Plan and prepare for Microsoft Copilot Studio in 2024 release wave 2

Overview

Use Microsoft Copilot Studio to extend Microsoft Copilot to Microsoft 365 and build custom copilots for internal and external scenarios. With Copilot Studio, you can design, test, and publish copilots by using the comprehensive authoring canvas. You can easily create generative AI-enabled conversations, provide greater control to responses for existing copilots, and accelerate productivity with specific automated workflows.

With Microsoft Copilot Studio's first-run experience, you can easily describe your copilot, provide data sources, and instantly create the foundation for a knowledgeable conversational copilot. From there, you can add topics, actions, and extra data sources. You can fine-tune your copilot's behavior and publish it to various channels that Copilot Studio supports. Creating extensions for Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a built-in feature of Copilot Studio. In just minutes, you can author a copilot or an action, describe how to use it and what capabilities it provides, and publish it to Microsoft Copilot—all within the governance controls of Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Copilot Studio AI capabilities automatically complete tasks for your users. As a copilot maker, you simply expose your tenant APIs, enterprise-specific Power Automate flows, or other actions to the copilot. The copilot understands the user's request, searches its library of actions, and identifies the actions that fulfill the request. It assembles and chains these actions together. If the copilot needs more information to complete the request, it prompts the user for that information.

Microsoft Copilot Studio also integrates and works with OpenAI’s Custom GPTs, bringing the power of these models into the tools you use to build or extend copilots. In addition, Microsoft Copilot Studio includes AI Builder models and new prompt and plugin capabilities. With these features, copilot and plugin authors can pull data from external sources by using many Power Platform connectors. This approach allows AI to provide more accurate and context-specific responses. Prompt building lets authors design, create, and test generative AI prompts. Makers can save prompts for reuse, archiving, and future enhancements. Saved prompts support application lifecycle management (ALM) practices for safe deployment and updates. You can invoke prompts in copilots through plugins.

Copilot Studio expands its governance features. It now audits maker activities, manages inventory, and offers more granular controls in the Power Platform admin center. With these features, you have more ways to make sure your organization uses Copilot Studio according to your governance requirements.

Release wave 2 for 2024 brings:

• Native capabilities for extending Microsoft Copilots.
• IVR support with Dynamics Customer Service.
• Generative actions are generally available, with geo-expansions to the UAE and Germany.
• Software lifecycle management capabilities, including topic-level import and export, and role-based access control (RBAC).
• Improvements to governance and administration, including more granular AI management controls, audit logs in Microsoft Purview, and specific controls over transcript viewership.

Updates to Microsoft Copilot Studio 2024 release wave 2

Investment areas

Copilot and AI innovation
Microsoft Copilot Studio leads the way in using AI to create clear and appropriate responses to your users' questions and issues. Copilot Studio combines the latest generative AI technologies with GPT models to build more conversational agents.

The generative answers capability in Microsoft Copilot Studio lets you specify existing internal and external sources that an agent can use to answer a user's questions. This capability uses AI to intelligently create fully conversational responses to your users' queries without requiring you to manually create individual topics for every possibility.

Generative actions dynamically create conversations by using AI to find and connect the right plugins in real time. Makers set up their agent with the right plugins. Then, with generative AI, the system automatically decides which plugins to use, what information it needs from the user, and how to guide the conversation and run the plugins until it completes the request.

Copilot configuration
When you configure an agent, set all the options and capabilities that let you define your target audience. Set these options to choose publishing channels, extend existing copilots, manage resource allocation across creators and environments, and set up system behaviors for analytics, logging, and data retention.

Core authoring
When you create an agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio, you use the low-code authoring canvas. You can choose how topics interact, how the conversation flows, and what the experience feels like.

You can test the agent without deploying it when you make a change. The solution includes lesson topics that guide you through topic authoring from simple to complex scenarios, along with default system topics. You can choose the language for your copilot. Use variables and entities to help your agent understand users better. Add rich content to make your agent more relatable and easier to use.

Service, runtime, and governance
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a high-scale, highly available, secure system that you can use to deliver agents for your employees, other businesses, and your customers. With Copilot Studio, you can build and extend agents, all running within the Copilot Studio service.

You can access Copilot Studio globally and in Government Community Clouds. The service integrates with the Power Platform and Power Platform admin center, which provides a one-stop shop for your organization's governance needs. This integration ensures that enterprises can trust makers to build and deploy agents safely while protecting enterprise data.

Speech and IVR
Voice interaction is the most natural way for humans to communicate and remains a critical medium in copilot engagements. With Copilot Studio, businesses can easily create and customize agents that interact naturally with customers through voice by accepting speech and DTMF input from telephony. It provides natural text-to-speech capabilities so end users can hear the agent's response.

Copilot Studio provides a no-code to pro-code authoring experience for voice interactions, including barge-in control, single and multi-DTMF input, and silence detection. Businesses can craft intelligent voice-responsive agents with capabilities that understand the user's intent and automate transactions.

For scenarios where businesses don't require explicit dialogues, Copilot Studio provides generative AI capabilities to cover the long tail of inquiries that users might have.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Copilot Studio below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Microsoft Copilot Studio