Understanding Copilot Studio in a nutshell
June 2024
What is the best way to learn about Copilot Studio? If you say, “Read the official documentation”1, then you must work in the sleep industry because it's the perfect way to put people to sleep. It's certainly not the best approach for a beginner learning Copilot Studio. It's not easy to explain to someone what Copilot Studio is, what exactly it does, and why you need it. I usually need what feels like a million words to explain it, but pictures speak louder than words. How true!
So I spent a few nights working on this graphic, which I will now explain piece by piece.
High Level Overview
Hold this picture up to a beginner and watch enthusiastically as they shrug their shoulders and look at you, wondering what exactly you want from this person. Now then, let's explain it to this puzzled person step by step!
Author & extend
Microsoft promotes Copilot Studio as THE tool to extend other Copilots, be it existing and out-of-the-box Copilots (First Party Copilots) or custom Copilots that you create yourself. If you create your own custom Copilot, you can build your own path of bliss (Topics), or have them built for you (Copilot Builder) or simply enrich them smartly with Generative AI features (Answers/Knowledge Source and Actions). There are several sources available to you in the Knowledge Source, including Dataverse (preview) and Fabric (coming soon).
You can use it to make your custom Copilot really smart. If that's not enough, you can use Actions, which have recently come out of the preview phase and are in GA. Here, too, you have many options.
Now you might ask yourself, what is the difference between Knowledge Source and Actions? The difference is quite simple: you program actions so that you get an answer, and you simply add a knowledge source and (hope to) get a good answer automatically.
Interestingly, the Actions for custom Copilots and First Party Copilots differ. First Party Copilots are self-marketed copilots such as Copilot for Sales, for example. First Party Copilots can be extended by Conversationals. Because in First Party Copilots you don't build own topics (why should I pay MORE for something and then build something myself?), but here too, sometimes you don't get the right answer in First Party Copilots that you would like, so you need to configure it. So now you have the option of using Conversationals to make adjustments here. You can also make this type of Copilot smarter with Prompts.
Understand & Ground
Let's start with the simple things. You can set several languages in Copilot Studio. If you live in Europe like me, you're surrounded by languages. There's nothing you can do. So it's good if you can change the language of your Copilot, because language is a gap and a barrier and people don't accept technology if they can't overcome it. It's quite easy to change the language, but it's a bit awkward to translate your topics.
Speaking of awkward, you can change your Large Language Model (LLM). You can actually live quite well with the default setting at the beginning, but if you want to get more out of your Copilot, then you will inevitably have to deal with the topic.
Dynamic Channing in particular is an exciting topic, as this feature allows you to give a wide range of answers from several sources. You want to know when a theme park will open and whether the weather will be good? With the standard setting you get 2 answers from your Copilot, with Dynamic Channing everything is given in one answer. Believe me that looks more “human” to the person who chats with Copilot.
Integrate
The integration story is quickly told. You have the option of calling low-code plugins or HTTP/Connectors or Power Automate (Flows) directly in Copilot Studio without having to jump from the Copilot Studio world into another service. This saves you a bit of time in terms of performance and makes things go a bit faster. Low-code or even pro-code developers can let off steam here.
Govern & secure
What kind of blog post would this be if we didn't touch on the subject of security, at least for 5 seconds? Do you want everyone on the planet to be able to use your Copilot or do you only want to make it accessible to certain user groups? Who is actually allowed to create and/or customize Copilots in Copilot Studio? These topics and more are covered under Security (Ok, that was really 5 seconds!).
Orchestrate
You can publish your Copilot in multiple channels, such as Microsoft Teams, or your website, etc. Check. You can also hand over a slowly angry user to a real agent so that they don't leave the chat. Check. But what's the cherry on the cake is the new Agents concept. For the first time, Copilots run asynchronously over a longer period of time and make decisions more independently than ever before. That's pretty cool, and you should read this article2 for it. This feature is currently in Early Access.
Analyze
At the end of the day, of course, you have to prove how your Copilot performs in everyday life. Copilot Studio provides you with a few useful tools for this. You can use these to check whether someone is leaving the chat, for example, or generally calculate a customer satisfaction score. Not unimportant in the age of Generative AI, whether the answers provided leave satisfied users.
Conclusion
I hope this makes Copilot Studio easier for you to understand. If you want to learn more about, be my guest and watch the following video.
Mahalo for reading!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/blog/copilot-studio/microsoft-copilot-studio-building-copilots-with-agent-capabilities/
Great pictures