Plan and prepare for Microsoft Copilot Studio in 2025 release wave 1

Overview

Microsoft Copilot Studio is a cloud-based service that you use to create AI agents for several applications. With Copilot Studio, you can build standalone agents for customer and employee care scenarios, extend Microsoft 365 Copilot, or develop autonomous agents that use AI and actions to perform sophisticated, long-running operations on behalf of the user.

With Copilot Studio, you can design, test, and publish agents by using the comprehensive authoring canvas. You can easily create generative AI-enabled conversations and autonomous agents](/microsoft-copilot-studio/nlu-gpt-overview), give greater control to responses for existing copilots, and accelerate productivity with specific automated workflows.

With Microsoft Copilot Studio's first run experience, you can describe your agent conversationally and easily add knowledge sources. From there, you can add topics, use actions, add extra data sources, tune the agent's behavior, and then publish the agent to a variety of channels supported by Copilot Studio.

Creating agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot is a native capability of Copilot Studio. In minutes, you can author an agent, describe how to use it and what capabilities it provides, and publish it to Microsoft Copilot—all within the governance controls of Microsoft 365. Extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with lightweight agents you create using the Copilot Studio agent builder, and add fully customized agents you create within Microsoft Copilot Studio for greater sophistication.

Microsoft Copilot Studio agents autocompleted tasks on their own by connecting tenants to enterprise-specific Power Automate flows or other actions. The agent understands the user's request or autonomous trigger, searches its library of actions, and finds the actions that fulfill the request. The agent then assembles and chains these actions together. It also prompts the user for any extra information needed to complete the request.

Microsoft Copilot Studio integrates the latest models from OpenAI, bringing the power of these models into great tools to build or extend agents.

Copilot Studio offers extensive governance capabilities, now with end-user activity auditing through Microsoft Purview and Sentinel integration, extended tenant-wide inventory in the Power Platform admin center, and customer-managed encryption keys. It also supports the latest managed environment capabilities, such as environment groups and policies.

2025 release wave 1 brings:

• Support and integration for custom agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Enhanced capabilities for the Copilot Studio embedded builder in Microsoft Copilot.
• Support for actions.
• Additional enterprise knowledge sources.
• The ability to upgrade a Copilot agent to an independent Copilot Studio custom agent that can access extra capabilities and be published in other channels.
• New conversational channels for custom agents, including WhatsApp and SharePoint.

Updates to Microsoft Copilot Studio 2025 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.

Copilot configuration
When you configure an agent, set all the options and capabilities that let you define your target audience. Set these options to choose publishing channels, extend existing copilots, manage resource allocation across creators and environments, and set up system behaviors for analytics, logging, and data retention.

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.

Speech and IVR
Voice interaction is the most natural way for humans to communicate and remains a critical medium in copilot engagements. With Copilot Studio, businesses can easily create and customize agents that interact naturally with customers through voice by accepting speech and DTMF input from telephony. It provides natural text-to-speech capabilities so end users can hear the agent's response.

Copilot Studio provides a no-code to pro-code authoring experience for voice interactions, including barge-in control, single and multi-DTMF input, and silence detection. Businesses can craft intelligent voice-responsive agents with capabilities that understand the user's intent and automate transactions.

For scenarios where businesses don't require explicit dialogues, Copilot Studio provides generative AI capabilities to cover the long tail of inquiries that users might have.

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