Copilot Studio: How to Build Your Own Custom Copilots with Low-Code Tools

Artificial intelligence (AI) powered assistants are becoming increasingly common in our daily lives. From Siri and Alexa in our homes, to chatbots on websites, these virtual assistants aim to understand our requests and provide helpful information or complete tasks for us. Now, a new tool from Microsoft empowers anyone to create custom AI copilots for business and productivity. 

Introducing Microsoft Copilot Studio – a low-code platform that allows you to build, train and deploy virtual assistants called copilots for your specific needs. With Copilot Studio, subject matter experts can create copilots customized for their organization’s scenarios, without requiring data science expertise. 

But why build a custom copilot in the first place? While general digital assistants can be helpful for basic queries, they lack the specificity that a tailored copilot can provide. A custom copilot designed for your business can understand industry-specific terminology, interact with your systems and data, and provide intelligent recommendations relevant to your users. 

Today we will explore what Copilot Studio is, how you can use it to build your own copilots, and the benefits this can bring to augment human capabilities in an organization. 

What is Copilot Studio? 

Copilot Studio is a low-code platform from Microsoft that empowers anyone to create custom AI-powered copilots for their business needs. It enables subject matter experts with no prior AI experience to build virtual assistants tailored to their organization’s unique requirements. 

At its core, Copilot Studio provides an easy-to-use visual interface to design copilots with custom skills, intents, and responses. It leverages large language models like GPT-3, GPT-4 and GPT-4 to understand natural language requests and generate human-like responses.  

Microsoft brings together its strengths in conversational AI and no-code/low-code development to make copilot creation accessible. 

Key features and capabilities of Copilot Studio include: 

• Visual copilot designer: Create copilots via a drag-and-drop interface without coding. 

• Pre-built skills and templates: Start with templates for common scenarios like customer service and sales. 

• Custom skill creation: Build skills with custom intents and responses for your specific needs. 

• Integration with Microsoft 365 and Teams: Embed copilots into your collaboration platforms. 

• Training capabilities: Train copilots with your organization’s data for greater accuracy. 

• Analytics: Monitor copilot usage and performance to improve over time. 

It’s important to note that Copilot Studio focuses on building copilots, not just chatbots. The difference lies in the intelligence and usefulness of the assistant. Chatbots provide scripted responses, while copilots utilize AI to understand context and provide recommendations to help users accomplish goals. 

Some examples of custom copilots you can create with Copilot Studio include: 

• A customer service copilot who can answer questions about your products/services and pull data from your systems. 

• A sales copilot who understands your offerings and helps guide potential leads through the sales funnel. 

• An IT copilot who can troubleshoot issues, pull up help desk tickets and documentation to assist employees. 

• A research copilot who can synthesize insights from various reports and data sources to highlight key findings. 

The possibilities are endless! Copilot Studio makes it possible for any expert to build an AI assistant tailored to their unique business domain. 

How Does Copilot Studio Work? 

Copilot Studio simplifies the process of creating conversational AI assistants by abstracting away the complex machine learning. But how does it actually work under the hood? 

The platform utilizes natural language processing (NLP) and large language models like GPT-3 and GPT-4 to understand text-based conversations and generate natural responses. 

Here are the key steps to building a custom copilot: 

• Design skills and intents – Subject matter experts can visually map out skills (capabilities) and intents (user goals) for the copilot. This gives the AI an understanding of the types of conversations it needs to support. 
• Define responses – SMEs provide examples of how the copilot should respond for different intents. Copilot Studio offers pre-built responses to choose from. 
• Train the model – The copilot model is trained on your organization’s unique data for more accurate responses. The training suite provides analysis of model performance. 
• Test conversations – Copilots can be tested via chat interfaces and test panels. Debugging tools provide insights to improve the model. 
• Monitor analytics – Usage analytics help track how well the copilot handles queries and where it needs improvement. 
• Integrate – Once finalized, copilots can be embedded into Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, or your own applications using webhooks and APIs. 

As Charles Lamanna, CVP of AI at Microsoft stated: “Copilot Studio lowers barriers for subject matter experts to create AI-powered assistants tailored to their domain.” The no-code experience allows anyone to leverage the power of large language models for conversational AI. 

Now let’s explore how you can start building custom copilots for your organization with Copilot Studio. 

How to Get Started with Copilot Studio 

Ready to create your own AI assistant to boost productivity? Here are the simple steps to get started with Microsoft Copilot Studio: 

Prerequisites 

• Access to Microsoft’s Power Platform (included with Microsoft 365 license) 

Pricing 

• Copilot Studio is currently in private preview. It will be free in preview, with paid tiers later for production use cases. 

Accessing Copilot Studio 

• Copilot Studio can be accessed from the Microsoft 365 admin center during the preview. 

Once you meet the prerequisites, request access to the private preview and you’ll get credentials to access Copilot Studio. 

Steps to Create Your First Copilot 

The visual copilot designer makes it easy to bring your first AI assistant to life in just a few steps: 

• Define your scenario – What is the copilot being used for? Common scenarios include customer service, sales, HR, IT support. Start with the pre-built templates for the scenario you want. 
• Customize skills – Tailor the skills and intents to your needs. For example, for an IT copilot, skills could include troubleshooting, documentation search, ticket management. 
• Build responses – Create responses to address the intents you defined. Utilize the preset responses or craft your own. 
• Train with data – Upload relevant data like support documents, sales materials, FAQs etc. Copilot Studio will analyze the data to train your copilot. 
• Test conversations – Verify how the copilot handles sample queries through test conversations across different intents. The analytics identify gaps. 
• Refine and deploy – Improve the model based on testing insights. When ready, embed your copilot into Teams or your website with the integration tools. 

With these steps, subject matter experts can build capable, customized copilot integrations adapted to their organization’s unique needs, without coding. 

Benefits of Building Custom Copilots 

Conversational AI is transforming how we interface with technology. Building copilots tailored to your business with Copilot Studio offers many benefits: 

• Increased productivity – Copilots act as digital assistants to help employees work faster and focus on higher-value work. 

• Cost savings – Automating routine tasks with copilots can save on labor costs. An Accenture study found $128 billion could be saved with AI assistants. 

• Consistency – Copilots provide standardized, evidence-based answers, unaffected by human emotions or biases. 

• Improved CX – Customers get quick, accurate responses with human-like interactions when chatting with a copilot. 

• New insights – Copilots can synthesize data and reports to uncover new insights humans may miss. 

As Emre Baran, General Manager of Microsoft AI Builders states: “With Copilot Studio, we’re making it easier for every organization to create custom AI copilots that augment human capabilities and lead to better business outcomes.” 

Some examples of custom copilots transforming different functions include: 

• An IT copilot at Dentsu improved technician productivity by 20% with automated ticket classification and triaging. 

• The sales copilot at SoftServe increased lead conversion rate by 10% with personalized sales guidance. 

• PwC’s accounting copilot scans documents and answers advisor questions 2X faster than human assistants. 

The opportunities are endless when you empower your workforce with AI copilots purpose-built for their needs with Copilot Studio! 

Conclusion 

As AI capabilities continue to advance, virtual assistants provide transformative ways to boost productivity and efficiency across every business function. Microsoft Copilot Studio puts the power of creating AI copilots tailored to your needs directly in the hands of subject matter experts. 

With its visual designer and pre-built templates, any expert can build a custom copilot that understands industry terminology, integrates with your systems, and assists employees, customers, and partners like a human teammate. Organizations that embrace copilots created with Copilot Studio will reap the benefits of increased productivity, cost savings, and improved experiences. 

To learn more and get started with building AI assistants that give your workforce superpowers, visit the Copilot Studio page or contact our team at Beyond Intranet. Our experts can advise you on use cases and help you maximize value from AI copilots in your business. The future of work is assisted – let’s build it! 

We hope this post provided a helpful overview of Microsoft Copilot Studio’s capabilities for building AI-powered assistants tailored to your business needs. Contact our team to make copilots a reality for your organization!