I'm going to take you through the agent Builder experience which is part of your Microsoft 365 co-pilot license and it allows any user, no skill required, to start building their own agents. Let's just level set on a couple of the concepts here so that you know what we're doing and why we're doing it.

This is co-pilot, Microsoft 365 co-pilot. I'm in the work experience here and this is my starting point for all of my AI experiences. But what if I want to tweak it a bit, customize it a bit, have it work for just a specific business process flow or to automate a specific thing that I do at work? That's where agents come in and what I'm showing you now is sort of the first early release of this. There's plenty more coming. Please subscribe to the channel if you're interested in this kind of thing.

I'm all over it and there's going to be plenty more content coming and I really believe this is a most important part of what we need to learn and understand going into the future of AI at work. Enough of the, let's take a look. I'm starting here in my Biz Chat, business chat experience which

you can access through the microsoft365.com app, which I'm doing here, or from inside Teams. You'll see you've got a couple of options over the side here. One is 'Get co-pilot agents' and one is 'Create an agent.' These two things will lead you to the same place, but one of them is for pre-built

things and one of them is build it yourself. If I click through onto the 'Get co-pilot agents' option, you will land in this page here where you have a bunch of pre-built agents ready to go. You'll see straight away that there's a mixture here of things that are connected to Microsoft

third-party and just general kind of systems. If there's something in here in particular you'd like me to explore further, I'll see if I can get a license. Obviously, you need licenses for all of these things that you're connecting to, but if some of these are your line of business systems, then

I would encourage you to explore them for now. I'm just going to pick something here. There's one called "Ideas" which is something that is just a fairly generic type of agent that I can work with to help me with brainstorming. It doesn't connect to any other sort of licensed service

so we can just choose to add that. You'll go through a similar experience if you choose one of the licensed ones, and now that takes me back to my main B chat experience, and you'll see it's over the side here now at the top. There is already one agent that is always pre-pinned if you

like, the visual creator, which is the one you can use to generate images. I put "career coach" in there earlier. There's "idea coach." If I choose to pin this, it pops up into that other area, and I can choose to unpin it and bring it down there if I decide there's one there that I don't want

anymore. I can simply uninstall it. So this is very easy come easy go type of stuff about the things that I find useful to have uh working with me in my co-pilot. So here's my "idea coach." You'll see that we've got a bunch of suggested prompts that I can start with, so let me just click this

and off we go. Now this one is just designed to give you a very quick start on those types of conversations where you can get real value out of this, though, is creating your own agent and you determine what it is and what it does. So let's take a look at that example here. I'm going

to click on create an agent and this is going to
bring up an experience here where we start in natural
language to describe something if you are familiar
with co-pilot Studio you'll see some things here not
the least of which is the co-pilot Studio at the
Branding at the top here but you'll

see some things here that are very familiar this
is powered by co-pilot Studio it's a lightweight
version of that so co-pilot studio is the place
where you can build out agents to go externally
you've got full sophisticated control over adding
all sorts of knowledge and topics we'll come back

to that a little bit later for now though this
agent Builder is a light version of that this
piece that I'm showing you right now is included
in your Microsoft 365 co-pilot license and it's
designed for everyday business users to create
everyday business agents now don't freak out

that this is going to get out of control we
will come back to the security and governance
at the end but I really want to show you what
we can do with it first so the first thing is
what would you like to make what I'm going to do
first is show you the idea of just the basics of

what it can connect to so let's say we want to
say create an agent to answer questions about HR
policy now this is just the typical starting
point that everyone wants incidentally Microsoft
is actually releasing an employee uh agent so
you won't need to build this particular one

but just sort of to show you a starting point and
then to show you something different that you can
do it so it tells you that it's suggested a name
which seems perfectly reasonable now immediately
as soon as I've done that it's given it a name
so here's my name at the top here and it's also

given me some of these suggested prompts the
next thing let's refine the instructions what
should be emphasized or avoided so we'll just say
please maintain a professional tone professional
domainer there you go you got to love Auto
got to love autofill I've spelled that wrong

but I think it will understand it anyway uh
yes it has okay uh so it should be should be friendly what we'll get to in a moment once
we've answered the questions I do not have
any further refinement is that it's going to say
okay that's finished don't just stop there though

because all that's done so far is just give
you these suggested prompts so the agent at
this point is almost just like the sort of just a
shell of suggested prompts which is a little bit
like what that ideas one or the career coach
one is doing which is fine helps you sort of

start the conversation but we can do better than
that I want you to click on this little configure
Tab and again you'll see some co-pilot Studio
things here so this has brought in a description
we can change the icon we'll come back to that
one in a minute it's got instructions about what

it's doing you can see it's picked up those
things from the conversation we just had but
let's come down here and now we have knowledge so
you can choose to say I want to add a SharePoint
URL or just come in here and browse so if I've
got a nicely curated SharePoint library of Human

Resources documents which is really what you need
here I'm just going to for this example let's choose
the whole Library I'm going to come back and show
you something more specific in a moment we can put
that one in there and then I can also choose
do I want this to be grounded on web content

or not I'm just going to choose not and then
we'll let it go while I keep talking here your Microsoft 365 co-pilot work experience by default
unless your admin has switched this capability
off which they can do is grounded in all of your
documents and also grounded in the web so what

I'm saying now is I'm basically creating an agent
here which is scoped right down I'm saying I want
an agent that is just looking at that particular
folder in SharePoint and nothing else not going to
look at my emails or my uh my teams chats it's not
going to be grounded in the web because I switched

that off so this is one example of something you
might do with it just to create a really refined
scope agent please look at this you can imagine if
you had a folder of documents about a particular
project that a team was working on you could
create an agent that just chats about what's

going on with that project so rather than that
experience sometimes in the Microsoft 365 co-pilot
where you ask questions and you have to make it
find the right thing this gives you that really
grounded landed starting point of a very specific
thing so we're going to just leave that one aside

because I want to show you something that is more
specific and more tailored and I think a little
b it more valuable let's go through this experience
again and create an agent and this time what I'm
going to do is something that is around an offsite
that we've got coming up we've got an end of year

trip that's a conference and a bit of a reward
for our staff and we are going to go to Slovenia
just my favorite place to talk about right now
so it gives us a name now let's say I don't like
the name I want to call it Slovenia uh fabulous
trip guide and then it will change the name did

you notice up there it changed the name now it's
giving us these suggested prompts again but what I'm going to do at this point is give it
a little bit more information so I am actually going to connect this to two specific documents
I'm going to connect it to a policy document which

is all about travel and expense policy and then
I'm going to connect it to another document in a different SharePoint folder that is about things
to do so rather than just going here's one folder like we saw in the previous example this one is
going to be very specific I want you to use these

different things so I'm going to come in here to
start with and put some more instructions in which gives it a bit more information about this is fun
please use emojis you'll see I'm also giving it instructions here that if someone asks about
expenses and policies please get it from that

document I haven't told it which documents yet so
that's so good so far so good again we're going to come into this configure tab and you can see
what's happened I could edit these instructions by the way if anything wasn't quite um fun so I
don't really want it to emphasis emphasize that

it's a fun conference I'm going to say remember
this is a fun conference right I don't want it to kind of shove that front and center all the time
so now what I'm going to do is browse and instead of choosing a whole folder like I did before I'm
going to come in and say for this particular agent

which is just a sort of a moment in time thing
about what we're doing I am going to bring in my most recent version of my travel and expenses
policy and you can see now it's instead of kind of finding that whole folder is just put
that one thing in there and then I can come

back in and browse and add something else so I've
got a conference site here and I've got a PDF with information about things to do actions coming soon
this is something that you will be able to include
in here to say that you wanted to actually do
something for you I'll come back when that's

available but for now you have to go to the full
co-pilot Studio experience right now at the time
of recording you can't actually link up and build
it there and bring it back so just watch this
space there'll be something more coming soon for
now the capability is about bringing the knowledge

and the instructions and the tone and behavior
into the experience I can choose to say do I
want it to have an image generator in there do
we want it to allow people to generate images as
well sure why not let's do that and don't forget I
might want to say do I want it to have web content

so in this case I'm going to say yes CU we're
encouraging people to explore things to do we've
got a document there but I I also want it to be
great grounded in the web so that people can find

other answers the other thing here is that these
startup prompts are all editable so let's say we
have um what Transportation options are available
and I don't want that one in there because it's
actually not going to be relevant uh We've also
not got the schedule prepared yet and we are going

to um maybe change the move that one as well and
then you could add additional ones in there so
brought this right down so that it's just got
these three in there but you can edit and change
that as you like and you can also bring an icon in
here this needs to be PNG format and less than one

Meg so we'll just go in here and click change icon. Incidentally, if you do want to create icons, this is something you can actually do.  You can use the Visual Creator agent within your Microsoft 365 co-pilot and that will use designer behind the scenes to come up with an icon for you. I think I

think this one captures it quite well. Let's grab that one and download that to something quite cute there and save that one. And now let's go ahead and click create. Before I do that, you can actually test it in here as well. So I could say what is the uh travel allowance per day and let's just

see that it's going to actually check the right thing there. It should refer to the Travel Document, so you can work on this and then refine those instructions and refine those prompts if you like. I did give it instructions saying to make sure that if the answer wasn't there that it would

refer to the manager. What is the allowance for a dinner? And so there you go. This time it's actually giving us the answer now. The references will be a little bit clearer when we actually create this thing. So let's go ahead and do that. This takes a minute or so and then what we're going to do

is we're going to find that that experience is inside the Microsoft 365 co-pilot in the same way as we saw earlier when we were choosing from the pre-built agents that you can select from at this stage. This is just my little personal agent but I'll show you in a moment that we can choose

to share it with other people in the organization as well. All right, there we go. So this link only works for you. I can change the share settings here, so if I come in and have a look at that, then I can choose to say this link works for anyone in the organization specifically via a

security group so let's say this is the whole
organization doing this and let's save that so now I could copy that link and make it available
to other people as well let's close that and close it down now here it is on the side let's pin
that to the top and click through and there

is my agent with its little icon and all of the
details so let's click on this prompt and see now I've actually put in here a document that has
a PDF document that has lots of things to do that's the one of the things that we did but
I've also allowed it to be grounded in the web

so you'll see what it's doing here is responding
both ways from the internal walks internal work sources that's hard to say 10 times fast we've
got that in there and you can see there's the reference to that document but it's also bringing
information from the public website so you're

getting a bit of a mix of both can I book premium
economy and that's something that should be in the travel and expenses policy so you'll see straight
away it even knows I'm looking for the travel and expenses policy because that's what I put in the
instructions that it knows that that's what I'm

supposed to find and so there we go it's giving
us that information it's pointing to that policy uh it's giving me all of the details I need to go
in there now I've only given it I've given it the

web I've given it that PDF document and I've
given it this travel and expenses policy this is not connected to the rest of my data it's
not connected to the rest of the Microsoft graph the same way the main copilot is if I come in
and say what is our grievance policy which is

in the HR documents but certainly not in the
travel and expenses policy and actually not part of the scope of this agent it's actually
going to give a generic answer and say please check with the HR department and not be able to
give the answer whereas let's copy this just to

show you the difference and go back to my main
co-pilot experience and ask what's our grievance policy it should be able to find that because this
co-pilot my Microsoft 365 co-pilot is grounded in all the business data let's say now that we've got
some more information about the conference we've

sorted out the accommodation arrangements and I
need to go back and edit this or for any other changes that you wanted to make just to improve
the performance the way that you can get back to this is go back into the create an agent and then
from the top here where it says my co-pilot agent

do a drop-down and view all agents if it's not the
last one that you accessed and you can see I've got a bunch of them in there there's My Slovenia
fabulous trip guide and I can click on edit come

in here back to knowledge and let's browse and
now in the conference documents I also want to add that extra document because I defined the scope of
this one as just those two documents I put in at the start and let's update that because I because
I find this as the just those two documents are

put in the start adding something else into that
SharePoint folder didn't automatically go in there whereas that first one I created that pointed to
a whole SharePoint folder it would still pick up updates to the SharePoint folder so choose the
level of control that you want over those things

confirmation message go to agent and now it
will also be able to answer questions about accommodation so what we've done here is create
an agent that is very narrow in scope connected to specific knowledge and soon we will be able to
use this to create actions Microsoft is thinking

of this as something where every business user
should be able to do this there are policies admin policies where you can switch off this
functionality please don't start with that please let people have a go with this this is the future
of how we're going to work this is all secured and

controlled within your tenant it's not running
away with things it's not leaking data anywhere else in the system the other option you've got for
building agents these ones are at the moment quite basic but once actions come in here there'll be a
little bit more sophistication and capability for

things that you can do but the other thing that's
been announced is this is the main co-pilot studio now this one if you want to do it this way you
do need a separate license for co-pilot Studio but here you've got a lot more functionality
you can start to build out specific topics the

access to actions is completely there there's
a lot more knowledge sources you can work with than just the the SharePoint and toggling on that
website knowledge source and you can build one of these agents with all of that richness involved
and then bring it back inside that Microsoft 365

co-pilot in that same user experience way that
we just saw if you'd like to learn more about how to build in co-pilot Studio check out my
tutorial here let me know what else you'd like to learn about I'm all over this stuff and can't
wait to share more with you thanks for watching

Build Your Own AI Agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Learn how to get started and get the most out of your business applications with practical, easy-to-follow tutorials, and summaries to help you stay up to date with the latest features. You'll find a heap of tutorials here on Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Office applications.

I am an Evangelist and MVP for Microsoft Business Applications, and I love getting people excited about this awesome technology, opening new possibilities, using it to solve business problems, and giving back to this community which has given me so much, learning and sharing together every day. 

Build Your Own AI Agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Build Your Own AI Agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot

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