Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility overview
Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-powered productivity tool that keeps users in the flow of their work across Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook, Teams, and Word, grounded in data from Microsoft Graph.
It offers knowledge, such as emails, chats, and documents that users have permission to access, and skills, such as understanding, summarizing, predicting, recalling, translating, and generating content.
As a developer, you can customize and extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with additional knowledge and skills by building agents. With agents, you can bring custom knowledge, skills, and process automation into Microsoft 365 Copilot, tailoring it to suit the unique needs of your customers.
What are agents?
Agents are scoped versions of Microsoft 365 Copilot that act as AI assistants to automate and run business processes. Agents enable customers to bring custom knowledge, skills, and process automation into Microsoft 365 Copilot for their specific needs. You can optimize agents for specific tasks, such as retrieving information, summarizing data, and taking actions like sending emails or updating records.
Agents include the following components:
- Custom knowledge (via instructions and grounding data)
- Custom skills (including actions, triggers, and workflows)
- Autonomy (including planning, learning, and escalation)
Agents can be customized to meet specific business needs, such as human resources, analytics, project management, legal, image creation, and more. The following practical examples illustrate the types of agents you can develop for your organization.
Project management agent for engineering team
If your engineering team relies on project management software, you can build an agent that enables users to monitor open tickets. For example, a user can request information about all issues assigned to them, and your agent can seamlessly retrieve and present this data from your API.
Product inventory agent for e-commerce
If your business operates in the realm of commerce, you can build an internal inventory agent by connecting it to your product database. For example, a user can ask Microsoft 365 Copilot to verify the availability of specific items, streamlining your internal processes.
Image creation agent for marketing campaign
If you need images for your marketing campaign, you can create an agent that develops marketing assets specifically tailored to your campaign.
Copilot extensibility options
You can build agents by using either a declarative or custom engine approach. This gives you, as a developer, the flexibility to choose how you want to build your agents, while providing the same experience to users.
Declarative agents are a collection of custom knowledge (via instructions and grounding data), and custom skills (including actions, triggers, and workflows) hosted on the Microsoft 365 Copilot orchestrator and foundation models to power a conversational experience. These agents can be integrated within Microsoft 365 and can use Copilot connectors and plugins to light up advanced functionality.
Custom engine agents are developed using custom foundation models and orchestrators and can be tailored to specific enterprise needs with your own stack. These include agents built with Copilot Studio, Teams AI library, or Azure AI. Custom engine agents currently work as standalone Teams apps.
You can add knowledge and skills to agents via Copilot connectors and plugins.
For more information about the two approaches to building agents, see Your agent options for Microsoft 365.
Copilot connectors
Copilot connectors are building blocks that enable you to add custom knowledge and custom skills to agents. You can extend your agents via the following types of Copilot connectors:
- Microsoft Graph connectors
- Power Platform connectors
IT Admins can configure appropriate Copilot connectors in Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Power Platform Admin Center to expand the knowledge available to all users in their tenant, while respecting data access limitations from the knowledge source itself.
Microsoft Graph connectors
Microsoft Graph connectors enable you to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot by integrating external data sources into Microsoft Graph, enhancing Copilot's ability to reason over your enterprise content and provide more comprehensive responses. This integration allows Copilot to access and utilize a broader range of organizational knowledge.
With Microsoft Graph connectors, you can:
- Make the most of your external data by giving Copilot the ability to access and summarize your diverse datasets from different sources, enabling more comprehensive insights.
- Use Copilot as a research aid to find, summarize, and perform Q&A natively by using the dataset of your choice.
- Surface the intelligence of Copilot in Microsoft Search, ContextIQ, and more to enhance the ways your users are already searching for answers.
For more information, see Microsoft Graph connectors overview.
Power Platform connectors
Power Platform connectors are essential components that enable Power Platform applications, such as Power Automate, Power Apps, and Logic Apps, to interact with external services and data sources. They also enhance the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot by enabling it to integrate with a wide range of external services and data sources, perform custom actions, and access a broader range of data types.
Unlike Microsoft Graph connectors, Power Platform connectors provide real-time data retrieval with read/write actions. For example, you can create a connector that allows your users to track an issue in real time and create actions, such as creating a ticket for the tracker.
For more information, see Copilot connectors and actions.
Plugins
Plugins are available as actions for declarative agents to interact with other systems to read or write information in near real-time. Use plugins to:
- Access real-time information such as the latest news coverage for a product launch.
- Retrieve relational data such as reporting on service tickets assigned to a given team member.
- Perform actions across apps such as creating a new task in your organization's work tracking system.
You can create the following types of plugins: