Creating Custom Agents in Microsoft Copilot 🤖

All.

I'm going to give you a high level overview of Microsoft Copilot and how you can create your own custom agent in here.

So if you're familiar with chatgpts and custom GPTs more specifically, it's very, very similar.

So within Copilot, if you open up the navigation menu, you'll be able to see that you have agents that have already been provisioned to you by your admins.

So Microsoft already has some like standard agents that you can utilize, including researcher analysts.

If you look at check out all agents, there's some pretty decent ones already created here for you.

So you can see you have analysts, you have ones that'll help you plan your day.

I created this custom one just here and here's another custom one I think one that can help, one that can really help, that is already has access to all the help docs and information about how you can automate things with Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Studio workflows, Power Automate, those things.

You can find that in AI Learning Advisor.

I'm going to be the first to tell you that I am not an expert in Copilot, but the way that I learned about it and learned how it differed from ChatGPT, from Claude, from Projects, from Custom GPTs was by engaging with this AI learning advisor.

So here's an example of that conversation that I had with it earlier today.

So I basically told it what I was trying to do, which is try to help someone that I was working with figure out deal, how to manage triage their emails and whether we would be using Copilot to do that and was able to go through and search Microsoft documentation and come back and tell me, okay, for an executive assistant you'd probably be using Copilot.

For some things we're going to be using Outlook rules, categories and quick steps and maybe a few targeted Power Automate flows which are more advanced workflows that you can create and it explains why.

So if you're trying to figure out what you can possibly do with copilot, I think this is a good resource.

Now let's get into creating agents because you're going to find that this interface is actually very similar to, you know, creating a project in Claude or creating a project in gbt.

you land here and you can message the agent builder or you can skip to configure.

So if I go to skip to configure, you'll have nice little modal and then the ability to message the agent builder here and also see instructions.

So these are the system instructions, any knowledge based files that you've added or want to add to the project, any tooling, what is it going to have access to by default?

Cloud files, Outlook teams and then anything that you have provisioned to you by the organization.

As far as connectors are concerned, you'll be able to find them here.

This is off by default.

And again your admin is going to have to give these connectors, turn them on for you in order for you to access them.

But what this does is it allows you to pull information from outside of Microsoft, other tools, let's say meeting note taker tools or project management tools outside of Microsoft.

You can pull that information in here if the admin allows you to do that web search and any additional attachments that you can see.

The suggested prompts are very similar.

So if you were to create a custom GPT, just conversation starters essentially.

So I think one of the easiest ways to start, because AI has gotten so good at creating prompts for you, at creating system instructions for you that we no longer need to do that ourselves.

Our job is just to give it the context that it needs, the outcomes that we want and then the resources that it's going to have access to or will have access to to do with job.

So in this example let's say we want to create an event planner agent.

And I've already done that here, but I want to show you how this works just through natural language.

So I'm going to use voice dictation for a second.

Can you help me create an event planning coordinator?

The purpose of this coordinator is to take information that I have about different events, meetings that we have internally to help us figure out who we're targeting, what the rollout plan is, what the marketing plan is.

I want it all organized into a folder.

Okay?

This is obviously very vague and very poor context.

You can give more.

You can even just drop a transcript in here and tell it to organize this information for you into a repeatable agent.

So I'm just gonna see what it does with.

Okay, So this actually took less than a minute to create.

But you can see here that it drafted the event planning coordinator.

What it does is turn scattered event information into organized actionable plans.

And these are all the things that'll do.

Now If I click on Preview like it says, I can see what this is going to look like for someone who's going to have access to this agent eventually.

So these are conversation starters but on the back end you can see under configure that that agent builder has created a description for this agent.

You just want to confirm that this is accurate and this is what you want it to do.

Same thing with the instructions.

These instructions are pretty good because it's already breaking it down by purpose so the agent understands what its role is, what the rules are, what information it has access to.

So you have general guidelines skills.

Okay, there's a standard output structure, you have step by step instructions, output standards, error handling limitations and then any follow up in case they doesn't have enough information to do its job.

And then you can add an additional knowledge file.

So if you have an output format that you would like to include here, Google, maybe it's a document that you already have saved somewhere on your drive, you can add that here.

So when I click on my add knowledge I have access to all of my files, all of my sites, any chats, meetings, etc.

information.

so you could provide an entire site as context for this agent.

So let's say in this case we've already created site, we're going to add event planning in here.

Let's say that I also wanted to add FinTech Innovation Summit 2026.

This is a synthetic event and now I just want to create this agent.

Now let's have a conversation with it.

what can you tell me about the upcoming FinTech event?

Okay, so it correctly found that one result, FinTech Innovation Summit could click right into it, ask it to summarize things, engage with it from here.

And one of the cool things about these agents is that it already has access to all of your meetings and chats, inside of teams and things like that.

So if there's any updates, maybe there's a channel where people talking about this event and planning and this document might be out of date.

So then you can pull in all that information and you will have the latest that you don't have to do the hard work of integrating, you know, all the different tools like Slack and Gmail and so on and so forth.

Those are all disparate tools.

This is all in the same environment which allows Copilot to reach into all those different areas.

One more thing that I want to share with you.

So in this case we created an agent for personal use.

If we wanted to share this with others, we would then go says event planning coordinator, say I want to share this for the organization.

I can then just toggle on this org wide sharing for chat access.

Now anyone who wants to use this is going to be able to access it.

So that's it.

That's a quick preview of Copilot agents and how you can create your own