Whether you’re a sales manager, writer, developer, or project manager, Microsoft 365 Copilot is built to help you get more done. In just a few years, generative AI capabilities have evolved rapidly to help organizations solve problems and work faster, including a recent addition to Copilot capabilities––agents.
Copilot is already an essential productivity tool transforming business processes—and now you can further enhance your business transformation by creating and training agents on your data. These agents can respond to queries, surface outstanding invoices, send payment reminders, analyze data with Python, and more––leading to faster problem-solving and improved return on investment (ROI).
Additionally, on January 15, we launched Copilot Chat—an offering that integrates pay-as-you-go agents with our existing free and secure chat. This makes it easy to access agent-powered AI directly in the chat, streamlining your workflows.
Designed to extend and enhance Copilot capabilities, agents are AI assistants built on large language models (LLMs) trained on a specific set of tasks that integrate additional knowledge, data sources, and applications. Businesses can develop their own agents or adopt third-party agents built for specialized use cases. (For more information on building your own agents, visit our agent starter kit.)
As the General Manager for Enterprise Commercial Partner Strategy and Marketing, my days are filled with tasks that require alignment with Microsoft innovations and sales and marketing goals—a balancing act that is made significantly easier with the help of Copilot. To keep up with the fast pace of AI innovation, I use Copilot to streamline my days, from summarizing insights and actions extracted from emails, chats, and meetings to quickly digesting white papers and customer research.
To further take advantage of Copilot, I recently created two agents that have become indispensable to my daily schedule: first, an “Executive Meeting Prep Reminder” agent that helps me prepare for meetings by scheduling key alerts and reminders; and second, a “Speech Coach” that helps me, as a non-native English speaker, refine and fact-check my presentations. Using Copilot and agents has empowered me to concentrate on strategic leadership and spend more valuable time developing and coaching my team—resulting in impactful results.
Recent research reflects my experience. Forrester’s report, “New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft 365 Copilot for SMB,”1 projects that businesses can experience an ROI ranging from 132% to 353% in just three years—with AI positively impacting time to market, productivity, operational costs, and employee satisfaction. Agents in particular present a unique revenue opportunity for partners. Not only can agents extend partners’ own Copilot capabilities, but partners can also become experts on extensibility and expand their monetization opportunities by positioning themselves as AI advisors offering extensibility services.
Continue reading to find out how agents can deliver substantial returns for your organization.
Update your skillset to help land agent opportunities
The table stakes are clear: to fully realize the potential of agents, organizations should develop a robust set of skills that go beyond traditional technical proficiencies in AI and machine learning (ML). While proficiency in AI and ML is foundational for using agents, partners will need to expand their knowledge base and approach agent skilling as a phased, holistic process to fully understand and take advantage of agentic AI.
Agent skilling starts with understanding the fundamentals of agents and why they matter—for example, you can first use prebuilt agents—and expanding to customizing and building your own agents based on your organization’s unique needs and use cases. Doing this successfully means building skills in business process analysis and optimization; extensibility; security and compliance; and new offering development.
Building these capabilities isn’t just about preparing to support customers—it’s also about leading by example. Partners who approach Copilot as Customer Zero by adopting and growing their own Copilot capabilities before going to market will signal to customers that they’re not merely selling a solution—they truly believe in it, too.
These updated skills will help partners:
- Analyze and optimize business processes internally and for customers—Identify inefficiencies, develop a deep understanding of their customers’ pain points and needs, implement solutions that optimize these inefficiencies, and maximize the benefits of agent technology.
- For example, you can use prebuilt agents or customize your own agents to automate mundane, time-intensive tasks like data entry and report generation, analyze huge amounts of data quickly and accurately, and even manage scheduling so that users can focus on solving more meaningful challenges in their workdays.
- Extend capabilities—Extend and customize agents to meet specific business needs, signaling to customers that their unique needs are being understood and that you are the partner to help them develop solutions.
- Boost security and compliance—Maintain data integrity and protect sensitive information while deploying agents.
- For example, Microsoft has developed several agents for the Microsoft end-to-end security platform. The agents perform actions such as triaging phishing attempts to detect real cyberthreats, monitoring vulnerabilities and prioritizing remediation tasks like patches, and curating threat intelligence based on real-time information.
- Develop new offerings—Drive potential new revenue streams and enhance market leadership.
Copilot agents span a spectrum from simple tasks to more advanced capabilities. Some use cases include:
Eric Gourmelen, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Arrow Electronics, a 2023 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award winner, says, "At Arrow, we deeply understand the transformative impact that AI and AI agents can create... ArrowSphere, our cloud management platform, incorporates Microsoft Azure OpenAI through the ArrowSphere Assistant. We know that skills are essential to unlocking the vast opportunity of AI agents, which is why we launched our AI Accelerator Program at Microsoft Ignite 2024. Included is our AI Academy, which offers extensive training and resources that enable our partners to build new capabilities to unlock new opportunities and drive innovation in the AI landscape."
Be Customer Zero to drive success with customers
The agent opportunity is undeniable, and using the Customer Zero approach to deepen your knowledge of Copilot and agentic AI is an important sales strategy. Developing these skills can help organizations position themselves as trusted market leaders to potential and current customers and may lead to increased revenue opportunities along the sales spectrum. As you build your knowledge of Copilot and develop new use cases, there’s no shortage of growth opportunities for your organization.
Partner opportunities include:
- AI advisory—Help customers understand their business needs and build AI transformation strategies.
- Deployment preparation—Assess customer technical readiness and address data governance posture.
- Third-party agent creation—Create agents to sell on the marketplace as an additional income stream and a means to get potential customers in your pipeline by proving your agentic capabilities.
- Extensibility—Extend and customize agents to meet your customers’ specific business needs.
- Reselling—Facilitate sales on enterprise agreements (EA) through licensing solution providers and resells through Cloud Solution Providers (CSP).
- Adoption and change management—Coordinate change management programs to help customers transition their processes, adapt behaviors, and prepare for proficient Copilot use.
- Data and records management—Help customers develop strong information management practices such as data classification, retention policies, and lifecycle governance to maximize Copilot’s effectiveness and deliver accurate, secure, compliant outputs.
Customers will be more willing to engage with organizations if there is an understanding of not only their unique business needs but also specifically how Copilot and agents can help improve their work and result in tangible ROI.
Skilling opportunities to level up your agent capabilities
To help develop these next-level skills, we’ve put together a four-phase process—understand, adopt, extend, and build—to maximize the value of Copilot. Resources include curated training, documentation, videos, and other resources, and you can read more about them on the Copilot learning hub.
Beyond our Copilot learning hub, we offer the following agent and extensibility-specific skilling opportunities, both live and on-demand:
- Microsoft AI Agents Day for Partners: This is a comprehensive virtual training event designed to empower partners and help you learn the importance of agentic AI. Plus, you’ll explore how to bring agents to life across Copilot, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and Azure AI Foundry. Registration is now open for the April event.
- Innovate with Microsoft 365 Copilot and build your own agents: Available on-demand, this virtual workshop teaches you how Copilot provides real-time intelligence assistance so users can enhance their creativity, productivity, and skills.
- Build and extend AI-powered agents with Copilot Studio: In this workshop, available on-demand, you’ll discover how to create advanced agents using generative AI, dialogue creation, plugins, process automation, and analytics with Microsoft AI tools.
- Build and extend your own agents using pro-code capabilities: Also available on-demand, this workshop delves into the advanced aspects of creating and extending agents using professional coding techniques. You will also learn to use pro-code capabilities to build intelligent agents.
As you invest in building your Copilot and agent capabilities, Microsoft is equally committed to advancing agentic AI. We’re dedicated to providing cutting-edge capabilities and skilling to help our partners enhance their business value, while continuously developing our AI-powered offerings. When you’re ready to make your agent skills available to customers, we recommend checking out our campaigns in a box (CiaBs) for marketing and outreach efforts. Campaigns in a box are collections of easy-to-use marketing assets, tools, and branding resources designed to distinguish your business with Microsoft branding, optimize your marketing, and fuel sales—including the Microsoft 365 Copilot ENT campaign to help customers identify opportunities and scenarios to deploy Copilot. You can also download the full Copilot Chat and agent starter kit—built to help you prepare users to create and use agents and Copilot Chat.
Join the conversation and stay up to date on the latest Copilot announcements by following the Copilot blog on the Tech Community.
1 Forrester, sponsored by Microsoft, “New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft 365 Copilot for SMB,” October 2024