Plan and prepare for Microsoft Copilot Studio in 2025 release wave 1
Important
The 2025 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2025 to September 2025. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Microsoft Copilot Studio.
Overview
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a cloud-based service designed to create AI agents for several applications. It allows you to build standalone agents for customer and employee care scenarios, extend Microsoft 365 Copilot, or develop autonomous agents that use AI and actions to perform sophisticated, long-running operations on behalf of the user.
With Copilot Studio, you can design, test, and publish agents using the comprehensive authoring canvas. You can easily create generative AI-enabled conversations and autonomous agents, 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 describe their agent conversationally and easily add knowledge sources. From there, you can add topics, use actions, add additional data sources, tune its behavior, and then publish the agent to a variety of channels supported by Copilot Studio.
Creating agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot is a native capability of Copilot Studio. In minutes, author an agent, describe how it is used and what capabilities it provides, and publish it to Microsoft Copilot—all within the governance controls of Microsoft 365. Extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with lightweight agents created using the Copilot Studio agent builder, and add fully customized agents created within Microsoft Copilot Studio for greater sophistication.
Microsoft Copilot Studio agents automatically complete tasks autonomously connecting their tenants, enterprise-specific Power Automate Flows, or other actions to the agent. The agent understands the user's request or autonomous trigger, looks through its library of actions, and identifies the ones that can fulfil the request. It then self-assembles and chains them together, and even prompts the user of the agent for any additional information the agent needs to complete the request.
Microsoft Copilot Studio integrates the latest models from OpenAI, bringing the power of these models into fantastic tools to build or extend agents.
Copilot Studio offers extensive governance capabilities, now with end-user activity auditing via Microsoft Purview and Sentinel integration, extended tenant-wide inventory in the Power Platform admin center, and customer managed encryption keys. It also supports the latest managed environment capabilities, such as environment groups and policies.
2025 Release Wave 1 brings:
- Support and integration for custom agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- New capabilities for the Copilot Studio embedded builder in Microsoft Copilot.
- Support for actions.
- Additional enterprise knowledge sources.
- The ability to upgrade a Copilot agent to an independent Copilot Studio custom agent that can access additional capabilities and be published in other channels.
- New conversational channels for custom agents, including WhatsApp and SharePoint.
Investment areas
Copilot and AI innovation
Microsoft Copilot Studio has always been at the forefront of how AI can be leveraged to produce eloquent, appropriate responses to your users' questions and issues. Copilot Studio integrates the latest in generative AI technologies using GPT models to create more conversational copilots.
The generative answers capability in Microsoft Copilot Studio lets you specify existing internal and external sources for copilots to use when answering user questions. The capability uses AI to intelligently create full conversational responses to users queries, without needing to manually create individual topics for every eventuality.
Generative actions dynamically create conversations by letting AI find and connect the appropriate plugins in real-time. Once you configure your copilot with the appropriate plugins, generative AI automatically determines which plugins are relevant, what information they need from the user, and then orchestrates the conversation and execution of the plugins until the user's desired request has been completed.
Copilot configuration
Configuring a copilot involves setting all options and capabilities that allow you to define your target audience. This includes choosing publishing channels, extending existing copilots, managing resource allocation across creators and environments, and setting up system behaviors for analytics, logging, and data retention.
Core authoring
Creating a copilot with Microsoft Copilot Studio is easy to do with the low-code authoring canvas. There are several ways you can manage how topics interact, how you want the conversation to flow, and what it should feel like.
It's easy to test the copilot without having to fully deploy it whenever you make a small change. There are also lesson topics that guide you through topic authoring from simple to complex scenarios as well as default system topics. You can choose what language you want your copilot to use, too. Variables and entities make your copilot more capable of understanding your users, and rich content makes your copilot more relatable and easier to use.
Speech and IVR
Voice interaction is the most natural way for humans to communicate and remains a critical medium in copilot engagements. Copilot Studio allows businesses to easily create copilots that interact naturally with customers via voice by accepting speech and DTMF input from telephony. It provides natural text to speech so end users can hear the response from the copilot.
Copilot Studio provides a no-code to pro-code authoring experience for voice interactions such as barge-in control, single and multi DTMF input, and silence detection. Businesses craft intelligent voice copilots with those capabilities that understand end user's intent and automate transactions.
For scenarios where businesses do not require explicit dialogues, Copilot Studio provides generative AI capabilities to cover the long tail of inquiries that the user may have. Increasing the copilot's coverage and minimizing the operation cost for businesses by minimizing copilot maintenance cost and reducing escalation to human agent.
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 ensures 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 turned on 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
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Microsoft Copilot Studio. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Microsoft Copilot Studio. |
| User community | Engage with Microsoft Copilot Studio experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Microsoft Copilot Studio. |