Partner Blog | How agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot help customers and partners drive business results

Through my frequent conversations with customers, it’s clear that enterprises are embracing Microsoft 365 Copilot as an AI-powered game-changer for productivity. Now, we are helping organizations achieve even greater business value with the recent introduction of agents in Copilot. This week at Microsoft Ignite, the promise of agents has come to life through compelling examples from our customer and partner ecosystem, which I’m excited to share. 

Enterprise customers are developing line-of-business agents to extend skills and knowledge in Copilot for specialized use cases and to scale their teams in unprecedented ways. They’re also adopting powerful third-party agents built by partners who develop software—also known as independent software vendors (ISVs)—and system integrators (SIs), which supercharge employee productivity and accelerate business processes.  

I will cover the two ways in which developers can build and integrate agents with Copilot: declarative agents, which are generally available, and custom engine agents, now in private preview. I will also provide resources for developing agents, explain when to develop each type, and showcase how customers and partners are gaining value from this evolution toward agentic AI. 

How agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot can meet your organization’s needs 

Agents in Copilot are AI assistants with expertise in a specific set of tasks, like running business processes or adding new skills. Agents allow you to enhance Copilot in three ways: 

• Focusing Copilot on specific knowledge, such as Microsoft SharePoint files or external content sources 

• Adding new skills, such as updating records or creating support tickets 

• Executing business processes autonomously 

The type of agent you build depends on your organization’s needs. 

Declarative agents run on the Copilot engine, with prompts handled by its orchestrator and foundation models. Where custom engine agents run on your own models, declarative agents don’t require your own AI platform or complex technical decisions. These agents also have native access to indexed Microsoft Graph data, like SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive files. If you’ve previously built an API plugin or a Microsoft Teams message extension, you can easily upgrade that to a declarative agent by adding instructions to your manifest. 

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