• Branching and Looping
• Working with Variables
• Calling Actions from Topics
• Orchestrate Topics and Actions using Generative AI
• LAB: Working with Topics

Enhancing Agents with Actions

Actions allow you to extend the functionality of an agent so that it can interact with external services. You can use the prebuilt or custom Power Platform connectors as actions or use Power Automate to create an action from scratch.

• Working with Actions
• Calling a Connector Action
• Use and build Power Automate Actions
• Orchestrate Actions using Generative AI
• Configuring Inputs and Outputs for an Action
• Working with Power FX and Adaptive Cards
• Extend existing Microsoft 365 agents with custom Actions and Libraries
• LAB: Enhancing agents with Actions

Enhancing Topics

Entities are informational units that represents a certain type of real-world subjects such as a city, phone number, postal code, city, or a person's name. The knowledge discovered by entities allows the agent to recognize the relevant information from user input and save it for later use. Power FX is a low-code language using which you can write complex logic to work with data and branching in agents.

• Creating and using Entities
• Implementing Slot Filling
• Working with Power FX
• Working with Adaptive Cards
• Add User Authentication
• Make HTTP Requests
• LAB: Enhancing Topics

Building Autonomous Agents

Autonomous agents can automatically respond to signals across your business and initiate tasks. They are configured to automatically react to events or triggers without human input that instead originate from various tools, systems, and databases, or are even scheduled to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. Autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy line of business applications to AI-first business processes.

• Adding Triggers to an agent
• Configure a recurrence trigger
• Configure a business triggers
• LAB: Building an autonomous agent

Publishing and Monitoring an Agent

Once your agent has been developed and tested, you can publish it to engage with your customers on multiple platforms or channels. These include Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, websites, mobile apps, Facebook... Once published, Copilot Studio has a comprehensive set of analytics that show you the key performance indicators for your agent.

• Setup Authentication for your agent
• Customize the look and feel of your agent
• Publish an agent to Microsoft 365
• Publish an agent to external sites
• Analyze agent Usage and Performance
• Analyze Customer Satisfaction
• LAB: Publish an agent