The most exciting news of Microsoft’s Ignite Conference in late November 2024 was the focus of Microsoft Copilot on new Agents and Actions. These concepts are easy to confuse, but in this blog, we explain the differences and describe why these concepts are game-changers for productivity.
It will help our understanding to review Microsoft’s Roadmap for Copilot. According to Aaron Bjork, Microsoft Product Manager for Copilot Apps, Copilot is focused on three different phases:
Assistive - Conversational - Automation
Assistive
This was the early days of Copilot (less than a year ago) when the AI showed up where you were already working to make a task easier. It assists inside the particular app that you are using, but it does not typically extend beyond other apps.
Conversational
This is where we are today and where agents start to show up. Conversational uses the power of natural language to extend assistive support beyond an individual document or app. “Copilot, show me all the documents related to the Johnson account.” It will not only return Word docs and Excel spreadsheets but also display related Outlook e-mails.
Automation
This is where Microsoft is headed, and just today, it is beginning to scratch the surface. Agents can take action across different Apps, Platforms, and technologies. Not only can it look up things for you like conversational Copilot can, but it can also interact and perform actions across many different scenarios.
It helps to understand that an Agent plays a specific role for the end user. A Copilot Sales Agent acts as another Salesperson to help on the Sales team. The agent specializes in the sales process and has been trained in all sales-related areas (customers, invoices, shipping, etc.). Besides Sales Agents, there are also Service Agents and Finance Agents, and Microsoft is also working on many more Agent types.
Therefore, an Action is a proactive step that a Copilot Agent can take to help simplify the role to which they are assigned. As Microsoft drives Copilot toward Automation, these actions can extend from one app/database/OS to another.
Let’s explain this difference with an example.
Larry, a salesperson, uses Copilot with CRM. While in Outlook, Copilot detects a customer's email about an order. The Sales Agent pulls relevant details, drafts a reply, schedules a Teams meeting, and synchronizes the tasks across CRM, Outlook, and Teams—seamlessly.
When you dive deeper into Agents, you see where they sit in the technology stack. Here is CoPilot for Sales.
Office apps on top are supported by Microsoft Graph, which provides access to data stored across all the Microsoft 365 services. It is the glue that binds together the various data endpoints of the applications so that it understands documents, emails, chats, and more.
Underneath the Graph are the various Copilot Agents. Remember, there are currently three Agents: Sales, Service, and the newest one, Finance (in Preview). Each Agent knows about its specialty, so for example, Copilot Sales has been trained on and understands Leads, Opportunities, and Sale Stages. Therefore, it can extend into Microsoft Graph and read an email in Outlook that mentions an opportunity.
Below the Agent is where Microsoft Copilot Studio sits. This layer provides extensibility to work with 3rd party connectors to access data sources and integrates with Copilot Studio.
Remember that Copilot studio allows organizations to build, train, and tweak their LLMs and interface Power Platform solutions with Copilot AI. Need a chatbot to interface with the team and pull customer invoices and ship dates? Copilot Studio is the tool for that.
The full stack integration of all these parts makes Copilot Actions work. They can operate across the different levels of Copilot to interface directly with the Office apps, access documents and information stored in Graph, work with the Agents in their specialized areas, and extend to 3rd party solutions and data through Copilot Studio custom interfaces.
Here are some functional actions with Copilot Sales Agent:
Summarize a customer meeting with sales-specific keywords and actions.
Summarize an email thread with sales insights from CRM.
Draft an email reply with sales templates.
Capture a customer contact or lead.
View and update CRM data in the workflow.
Capture customer engagement data.
View sales information during a TEAMS meeting
Create a deal room to collaborate seamlessly on an opportunity.
Create a CRM opportunity from Outlook.
Generate a pre-meeting briefing on the web in Word and share it with your team.
The real power of Copilot comes into play when Agents can start stringing together Actions to maximize productivity. For example, asking Copilot, “Do I have any urgent tasks?” while staring at 300 new emails. Or ask an Agent to take notes during a TEAMS conference call so you can focus on the discussion. Or saving hours of work by asking Copilot to do competitor research. These are just a few of the serious productivity gains that Copilot brings to organizations.
Forrester Research has posted some early metrics concerning Copilot use. They report that organizations that use Copilot have a 282% ROI, see a 6% increase in total revenue due to higher transactional value, and reduce churn rates by 10%. This is due to the use of Copilot Agents and Actions.
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