Plan and prepare for Microsoft Copilot Studio in 2024 release wave 1

Overview

Microsoft Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) extends Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft 365 and builds custom copilots for internal and external scenarios. With Copilot Studio, makers can design, test, and publish copilots by using the comprehensive authoring canvas. Makers can easily create generative AI-enabled conversations, give greater control to responses for existing copilots, and accelerate productivity with specific automated workflows.

Creating extensions for Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a native capability of Copilot Studio. In minutes, a maker can author a topic by using generative AI, describe how the topic is used and what capabilities it provides, and publish it to Microsoft Copilot—all within Microsoft 365 governance controls.

Microsoft Copilot Studio AI capabilities automatically complete tasks for your users. As a copilot maker, you simply expose your tenant APIs, enterprise-specific Power Automate flows, or other actions to the copilot. The copilot understands the user's request, searches its library of actions, and identifies the actions that fulfill the request. It assembles and chains these actions together. If the copilot needs more information to complete the request, it prompts the user for that information.

Microsoft Copilot Studio integrates and works with OpenAI’s Custom GPTs. This integration brings the power of these models into the tools you use to build or extend Copilots. Enterprises can easily import and configure their GPT models from the OpenAI store for their Copilots. The Copilot selects and calls the right models in the correct sequence. It uses the models based on the end user query and orchestrates these models with other Copilot building blocks. Microsoft Copilot Studio also includes AI Builder models and new prompt and plugin capabilities. With these capabilities, copilot and plugin authors can pull data from external sources by using numerous Power Platform connectors. This data access allows for more accurate and context-specific AI responses. Prompt building lets authors design, build, and test generative AI prompts. Makers can save prompts to make reusability, archiving, and future improvements easier. Saved prompts support application lifecycle management (ALM) safe deployment practices and updates. Copilot plugins invoke prompts.

2024 release wave 1 includes:

• Native capabilities for extending Microsoft Copilots
• IVR support with Dynamics Customer Service
• General availability for generative actions and geo-expansions to UAE and Germany
• Software lifecycle management capabilities, including topic-level import and export and role-based access control (RBAC)
• Improvements to governance and administration, including more granular AI management controls, audit logs in Microsoft Purview, and specific controls over transcript viewership

Updates to Microsoft Copilot Studio 2024 release wave 1

Investment areas

Copilot and AI innovation
Microsoft Copilot Studio leads the way in using AI to create clear and appropriate responses to your users' questions and issues. Copilot Studio combines the latest generative AI technologies with GPT models to build more conversational agents.

The generative answers capability in Microsoft Copilot Studio lets you specify existing internal and external sources that an agent can use to answer a user's questions. This capability uses AI to intelligently create fully conversational responses to your users' queries without requiring you to manually create individual topics for every possibility.

Generative actions dynamically create conversations by using AI to find and connect the right plugins in real time. Makers set up their agent with the right plugins. Then, with generative AI, the system automatically decides which plugins to use, what information it needs from the user, and how to guide the conversation and run the plugins until it completes the request.

Core authoring
When you create an agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio, you use the low-code authoring canvas. You can choose how topics interact, how the conversation flows, and what the experience feels like.

You can test the agent without deploying it when you make a change. The solution includes lesson topics that guide you through topic authoring from simple to complex scenarios, along with default system topics. You can choose the language for your copilot. Use variables and entities to help your agent understand users better. Add rich content to make your agent more relatable and easier to use.

Service, runtime, and governance
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a high-scale, highly available, secure system that you can use to deliver agents for your employees, other businesses, and your customers. With Copilot Studio, you can build and extend agents, all running within the Copilot Studio service.

You can access Copilot Studio globally and in Government Community Clouds. The service integrates with the Power Platform and Power Platform admin center, which provides a one-stop shop for your organization's governance needs. This integration ensures that enterprises can trust makers to build and deploy agents safely while protecting enterprise data.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Copilot Studio below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Microsoft Copilot Studio