What is Copilot Studio?

let's explore what co-pilot studio is and what it does and the thing I want to do first here is to frame it up alongside the other co-pilots because this is where it gets confusing and also where there is some overlap so first up Microsoft co-pilot exists across a lot of different versions there is a version that is a free version which is the one that's actually just called co-pilot this is something that you can access on the web on the mobile in Windows to ask questions to research information to have it create songs images poems

all those kinds of things for you the one that most people think about when they say co-pilot though is this one here which is actually Microsoft 365 co-pilot the one I just showed you is free Microsoft 365 co-pilot comes on top of your Microsoft 365 license this is an additional $30 per user per month and this one is connected to all of your Microsoft graph data at work your emails your chats your documents it exists in teams here so that you can do things like say help me find the latest document on this or give

me an update in this and it also sits inside those Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook Excel PowerPoint and word to help you in your line of work with all of the things you do in those apps and the reason I wanted to take you through this first is because this is where co-pilot Studio comes in this is the piece that allows you to either build your own Standalone co-pilot for internal or external use or to extend that Microsoft 365 co-pilot so that it can reach more systems and do more things let's take a look at

what that actually means so the experience here is that you start off by saying what do I want my co-pilot to do and you have control here you're basically starting from something that has the capability of a large language model similar to chat GPT but it's not like chat GPT in the sense that that's your public facing out on the web connected to everything answering all the questions that first Microsoft co-pilot that I showed you earlier is the Microsoft equivalent of that this is like starting from the ground up and building it yourself for a

particular purpose and you choose what it has access to so it doesn't start with access to everything you give it knowledge in the form of saying point to this public website or these public websites or ingesting documents uploading documents that it then has in its virtual AI brain you can also point it to SharePoint sites or to dataverse for internal use cases where the users are going to authenticate in and you want them to be able to access documents in your SharePoint library or information in dataverse for those kinds of use cases and you can

add a bunch of other thirdparty external data sources in here as well so your starting point here you're building a co-pilot and from the ground up saying here is the knowledge that you have as a co-pilot and then it's using the large language model underneath to answer questions on behalf of the user this is an example of one that I've got that's connected to a publicly available website and it actually is able to connect to that knowledge give a response and it will give you the citations but if you ask it random other questions you've

got an option here where you can say yes allow it to use the general knowledge of the large language model to answer anything else or no tunnel vision this co-pilot is only connected to the knowledge that we give it so you've got control here this is very different from that starting point of co-pilot or chat GPT on the web you decide what knowledge your co-pilot has for its particular use case the other important thing here is that it's not just AI all the time you actually can do what's called conversational orchestration which is about controlling

the flow of the topic in almost any scenario you are going to want certain topics answer answered a certain way you don't want to let generative AI answer everything think about your brand how you might want it to respond to certain questions versus how a large language model might just randomly answer those questions anything that's you know legal or safety or critically important you want to control the flow of that conversation and so with co-pilot Studio it's not just about connecting with AI to those knowledge sources but then you author these topics to say if

someone wants to talk about this thing here is how I would like you to respond including this idea of conditional branching logic and there's a lot of things you can do in here with variables and storing information so that it knows what's going on in the conversation and can come back to it later you can also have your co-pilot take action on behalf of the user by using all of these out ofth thebox Power Platform connectors apis plugins anything that you can connect to you can set this up so that the co-pilot that needs certain

inputs and provides certain outputs so classic example here is using something like a weather connector where you can say what's the weather in and it's looking for a city and it can return that right through the sophisticated scenarios of triggering approval processes or triggering putting data into other systems so anything you can do in power automate your co-pilot can essentially be the trigger point for that to pass information through do a thing and return information back and there's lots of sophisticated Tools in there that allow that co-pilot to take action on behalf of the user

and so back to where we started you can use this to build those Standalone co-pilots from the ground up or you can use it to extend Microsoft 365 co-pilot now the starting point here is different this is not a narrow Focus where you're saying I determine what knowledge you have the Microsoft 365 co-pilot already has all of that knowledge in the mic Microsoft graph all of that stuff about your documents and your emails and your chats so this one is already deeply embedded as your AI assistant at work but what if you want it to

connect to your Erp system or your ticketing system or your something else that's not part of that so this is where you can use co-pilot Studio to extend the skills of that co-pilot to go even further and to be able to do other things other than those standard things that it comes out of the box with typical starting point for building co-pilots most people start by thinking about one of these two scenarios either hey let's build an IT Help Desk system which typically looks like taking those frequently asked questions away about it support services and

perhaps connecting to a ticketing system of some kind Dynamics service now sales for some of those kinds of things and the co-pilot can do that because it can have that knowledge about your frequently ask questions and your it policies and documents and take action to create those tickets and keep the user up to dat the other one is a HR type scenario which is about saying let's point it to a SharePoint site which has all our policy documents and if you don't have the Microsoft 365 co-pilot already connected to everything this is something you can

do as a standalone co-pilot without paying for that license and then deploy that into teams but the real value Here Comes not just from those business to employee scenarios but where you start to think of it as a way that you can use co-pilot to to grow your business so we're moving from the old idea of saying oh it's a retail site and there's a chatbot or an insurance site and a chatbot on the site we've already seen all of those things for years similar concept but we can go so much further now with these

tools of AI and knowledge built in so think about scenarios that might help grow your business in some way can it act as a concierge can it help people find the services make bookings find available appointments suggest best products completely reinvent the way you think about customer self-service in terms of the amount of knowledge that it can have access to you don't have to manually author all those things anymore can you point it at a knowledge base and take that really high volume work away from your call center so this is really starting to revolutionize

how we can think about these things I've got an entire series here on co-pilot Studio Essentials that takes you through the Core Concepts in under 10 minutes if you'd like to keep keep learning I'll see you in the next video