Microsoft's upgraded Copilot Studio is like a LEGO set for building AI agents

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Microsoft is conducting "AI tours" in 60 cities. These one-day events are designed to connect AI-curious business folk with Microsoft engineers and sales teams to help explore what Microsoft is calling the "AI-first company" and its enabling technology, Copilot.

At Microsoft's London stop today, the tech firm announced new features for Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) designed to help companies build and deploy AI agents.

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I really like Microsoft's shorthand for describing AI agents: "Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world." The idea is that you can apply AI specifically to your vertical problems and create automated smart code that can accomplish tasks for you.

The challenge, of course, is that if the AIs are going to be focused on solving your unique business challenges, they have to be tuned to solve those challenges. Rather than deploying a team of engineers to hand code every new AI agent, Microsoft has created Copilot Studio, which can help operational managers build their own solutions.

Profit protection AI agents 

For example, the UK's Pets at Home retailer has used Copilot Studio AI to deploy autonomous agents for profit protection workflows. Profit protection is the current business buzzword for the teams that act to prevent fraud and theft throughout the supply chain.

Pets at Home has more than 450 stores across the UK, so profit protection is a high-profile, mission-critical task within the company.

According to Pets at Home CIO William Hewish, as quoted in Microsoft's announcement, "We're using Al to do the time-consuming work so they can use their resource and expertise to make decisions quickly based on the data available."

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He says, "It's truly helped us empower colleagues through both the level of information at their fingertips, and in time spent on more nuanced and insightful work. The agents solution allows the profit protection team to more effectively assess cases for potential profit loss and dedicate more of their time to skilled analysis, rather than simply information gathering."

How Copilot Studio works 

With Copilot Studio, you're not coding as much as you're configuring. It's on the same level of configuring as setting up an email filter. You assign rules, specify triggers, and describe workflows. You can start with a pre-built agent template and then tweak the template to your company's business operations. You can change behavior, modify data inputs, and specify prompts and vocabulary used in the agent.

It's kind of a LEGO set for building AI apps.

In today's announcement in London, Microsoft is spotlighting four new capabilities for Copilot Studio. They include ten new autonomous agents, which are available for sales, service, finance, and supply chain workflows within Dynamics 365. Think of these agents as pre-built templates that you can tune to meet your business processes and procedures.

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Agents can now be triggered automatically based on certain business signals. They can start tasks without any human input, which can increase efficiency but also makes me worry about robots taking over the world.

Copilot Studio agents can now also do dynamic task planning, which means they can modify and change workflows based on situational awareness. It's another powerful business automation tool that, for some reason, doesn't reduce my concerns about AIs taking over the world.

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Look, having watched a lot of Terminator and then writing about AI for a living is not good for the psyche, okay?

Copilot Studio agents also now have activity tracking, which doesn't sound threatening at all. Actually, this is an important debugging tool because humans can look at detailed logs of an agent's actions to see what it's been up to without adult supervision.

All this intelligence-based automation is inherently worrisome in a science-fiction kind of way. But it's also a powerful business tool that can augment staff activities, speed up responsiveness, and identify concerns much faster than human team members will be able to.

Another AI-first company 

Blue chip management consulting firm McKinsey & Company is transforming itself into an AI-first company, presumably to eat the dog food before taking that strategy on the road to its clients.

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So far, it's working out. The company built a copilot to help teams process new client proposals quickly.

Among the processes it automates, the agent can identify the most appropriate experts and teams to staff client projects. The company says it also provides a "single place where colleagues can ask questions and request follow-ups." It's not clear if those are questions to the AI in the form of a help desk or some sort of intelligent Slack for collaboration, but both seem possible with Copilot Studio.

Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company Rodney Zemmel seems pretty stoked about the possibilities. As quoted in Microsoft's announcement, he said, "We are excited about the power of copilot agents in taking Al transformations to the next level."

AI safety first 

Another important feature of the current Copilot Studio announcement is the ability to add guardrails and controls. According to Microsoft, these are established "by maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions." You can "implement access controls for creating, sharing, and using agents" and "establish policies and information labels to safeguard data and monitor agent usage."

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Microsoft is heavily centered on becoming an AI-focused company. Many of the announcements discussed here provide insights into the technologies that could make that possible. It is encouraging that Microsoft also seems to be including safeguards into its offerings so that, as companies share management reins with AI, the outcomes are more predictably positive and the scary Cyberdyne Systems Terminator-like future stays firmly in the realm of science fiction.

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