Through my frequent conversations with customers, it’s clear that enterprises are embracing Microsoft 365 Copilot as an AI-powered game-changer for productivity. Now, we are helping organizations achieve even greater business value with the recent introduction of agents in Copilot. This week at Microsoft Ignite, the promise of agents has come to life through compelling examples from our customer and partner ecosystem, which I’m excited to share.
Enterprise customers are developing line-of-business agents to extend skills and knowledge in Copilot for specialized use cases and to scale their teams in unprecedented ways. They’re also adopting powerful third-party agents built by partners who develop software—also known as independent software vendors (ISVs)—and system integrators (SIs), which supercharge employee productivity and accelerate business processes.
I will cover the two ways in which developers can build and integrate agents with Copilot: declarative agents, which are generally available, and custom engine agents, now in private preview. I will also provide resources for developing agents, explain when to develop each type, and showcase how customers and partners are gaining value from this evolution toward agentic AI.
How agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot can meet your organization’s needs
Agents in Copilot are AI assistants with expertise in a specific set of tasks, like running business processes or adding new skills. Agents allow you to enhance Copilot in three ways:
- Focusing Copilot on specific knowledge, such as Microsoft SharePoint files or external content sources
- Adding new skills, such as updating records or creating support tickets
- Executing business processes autonomously
The type of agent you build depends on your organization’s needs.
Declarative agents run on the Copilot engine, with prompts handled by its orchestrator and foundation models. Where custom engine agents run on your own models, declarative agents don’t require your own AI platform or complex technical decisions. These agents also have native access to indexed Microsoft Graph data, like SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive files. If you’ve previously built an API plugin or a Microsoft Teams message extension, you can easily upgrade that to a declarative agent by adding instructions to your manifest.
Custom engine agents, now in private preview, can be built on any orchestrator or large language model (LLM) platform, such as Azure OpenAI Service, and then deployed inside Microsoft 365. Because they’re developed on custom LLMs and orchestrators, they’re designed for more precise needs, industry-specific uses, and advanced scenarios. Custom engine agents also work as standalone Teams apps and are accessible for Microsoft 365 users without a Copilot license, creating broader reach for solutions from ISVs and SIs.
For a deeper dive into your options, check out our guide to agents.
How the Microsoft AI ecosystem is empowering businesses with agents
Throughout Microsoft Ignite, we’ve showcased Microsoft partners and customers that are taking advantage of the opportunity to develop agents in Copilot. More than 100 enterprises, like Dow Chemical and Visa, are transforming business processes and employee productivity with these agents.
- Dow anticipates that Copilot will save them millions of dollars in shipping operations in the first year.
- Institut Curie is using an agent in Copilot to streamline common tasks, allowing researchers to dedicate more time to their core research. By efficiently searching and identifying relevant articles and impactful publications, it significantly reduces the time spent preparing for lab meetings, transforming hours of work into mere minutes.
- At PETRONAS, an agent in Copilot enhances employees’ career development experience by creating individualized learning and action plans in one-tenth of the time.
- Komatsu built an agent in Copilot that delivers tailored guidance on career growth, leadership expectations, and training opportunities, improving employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity by saving approximately 2,000 hours across all users.
- VISA’s integration with Copilot is creating value in customer service by transforming traditional technical document writing to gain approximately 20% efficiency in initial use cases.
We also have over 70 ISVs, including Adobe, SAP, and others, who are building agents to help customers save time, boost productivity, and accelerate their business.
- The Adobe Express agent will empower Microsoft 365 users to create a wide variety of content swiftly and effortlessly—including generating standout images, engaging videos, animations, social media posts, banners, flyers, and more—directly within the Copilot conversational chat interface, seamlessly integrated across Microsoft 365 apps such as Word and PowerPoint.
- The Adobe Marketing agent empowers marketers with campaign planning and measurement tools, workflow optimization, and scaled content generation directly within Microsoft 365 apps and Copilot—meeting marketers where they are and driving impact and efficiency for their brands.
- The Cohere agent for Copilot harnesses Cohere’s advanced language models, multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and grounding technology. The agent provides secure, customizable access to organizational data, allowing enterprise teams to make informed decisions with ease, speed, and security.
- LexisNexis Protégé is a personalized AI-powered assistant that streamlines workflows and enhances productivity for legal and business professionals. It is uniquely tailored to each individual user and securely connected to the digital workflows they operate in—integrated into Microsoft 365 applications and across the LexisNexis ecosystem.
- SAP’s Joule in Copilot helps employees to streamline their workflow by providing unified, two-way access to both Microsoft 365 and SAP business applications, enhancing productivity for users.
- ServiceNow's Now Assist integrates with Copilot to streamline workflows and activate self-service capabilities within Microsoft apps, combining two AI assistants to understand user intent and drive automation and productivity where employees work.
- Workday's agent in Copilot taps into your Workday and Microsoft 365 data to provide performance review assistance for managers, streamline HR tasks, and enhance employee productivity through intelligent suggestions and insights.
We’re committed to building a robust AI ecosystem for enterprises, SIs, and ISVs alike, and these scenarios preview what we’re creating together.
We’re also expanding our catalog of prebuilt Copilot connectors, which link Copilot and agents to additional enterprise data sources, including apps from leading ISVs and SIs. With this enhanced connector catalog, teams can access and use data from across the enterprise within Copilot and agents to drive more meaningful insights and actions for individual tasks and large-scale organizational initiatives.
How to develop and deploy agents in Copilot
I invite enterprises to join our AI ecosystem during this time of extraordinary innovation. You can start by rapidly developing line-of-business agents with the user-friendly interface of Microsoft Copilot Studio. Agents can also be submitted for publishing through Copilot Studio and will be added to an enterprise’s catalog once approved by an admin. Enterprises that want to benefit from the dynamic capabilities of agents developed by ISVs and SIs can discover and download them from AppSource, the Teams store, and the Azure Marketplace.
Alternately, enterprises, ISVs, and SIs can build agents using Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code. This pro-code toolkit offers full customization capabilities and prebuilt templates that are ideal for quick launches and easy debugging and deployment. When building custom engine agents, Teams AI library is a great resource to ensure accessibility for Microsoft 365 users with more natural, intuitive, and specialized user experiences.
ISVs and SIs can publish their agents to the Microsoft commercial marketplace, empowering them to reach millions of users in Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps. Once agents are published, partners can also create transactable software as a service (SaaS) offers to monetize agents and create new revenue streams.
I encourage enterprises, SIs, and ISVs to explore the resources at Microsoft Ignite and throughout this post and join us in this new chapter of AI development. I anticipate highlighting more exciting partner and customer opportunities soon.
Learn more about the next wave of AI in Copilot
For more information about Microsoft Ignite, agents in Copilot, and Microsoft resources, follow the links below.
- For more partner announcements, read the blog on the many exciting updates at Microsoft Ignite.
- Check out these valuable Microsoft Ignite sessions on Copilot and the opportunities available for partners and enterprises: