Summary

Our goal was to help you evaluate whether a custom engine agent would be a good choice to build an agent in Microsoft 365. We developed some criteria you can use to guide your decision and remove some guesswork from choosing whether to use custom engine agents:

• Scenario
• AI model and orchestrator
• User experience
• Proactive messages

You analyze your requirements against each criteria, which help you evaluate your business process in these ways:

• Help you assess how well a custom engine agent meets your needs.
• Give you an idea about the amount of required effort.

As a result, this analysis gives you a better idea about how closely custom engine agents match your needs.

When we apply these criteria to our fictional healthcare company, we can determine that a custom engine agent is a good fit.

First, we have a scenario to optimize. Second, it requires a domain-specific agent, which we can enhance with a custom model. Finally, the agent needs to be accessible from Microsoft Teams, meeting users where they already are on desktop, web, and mobile.