Enhancing productivity with Generative AI

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As AI technology advances, it's providing organizations with multiple opportunities to provide more and better ways to enhance productivity and guide employees. One way this is done is with Generative AI. Copilot Studio allows you to leverage Generative answers in multiple ways. Once you are in Copilot studio, generative AI capabilities can be accessed by selecting Generative AI from the Settings menu.

With Copilot studio, you can use Generative AI to do the following:

• Use generative answers as a fallback: Allows you to use generative answers as a fallback if your agent is unable to find a relevant answer to the user’s question.

• Insert generative answers into Topics: Allows you to integrate Generative AI into your topics by using the generative answer node.

• Use Copilot to create agents and topics: Copilot allows you to provide a brief description of the agent or topic that you want to create, and it will build it out for you.

Use generative answers as a fallback

In the past, if an agent were unable to determine a user's intent, it would ask them to rephrase their question. If the agent were unable to identify a topic after two prompts, it would escalate to a live agent.

With generative answers, Microsoft Copilot Studio allows your agent to find and present information from multiple sources, internal or external, without created topics. This allows you to use generative answers as primary information sources or as a fallback source when authored topics can't answer a user's query. As a result, this will dramatically reduce the time it takes to create and deploy a functional agent, removing the need to manually author multiple topics that might not address all customer questions.

Generative answers use knowledge sources as “grounding data”. Grounding data helps to provide more context. For example, when you use an internal data source as a knowledge source, the knowledge source is based on your data, therefore the information presented back to the user will be more relevant than generic information for a public facing site. There are multiple knowledge sources currently available with more being added all the time.

This article helps you get started, using generative answers as a fallback topic, when a user's intent can't be addressed by existing agent topics.

Generative answers can use these sources:

• External resources:

  • Bing Web Search—doesn't require external configuration

  • Bing Custom Search—requires external configuration

• Internal resources:

  • SharePoint (.aspx pages aren't supported)

  • OneDrive

  • Documents uploaded to Dataverse

  • Custom data (internal or external): supply your own source, such as a Power Automate Flow or from Skill.

The Generative AI page in Copilot Studio allows you to tailor the generative capabilities of your agent. It provides multiple ways to take advantage of Generative AI. There are multiple options that you can work with, including:

• Upload a document: Allows you to upload documents that will be used in addition to any websites specified to provide real-time responses to users.

• Websites & SharePoint sources: Allows you to specify the URL of the websites and/or SharePoint sites you want to leverage as a source for providing generative answers.

• Agent content moderation: Allows you to determine how relevant you want the answers that are generated to be.

• Boost conversational coverage with generative answers: Allows you to enable or disable the ability to leverage generative answers in topics.

To learn more about generative answers, see: Generative answers

Content moderation

Content moderation is where you can define the relevancy of the answers that are being generated. You have three options to choose from.

• High (default): Agent generates fewer answers, but the responses will be more relevant.

• Medium: Agent will generate more answers, but the responses might be less relevant.

• Low: Agent will generate the most answers, but responses can have inaccuracies.

To learn more about content moderation, see: Generative answers

Website & SharePoint URLs

To provide your agent with a wider range of knowledge, you can provide URLs to different websites and SharePoint sites. The URL is used to represent the scope of the content that will be used to generate responses. To maximize the amount of data your agent has access to, there are multiple things to consider.

URLs can have up to two levels of depth / sub paths indicated by a forward slash.

The following items, represent examples of valid URLs:

• www.contoso.com

• www.fabrikam.com/engines/rotary

• www.fabrikam.com/engines/rotary/

An example of an invalid URL would be:

• www.fabrikam.com/engines/rotary/dual-shaft

While you're limited to up to two subdomains in the URL that doesn't necessarily mean that you're limited to two subdomains in your results. Any publicly viewable content in the URL you specify (including subdomains under a top-level domain) generates content for your agent. For example, If you were to enter www.fabrikam.com as your URL, data from www.fabrikam.com/engines/rotary, and www.fabrikam.com/engines/rotary/dual-shaft would be looked at to potentially be returned as results.

Another consideration is how to specify the domain. If you enter something like use www.fabrikam.com (the www exists), only content from the www will be returned. Content located on news.fabrikam.com (the www doesn't exist) isn't used, since news is a subdomain under the top-level domain fabrikam.com.

If instead, you were to enter fabrikam.com, then content on www.fabrikam.com and content from news.fabrikam.com is used, since they both sit under the top-level domain fabrikam.com.

Other items to consider include:

• Social network & forum URLs: Your agent might generate nonsensical, irrelevant, or inappropriate answers if you use a forum or social network site as your URL. Therefore, community content on social networks often increases the risk of more answers being rejected.

• Search engine URLs: Don't include URLs of search engines like bing.com, as they don't provide useful responses.

• SharePoint: SharePoint URLs can be added.

  • It’s recommended to omit https:// from the URL. Recognized SharePoint URLs will be from the sharepoint.com domain. SharePoint site URLs can't be more than two levels deep. Content from aspx files on SharePoint won't be used to generate answers.

For more information on URLs, see: Generative answers

Uploading documents

Another option you can use as a data source for generative answers is to upload your own documents for your agent. The documents will be used across your agent; however, you do have the ability to specify any nodes that shouldn’t be used in the uploaded documents.

Once uploaded, when an agent user asks a question, and the agent doesn't have a defined topic to use, the agent generates an answer from your uploaded documents. The agent uses generative AI to answer the user's question and provides an answer in a conversational style. Uploaded documents are stored securely in Dataverse. The number of documents you can upload is only limited by the available file storage for your Dataverse environment, and the maximum size per file is 512 MB.

Image, audio, video, and executable files aren't supported, see: Generative answers for a full list.

Note

Uploaded file content is available to anyone chatting with the agent, regardless of file permissions or access controls. To learn more about uploading documents, see: Generative answers