Join me exploring Microsoft Copilot through each letter of the alphabet. (Well, we’ve got to start somewhere!)

You might have read my previous A-Z blog series on Microsoft Teams. I’m doing it again and this time I’m A-Zing Microsoft Copilot. The features, use-cases, and everything in between. Let’s start with A. 

I thought about making this first blog all about AI, but unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably got that mostly figured out. Instead, let’s talk about Agents.

What on earth is an Agent?

If having a chat with an AI blows your mind, then hold on to your hats when we start getting into the world of agents! To understand them, think of yourself as a Movie Director. (I’ve always wanted to be in the movies…) 

Standard AI is like a very smart encyclopedia; you ask it a question, and it gives you an answer. But an Agent is like an Actor you’ve brought onto your set.

As the Director, you are in total control. You aren’t just “chatting”; you are:

• Casting the Role: You choose an agent because it has a specific set of skills—like a data scientist or a sassy business coach.
• Providing the Script: You give the agent specific information and data to study so they know exactly what the “story” is.
• Giving Direction: You tell them exactly how to behave, what tone to use, and what the final “scene” should look like.

The agent then goes out and performs. It doesn’t just talk; it reasons, plans, and executes based on your vision. You provide the direction; they do the work.

Built-in Copilot Agents

If you have a paid Microsoft Copilot licence, you can access built-in agents right now. M365 Copilot Chat comes with two; Researcher and Analyst.

Researcher: The Ultimate Intern Researcher is designed for the heavy lifting. While standard Copilot is great for a quick summary, Researcher is for “deeper reasoning”. It searches across your internal work data—like emails, chats, and files—and the web to create structured reports with full citations.

Real-world win: I’ve used it to complete new procurement questionnaires based on the answers to previous ones. 

No offence to procurement folks out there but all your questionnaires take ages to complete and they’re all very similar.

Instead of manually trekking through old documents to copy, paste, and tweak answers, I give Researcher some previously completed questionnaires as a reference and tell it: “Use this information to complete the new questionnaire”. Voila! 

Important note: it goes without saying (or maybe it doesn’t yet) that you should always double check anything AI generated. I found I had to explicitly tell Researcher not to guess at answers if it didn’t know. Otherwise I found that with its AI people-pleasing nature, it would make stuff up rather than not provide an answer. 

Analyst: Your Virtual Data Scientist It’s perfect for when you have a messy Excel sheet full of data and no idea where to start.

Real-world win: I’ve only dabbled a little with Analyst so far. Let’s say you’re a marketing or content manager, and you’re tracking metrics on content like newsletter subscribers, video watches and podcast downloads. You likely have a whole portfolio of data to keep track of, and you probably want to report easily on how those numbers are doing. 

Well, you can feed analyst your metrics and it will quickly give you the headline stats on any fluctuations without even having to touch a pivot table. Win win win.

More to Play With

There are other Agents built by Microsoft that you can access and play about with;

I quite like the Prompt Coach for helping me…write better prompts (does what it says on the tin). I’ll tell it the outcome I’m trying to achieve and ask, “How can I write a prompt that will give me this?” and it will give me a detailed prompt I can then use, or the start of a prompt that I can keep refining further with Prompt Coach’s help. 

Creating Your Own

If your org has Copilot Studio, you can even create your own agent! (But that’s for another blog) . This is where you get to be the ultimate Director. You can lock in your preferred tone and personality so that the agent sounds exactly how you want. Want to chat with a grumpy robot or a wisecracking comedian? No problem! 

What’s Next?

There will soon be Agents in Teams Channels too. 

These will look at all the activity in your Teams Channel and summarise it, giving you a status report. It can also answer questions about what’s going on in the channel, so rather than scrolling up and down after a week on holiday, you can just ask the agent and it will tell you:

This is going to be so powerful but does rely on proper use of Microsoft Teams channels; like: 

• Having threaded conversations in a channel (instead of a group chat)
• Keeping relevant documentation stored in the channel 
• Ideally holding Channel meetings with relevant people 

Using a channel like this will allow the channel agent to ingest all of the chat discussion, meeting transcripts and files to get to grips with what’s going on and give you useful updates and info. 

I find that working in a very small team means that we are not as disciplined about channel usage as we might be (everything seems easier in a group chat), but this is encouraging us to use them more. 

That’s a wrap for A is for Agents. Next week we’ll look at B…

How are you using Microsoft Copilot Agents? Let me know in the comments.

Helpful Links:

• Microsoft Copilot Licensing explained
• Microsoft Copilot Studio Licensing explained
• Get started with Researcher in Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Get started with Analyst in Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Get started with Channel Agent for Teams channels