Copilot Studio Agents Become More Integrated, Proactive Teammates

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Microsoft laid out new Copilot Studio features that empower users to delegate work to digital teammates from within their commonly used apps. It’s also enhancing users’ ability to operate agents persistently and proactively within work they’re already doing.

Newly launched Agent Accounts allow agents to work in Microsoft 365 with their own credentials in the same way a person would. People can now invoke an agent in Teams and Outlook to ask questions, assign work, or contribute updates without a separate agent chat for every task.

These agents can be @mentioned like anyone participating in a process within Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Team members can also delegate tasks within processes to the agent through Teams or email and keep working while the agent continues the task.

Agent accounts also enable agents to work with other agents, apps, and services using their approved credentials and permissions, without relying on any individual user’s credentials. This means work can be attributed to the agents, while process owners retain control. Improved attribution increases observability and traceability so that process owners can clearly understand which actions were taken by agents and which were taken by people.

Agent accounts support administrative controls including the ability to scope access and manage lifecycles for agents.

Continuous Learning

In order to be adaptable to business conditions, business processes need a continuous learning and improvement loop. To make such continuous learning possible, Microsoft is introducing business process memory, which enables agents to carry forward users’ preferences and business-process context into future work. Any unique element of the process that one person raises to the agent becomes a shared resource for other users and agents to benefit from.

Adding business process memory reduces the amount of information that people need to restate when they delegate tasks to their agent. Users and developers guide how retained context informs an agent through instructions, while also deciding which business records and policies are authoritative.

Microsoft said it will soon roll out agent refinements that use an agent’s activity to recommend improvements for a user to evaluate, test, and implement. Recommendations are designed to help users and developers convert stable, repeated steps into workflows and capture reusable approaches as skills.

Microsoft also announced triggers in the GitHub Copilot harness, which will enable any agent built on the harness to maintain an “always-on” state and get to work as soon as the need arises. When configured, an external signal (like an email) will trigger an agent’s action, with no additional prompt required. This will equip these agents to proactively run shared processes.