Introduction

Today, organizations look for more effective ways to deliver customer service solutions to their customers. Customers seek faster and more precise self-service support options, while businesses seek to satisfy their customers with faster, better customer service. The intersection of these needs can be met with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Microsoft Copilot Studio provides businesses with a way to build a library of the most easily answered questions and offer a user experience that helps customers retrieve that information with fast and simple queries by using custom agents. Microsoft Copilot Studio is simple for nontechnical users to write and expand quickly. It's desirable for customers who are accustomed to searching the internet for answers to their questions.

What is an agent?

An agent is an AI-powered assistant that understands its business context, answers questions, and takes action on a user's behalf. Depending on its harness and configuration, an agent can reason over a goal, use knowledge, call tools, follow authored conversation paths, and work with other agents.

Adopting agents into your organization's service structure provides many benefits, including:

• Reducing assisted support inquiries - Customers don't always need to connect with customer service representatives to get answers. Simple or common issues can be resolved by displaying topics, knowledge base articles, or FAQ pages.
• Integrations with other systems - Integrations with customer relationship management systems let organizations include relevant information in conversations. They can also transfer a conversation and its context to a customer service representative when needed.
• Task automation - The agent can start follow-up actions, such as scheduling meetings, assigning cases, sending emails, or sending surveys. With the customer's permission, workflows and tools can automate steps that resolve the issue.
• Generative answers – Generative AI can be used to create more personalized and conversational interactions. Data sources for generative AI include public facing websites, internal SharePoint sites, documents, Azure OpenAI, and more.

Overview of creating agents

Microsoft Copilot Studio empowers your teams to create agents through a guided, no-code graphical interface. This feature allows you to use the benefits of agents without having to rely on data scientists or developers. It helps to address many of the current challenges in building agents. You can eliminate the gap between the subject matter experts and development teams that are building the agents, including the latency between teams that are recognizing an issue and updating the agent to address it. Microsoft Copilot Studio also removes the complexity of exposing teams to the nuances of conversational AI and the need to write complex code.

Using Microsoft Copilot Studio helps your organization to:

• Better empower your teams. Your teams can build agents without needing intermediaries, coding, or AI expertise.
• Reduce costs. You can automate common inquiries, which give agents time to focus on more complex issues.
• Improve customer satisfaction. Customers have access to an all-day, self-help solution to help resolve their issues through comprehensive, personalized agent conversations.

One key advantage of using Microsoft Copilot Studio is its ease of deployment. With just a few clicks, you can sign up, create an agent, and embed it into your organization's website. Microsoft's conversational AI capabilities allow customers to have comprehensive, multi-turn conversations where they're guided to the appropriate solution. By providing a few examples of the topic that you want the agent to handle, you can build the conversation, and your agent is ready to handle customer requests. For example, consider the scenario where your organization has analyzed its incoming support topics and has identified that a large portion of customer issues relates to store hours and shipping issues. In that situation, you could build an agent around those topics, which helps the customer gain answers quickly from the agent without initiating a request to an agent maker.

Agents can converse with your customers and can also be designed to act on their behalf. Agents can be integrated with services and network systems out-of-the-box or through hundreds of Power Platform connectors. For example, if a customer has made a request that the agent isn't equipped for, the agent can escalate the conversation and then pass it and its details to a human representative. This process ensures that the representative has the necessary details and context to avoid needing to recapture information from the customer. Additionally, Microsoft Copilot Studio and Copilot Studio workflows can be orchestrated to run IoT commands to the customer's device, with the customer's permission.

Copilot Studio supports a standard harness authoring experience and a new experience powered by the GitHub Copilot harness. It also supports the Copilot chat harness for extending Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. You compare these harnesses and experiences later in this module.

Use cases for Microsoft Copilot Studio

Some of the ways you might use agents include:

• Sales help and support issues.
• Opening hours and store information.
• Employee health and vacation benefits.
• Public health tracking information.
• Common employee questions for businesses.

You can easily create agents in Copilot Studio without the need for data scientists or developers.

Responsible AI FAQs for the solution

Responsible AI FAQs are part of a broader effort to put Microsoft AI principles into practice. They aim to provide insights into the workings of AI technology, the decisions that can affect its performance and behavior, and the significance of considering the entire system, including the technology, people, and environment. We recommend that you use these FAQs to gain a deeper understanding of specific AI systems and features developed by Microsoft.

To learn about the AI capabilities and impact of specific features of this solution, see Platform Card and Responsible AI FAQs for Copilot Studio.