Join me exploring Microsoft Copilot through each letter of the alphabet. This week, W is for Workflows. 

Agents vs Workflows – what’s the difference?

Open Copilot Studio and you’re given two options sitting side by side: agents, and workflows.

(Oh wait, usual caveats around licencing apply here…you’ll only be able to access Copilot Studio if you have the right licence and access. If not, take it up with your IT admin, not me!)

An agent is something you prompt. You ask it something, it reasons, it responds. It’s dormant until you poke it. 

A workflow doesn’t wait for a prompt from you. It runs on a schedule, or triggered by something happening, without anyone needing to remember to ask it anything.

I ran into this exact wall in my S is for Studio post. I’d built myself a “spot what’s dropping” agent that came back with a pretty useful table of things slipping through the cracks. But it only worked if I remembered to open it and ask. What I actually wanted was that same information, delivered to me, without lifting a finger. That’s not an agent problem. That’s a workflow.

For once, I started stupidly simple

I’ve a bad habit when I’m given a new tool, I skip straight past “simple” and go looking for the complicated version. It rarely ends well.

This time I tried to walk before running. Rather than leap into building, I asked Copilot to suggest a simple workflow that would actually be useful to me, by looking at my recent activity. Copilot came back with an idea based on a conversation we’d had where I’d been moaning about visibility – you can only be prepared for something if you know that it’s coming.  

Copilot suggested a ‘Tomorrow Radar’. A workflow that proactively surfaces what’s coming up, rather than relying on me to go looking for it myself.

Building it – is “low-code” actually true?

Microsoft positions Copilot Studio as a low-code, no-code tool, and for the first stretch of building Tomorrow Radar, that felt like a fair description. Straightforward steps, sensible options, nothing that needed a developer.

I asked Copilot to walk me through the process of building the ‘Tomorrow Radar’ step by step.

In the workflow builder, you start off with what looks like a blank mind map, which you can keep adding and adding ‘blocks’ to. 

Copilot walked me through setting up the trigger to run on a schedule, which was easy enough, similar to setting up the recurrence for an Outlook meeting:  

The next step in the mind map was to add a Copilot prompt. You can literally press the plus button and get a host of ‘action’ options – Copilot was easy to find. 

Copilot also gave me the exact message to include to ‘Configure’ the Copilot step:

The final step in the workflow is to post a message in a Teams chat or channel and Copilot walked me through how to configure that. 

Enter dynamic fields. This is where things quickly started feeling properly techy. The “deep end” of the pool arriving a lot sooner than I expected. 

A dynamic field is an ‘empty space’ you leave for a certain piece of information that the workflow fills in later. Here’s my workflow example:

For this workflow we have now got 3 steps: 

A trigger – the time of day for the workflow to run 

An action – the Copilot prompt looking at all my diary entries for the following day and categorising them 

The output – a Teams chat message to me from ‘Flow bot’ with the result of the Copilot prompt – that’s the part that is dynamic content here. 

Dynamic fields are hiding behind the little lightning bolts in Copilot Studio: 

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not a ‘click this button and be happy to get the end result’ kinda gal. I need to know what it is that I’m doing and why it’s working, or not. This is where it felt like I was getting into ‘code’ disguised by a friendly interface. 

Copilot as the instructor, not just the tool

Thankfully I had Copilot still stepping me through what to click and why, and, crucially, how to troubleshoot when something didn’t behave.

For example, the first version of the message I got from the chat bot was almost complete gobbledygook: 

Eventually (and actually in under an hour) between the two of us, I got to a working version of Tomorrow Radar.

When I tested it (by the way, you have to publish it first to test it running, which seemed totally backward to me) – Copilot Studio showed me all the steps running: 

And I ended up with a Teams chat message from Workflows, categorising all my following day calendar appointments into buckets: 

Voila, Workflow complete. 

Was it actually worth it?

Once Tomorrow Radar was built and running, I found myself questioning whether it was actually worth it.

A quick glance at my own calendar would have told me the same information Tomorrow Radar was now surfacing for me. And yet here I was, with a workflow quietly ticking away, eating up credits, and the environment, to tell me something I could have found out myself in about four seconds.

Just because we can automate something doesn’t mean we always should. I feel the value has to be properly valuable, not just automated for the sake of it. And value is going to take a different shape to different people in different roles and organisations. 

Another lesson: no more skills-gap dead ends

Here’s my main learning from building this workflow. After the success of building Tomorrow Radar, my brain wandered straight to six other, more complicated workflow ideas. Ones that would hook into other tools entirely. ClickUp, for instance.

Old me would have been blocked there. “I want to build a workflow that pulls in ClickUp, but I don’t know how to do that” would have been the end of the idea, permanently, before it even got started. A skills gap used to just be a full stop.

With Copilot literally able to step me through the process, including, crucially, when things went wrong, that full stop isn’t a full stop anymore. When Tomorrow Radar threw out something I wasn’t expecting, I didn’t have to understand what had broken. I just took a screenshot and asked, “how do I fix this part?”

That’s the powerful part. Not that Copilot builds the workflow for you, but that it removes “I don’t know how” as the reason an idea never leaves your head.

TLDR

Copilot Studio splits into agents (things you prompt) and workflows (things that run themselves). I built my first one, Tomorrow Radar, after deliberately asking Copilot to keep it simple – and still hit a techy wall at dynamic fields that only Copilot’s step-by-step troubleshooting got me through. 

Once it was live, I had to be honest with myself about whether it earned its keep, or whether I’d automated something my calendar already told me for free. The real shift isn’t the workflow itself – it’s that a skills gap no longer kills an idea before it starts.

Have you built a Copilot Studio workflow yet? What’s the workflow you’ve been too scared to attempt, purely because you don’t know how yet? Tell me in the comments.