When we launched Microsoft 365 Copilot in February of 2023, it was a watershed moment in the history of Microsoft. By incorporating next-generation AI into the productivity tools that millions of people depend on every day, a new era of productivity was born.
“Today marks a significant milestone in our journey to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said when he announced the product. “With Copilot, we are bringing the power of next-generation AI to the tools millions of people use every day.”
Fast forward to now and there’s no doubt that Copilot is revolutionizing employee productivity here at Microsoft and elsewhere. It’s also clear that the pace of innovation is only increasing, and AI-powered agents, integrated with Copilot, are poised to help enterprises all over the world fulfill the promise of AI.
Jared Spataro, Microsoft corporate vice president for AI at Work, reflected on this paradigm shift during his keynote address at Microsoft Ignite. “Agents are the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents, ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous.”
Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, the feeling of excitement that we felt that day was palpable.
“It was exciting to hear about the vision for an ‘agentic world,’ where a rich tapestry of AI agents, including personal agents, business process agents, and cross-organizational agents, work together to enhance productivity and collaboration,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal program management lead.
The opportunity that agents present is massive.
“AI powered agents can automate or assist in time consuming tasks like document creation, email or meeting summarization, creating presentations or reports, saving precious time and energy,” Krishnamurthy says. “This will enable our employees to focus on more innovative and engaging work.”
They will become our personal assistants.
“Agents will be able to do things like tell me what time I should be leaving for work based on traffic, helping me navigate which way to go, helping me to find parking, and helping me set up my day so I know what’s most important to work on,” says Amy Rosencranz, a principal program manager also working on agents in Microsoft Digital. “I’ve been excited about those scenarios for a long time, anticipating how AI can seamlessly integrate into our daily lives, and now it’s here.”
In Microsoft Digital, we are embracing our agentic future, where agents will make our employees, as well as the millions of employees who rely on Microsoft 365 globally, more productive every day.
Enabling an agent-powered Microsoft
It’s important to acknowledge that adopting AI in the enterprise is a journey. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve adopted a maturity model for AI deployment in the enterprise. Early phases focus on using Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases enable employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows. Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise deployment phases
Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise deployment phases
Use these principles to guide you as you move through the two phases.
- Foundational capabilities. The first and most important step is to deploy a secure, enterprise-grade AI solution like Copilot for Microsoft 365 that’s grounded in your enterprise data. At Microsoft, we’ve deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to all of the more than 300,000 employees and vendors at the company, providing everyone with an AI-powered assistantto enhance their daily productivity.
- Specialized agents. Employees use low-code solutions like Copilot Studio Agent Builder or ready-made agents in SharePoint to quickly train models and retrieve knowledge for specialized scenarios.
- Knowledge and actions. Powered by Copilot Studio, agents go beyond simple knowledge retrieval, offering next steps and actions that help employees to defragment their day-to-day employee experience. While these agents take a little more time to build, they offer significantly more utility in the enterprise. Copilot Studio provides a robust library of first- and third-party connectors that make it easy to incorporate actions across enterprise platforms.
- Workflow reinvention. Employees manage and train a constellation of agents that perform fully autonomous actions. Note, the ability to create fully autonomous agents is currently in public preview. “The best way to think about these are just as your teammates,” Nadella said when explaining this at Microsoft Ignite.
It’s important to note that these steps can take time.
Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at global enterprise scale and conducting change management practices to help our employees maximize the potential of AI has required patience as we create locally relevant change management campaigns tailored to individual countries, roles, and other factors.
Later phases require more advanced tools, appropriate tenant governance, and collaboration between departments to ensure appropriate and responsible uses of AI. Additionally, our AI Center of Excellence has been instrumental in helping to build an AI-forward culture through training activities, knowledge sharing, and other activities to accelerate our growth as an organization.
Data quality and tenant governance are also important considerations for unlocking the value of agents in your enterprise.
“The better your data, the better your back-end data, the better your data is set up to interact with AI, the better the responses are going to be,” Rosencranz says.
In Microsoft Digital, we’ve adopted standards and policies that help us ensure that our agents are trained on high quality, accurate AI-ready data. AI-ready data for enterprise AI agents is data that’s clean, well-governed, and accessible through scalable pipelines, integrating principles of data standardization, privacy compliance, and federated governance to enable seamless interoperability and actionable insight. With AI-ready data, our data scientists and engineers are better equipped to locate, process, and govern the enterprise data that drives our organization, including the development of agents.
But we’ve also been deliberate in building tools that make it easy to build and deploy agents in the enterprise. In fact, our design-first mindset, facilitated through architectural reviews, is enabling us to design and deploy agentic architectures that are resilient, secure, cost-effective, high-performance, and operationally sound. This structured approach ensures that AI agents deliver transformative value while aligning with organizational goals and maintaining trust.
{Learn how we’re transforming our data culture with AI-ready data.}
{Learn more about how we’re responding to the AI Revolution with an AI Center of Excellence.}
Bringing agents to life at Microsoft
While everyone at Microsoft already has access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, we’ve been cautious in deploying Copilot Studio, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, to all of our employees. Copilot Studio uses the same low-code connector model as the Power Platform to provide over 1,400 first- and third-party services that can power actions. The same principles that we apply to the Power Platform—“employee empowerment with guardrails”—are being used to safely bring agents to life at Microsoft.
“Anyone at Microsoft can build agents to help them through mundane tasks such as a writing assistant to help write better content or to strategize with them on important areas like their career, however these agents are available only to the person who created them,” Krishnamurthy says. “Agents that need to scale enterprise-wide are worked on by the respective engineering teams in collaboration with business partners.”
While the power in these “knowledge-only” or specialized agents is significant, we in Microsoft Digital must balance employee innovation against some of the risks of agentic AI. Security and privacy controls are important for all applications, and even more so for those that incorporate AI.
“Sometimes we mysticize these agents as things that take a lot of effort to build,” Nadella said at Ignite. Our vision is that it should be as simple as creating a Word doc or a PowerPoint slide.”
Additionally, understanding and incorporating our responsible AI principles in all aspects of the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is critical.
“A robust governance process and controls should be adhered to when building these AI agents through the entire SDL, starting with designing, building, deploying and monitoring agents after they’re deployed,” Krishnamurthy says.
Some practices we’re using within Microsoft Digital to keep our employees safe include:
- Security. We have established standards for data classification, policies on handling confidential information, and other security measures to protect data from unauthorized access, misuse, and disclosures. Microsoft Purview provides these foundational capabilities, including data labeling, rights management, and data loss prevention at Microsoft.
- Privacy. At Microsoft, we have established privacy compliance measures to ensure that personal data is protected. Includes adhering to regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. We also conduct regular privacy assessments for all applications, especially AI-powered agents.
- Regulatory. It’s important to conduct regulatory compliance assessments to ensure that agents and extensions are meeting legal standards. Our legal and compliance teams are carefully monitoring AI regulations like NY 144 and the EU AI Act. Understanding and incorporating applicable guidelines, regulations, and laws into assessments is critical.
As Peter Parker famously learned, “with great power comes great responsibility.” The same holds true with agents in the enterprise. While agents are an incredibly powerful tool that nearly anyone can take advantage of to improve their productivity, being mindful of security, privacy, and regulatory issues is essential to the responsible deployment of agentic AI in the enterprise.
{Find out how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.}
{Learn how citizen developers at Microsoft are empowered through good governance with the Power Platform.}
Enabling employee self-service
In Microsoft Digital, we’re building AI-powered agents to support common employee scenarios like IT support and HR queries. The employee self-service agent seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 Copilot and helps to defragment the employee experience by providing a single place for employees to seek help with their most common pain points. With Copilot Studio, this agentic experience helps employees to quickly retrieve relevant information and then resolve their issues while also enabling them to act, such as by opening a support ticket or submitting a request for time off.
Other capabilities include:
- An out-of-the-box experience that facilitates a no-configuration, focused employee self-service lens for optimized responses to common HR and IT questions.
- The minimum configuration delivers answers to employees via official content sources and company-crafted answers where necessary, lowering search time and frustration.
- Additional configuration reduces cost and accelerates time to value for HR functions and IT workflows.
Employee self-service agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Employee-self service is being used by some partners and customers in a private preview and will be available globally to all Microsoft customers soon.
{Learn how we’re building employee self-service agents for IT and HR.}
The future of IT
While we’re at the very beginning of this agentic journey at Microsoft, the pace of change has been and will continue to be incredibly swift, as new capabilities emerge and autonomous agents become more common. In Microsoft Digital, we see a world where agentic AI will unlock productivity and creativity, empowering our employees to train their own agentic teams that handle routine day-to-day operational tasks so they can focus on the higher value work only humans can do. Some ways we’re exploring applying agents within Microsoft Digital include:
- Autonomous agents that can detect, report, remediate, and monitor network security and connectivity issues.
- Autonomous agents that streamline and simplify business and operational processes, enabling our employees to focus on the higher value work that only humans can do.
- Autonomous agents that anticipate your needs during travel, clearing your calendar, reconciling schedule conflicts, and even helping with things like reserving a car or mitigating flight delays.
- Autonomous agents that help our global workplace services team to manage their facilities more effectively, reducing carbon emissions while maximizing workplace occupancy.
- Autonomous agents that anticipate device issues, apply patches, continuously monitor device health and security, and keep our infrastructure and devices secure and reliable.
While the advent of generative AI in the enterprise has been a boon to employees and has given organizations like Microsoft a competitive advantage, fully autonomous agents, powered by Copilot Studio, will give our employees an incredible advantage in a very competitive global marketplace for products, ideas, and solutions.
“We are so at the tip of the iceberg, and the pace at which the product is developing is unlike anything I’ve seen in my tenure at Microsoft, and I’ve been here a while,” Rosencranz says. “Agents are already so powerful, but they’re only going to get more powerful. More “wow” moments are coming.”
We invite you to seize this generational opportunity with agents to provide more “wow” moments for your own employees.
Here are principles to think about as you consider experimenting with agents at your company:
- Agents are the next wave of AI innovation, enabling your employees to retrieve information, act, or even fully automate business processes and operations.
- While agents are powerful and simple to create, be mindful of security, privacy, responsible AI, and compliance requirements to ensure that your agents aren’t creating unnecessary business risks.
- There are several ways to build no-code and low-code agents for personal or enterprise-wide use, including Agent Builder in SharePoint, creating agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, and using Copilot Studio.
- AI-ready data is essential to unlock the power of agents in the enterprise. Like other AI systems, the responses and actions of your agents are only as good as the data they were trained on.
