Microsoft Copilot | Vlad Talks Tech

SharePoint Skills FAQ: Your Webinar Questions Answered

Vlad Catrinescu — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:07:27 GMT

The Teams gremlins held my camera hostage for part of my Getting Started with SharePoint Skills webinar, but the questions kept coming, and I ran out of time before I ran out of questions. This SharePoint skills FAQ answers every question from the Q&A panel and the chat, including the ones I answered live, double-checked against Microsoft Learn and Microsoft’s latest updates. If you missed the live session, you can watch the full SharePoint skills webinar recording on my YouTube channel.

Key takeaways

A skill is not a saved prompt. It’s a shared, multi-step workflow that everyone on the site can trigger in plain English, and Copilot in SharePoint doesn’t have saved prompts anyway.
Skills run when someone asks for them in the Copilot in SharePoint chat. They can’t run on a schedule, on a file event, or from Power Automate today.
Personal skills live in your OneDrive and are for you only. To share a skill with your team, create it as a site skill on the team’s SharePoint site.
You protect skill files like any other SharePoint content: break inheritance on the Agent Assets library, and people with View access can still run the skills.
There’s no official application lifecycle management (ALM) for skills yet, so keep a copy of business-critical skills in a central repository and use PnP PowerShell or Microsoft Graph PowerShell for inventory.
A SharePoint agent answers questions about content. Copilot in SharePoint with skills takes action on that content.
Microsoft just announced that Copilot in SharePoint has hit General Availability and also clarified the billing model!

Skills vs Saved Prompts and Other Tools

Why Is a Skill Different From a Saved Prompt?

Microsoft 365 Copilot does let you save prompts in the Copilot Prompt Gallery from Copilot Chat, Teams, and Outlook, but Copilot in SharePoint doesn’t have saved prompts, so on a SharePoint site a skill is the way to package a request people can reuse. There is some overlap in the idea, since both save you from retyping the same instructions. The difference is everything a skill adds on top.

A skill lives on the site, so everyone with View access can run it. Nobody has to find the prompt in a Notepad file or a OneNote page. People just ask in natural language, and Copilot in SharePoint matches the request to the skill through its description. A skill can also chain several steps, load reference files, and call other skills, so it handles long-running tasks a single prompt can’t.

The biggest difference is consistency. A saved prompt behaves differently depending on who runs it, because each person’s memories and customizations shape the answer. A skill documents the process once, so everyone gets the same steps and the same output. Microsoft’s skills documentation says skills let Copilot in SharePoint perform tasks “more consistently than one-off prompts.”

When Should I Use a Skill Instead of a Power Automate Flow, a Copilot Studio Agent, or a SharePoint Agent?

Use a skill when the work stays inside SharePoint and benefits from judgment: reading documents, classifying them, checking them against a rule, and updating lists or libraries based on what it finds. Skills are no-code, multi-step, and use AI to understand intent, but today they can’t connect to external systems or run custom code. That first limit is about to loosen: Copilot in SharePoint is getting support for plugins from your enterprise store, and a plugin can bundle skills and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect to other systems. It’s in preview and scheduled to roll out worldwide in December 2026, according to the Microsoft 365 roadmap.

The other three options each fit a different job:

A Power Automate flow is deterministic. It follows the exact same path every time, connects to third-party systems through connectors, and handles formal processes like approvals through Outlook. When the process must never vary, or it has to reach outside Microsoft 365, use a flow.
A SharePoint agent answers questions. It’s grounded in your SharePoint content, but it doesn’t take action on that content.
A Copilot Studio agent is for scenarios beyond SharePoint. Custom engine agents built in Copilot Studio can reach other systems and even trigger actions automatically, without a user asking. They’re also more work to build, deploy, and maintain.

This is exactly the question my October 20 webinar goes deeper on, with scenarios for each option. The registration link is at the end of this post.

Running Skills

Can Skills Run on a Schedule, When a File Is Added, or From Power Automate?

Not today. A skill runs when someone asks for it in the Copilot in SharePoint chat, either with a matching request or by naming the skill. You can’t trigger a skill from a file event, run it on a schedule, or call it from a Power Automate flow.

If what you need is a simple reaction to a file event, SharePoint’s built-in workflows for lists and libraries now cover some of it. In its September 2026 update, Microsoft added workflows that post a Teams message when files are added or metadata changes, and workflows that route approval requests. Those are separate from skills, but they might cover the event-driven part of your scenario.

Is There a Limit to How Many Documents a Skill Can Classify, and Can It Handle 10,000 Files?

I haven’t found a published limit on how many files a skill can process, and I haven’t tested a 10,000-file library myself. I’m checking with the product team and will update this post when I hear back.

What is documented is the usage limit. During the preview, according to the Copilot in SharePoint get-started guide, Copilot in SharePoint applies daily and weekly usage limits to each user. The limits are individual, not shared across your organization, and when you hit one, Copilot features pause until the limit resets automatically. A classification run across thousands of files does a lot of work, so plan for it:

Test the skill on a few selected files first, then on a single folder.
Run large libraries in batches, folder by folder, instead of in one request.
For files that keep arriving, look at autofill columns in SharePoint, which extract metadata as files are uploaded, so you only run the skill once on the backlog.

In the blog post from September 25th, Microsoft has announced the ability to work with Copilot in SharePoint to operate across large content collections, but I do not know yet what large means!

Can a Skill Create Site Pages From a Template and Add Quick Links Web Parts?

Creating pages, yes. Copilot in SharePoint can create pages, and a skill chains Copilot in SharePoint’s built-in capabilities, so page creation can be one of the steps. Whether it can also add and configure a Quick Links web part that points to related pages depends on the page tools available in your tenant.

The quickest way to check is to type --agenttools in the Copilot in SharePoint chat, which lists every action Copilot in SharePoint can run on that site, and look through the page-related tools. The list of tools differs from tenant to tenant, so check yours rather than relying on someone else’s screenshot. Then test the skill on one page before running it across a site.

A skill you create in OneDrive is a personal skill, and personal skills are designed to be yours alone. That’s why you got the message that the skill doesn’t support sharing with everyone who can access the folder. So yes, it comes down to OneDrive instead of SharePoint, though the real distinction is personal versus site scope.

Personal skills are saved as Markdown files in your own OneDrive, under Documents, Copilot, Agent Assets, Skills, and they follow you across every SharePoint site and OneDrive. They’re perfect for your own way of working, like how you want long documents summarized. They rolled out in preview in August 2026 and roll out worldwide in December 2026. Microsoft announced them in its September update, but the Microsoft Learn skills article only covers site skills so far.

To share a skill with your teammates, create it as a site skill instead. Open the Copilot in SharePoint chat on your team’s SharePoint site and create the skill there. It’s saved to that site’s Agent Assets library, and everyone with View access to the site can run it.

How Do I Protect the Skill Files in the Agent Assets Library?

You protect them the same way you protect any other SharePoint content. By default, anyone with Edit permission on the site can create a skill, and anyone with View permission can run one, which means every member of a team site can change the skill files. If you want a tighter model, Microsoft’s documentation points you to breaking permission inheritance on the Agent Assets library and applying more restrictive permissions.

In practice, that means giving members Read on the Agent Assets library and keeping Edit for the owners and the few people who author skills. Members can still run every skill, because running a skill only needs View access. Retention, sensitivity labels, and auditing apply to skill files too, and the library keeps version history, so you can roll a skill back if someone breaks it.

You already spotted the trade-off: once members can’t edit the library, they can’t create skills on that site anymore. The same library holds your SHAREPOINT.md file, so locking it down protects your site context too. The library also holds a Plans folder, so after you change the permissions, sign in as a member and run a skill to confirm everything still works the way you expect.

Governance and Lifecycle Management

Can I Maintain SKILL.md Files With Azure Pipelines in Azure DevOps?

Not officially, and I’ll be honest, this is one of the more disappointing parts of the preview. Skills are managed at the site level, and Microsoft doesn’t offer a supported way to deploy or update them from a pipeline.

In the meantime, a few things help:

Version history. Skills are files in a document library, so every change is versioned and you can restore an earlier version.
Built-in skills that improve your skills. Microsoft ships built-in skills to create, check, and improve skills. In September 2026 they added measured evaluations, where Copilot suggests tests, evaluates the current results, and recommends changes before you share a skill more broadly.
A preview of what’s coming. When you type /skills, the list includes a section for enterprise skills. It was empty in my tenant during the webinar, but it shows where Microsoft is heading for centrally managed skills.
Plugins from your enterprise store. A plugin can bundle skills, and an admin can install it tenant-wide, so once plugin support rolls out you’ll have a governed way to distribute the same skills across sites.

Until then, my recommendation is simple: when a skill becomes business-critical, keep a copy in a central repository you control. That gives you a source of truth even without an official process.

Until Enterprise Skills Arrive, Is PnP PowerShell the Way to Govern Skills?

Yes. Since skills are Markdown files stored in each site’s Agent Assets library, PnP PowerShell works well for building an inventory: loop through your sites, look in the Skills folder of the Agent Assets library, and each subfolder with a SKILL.md file is one skill. Microsoft Graph PowerShell works too. Auditing also applies to skill files, the same as other SharePoint content.

I can’t wait for Microsoft to give us proper governance for skills. Governance for SharePoint skills and agents would make a great future webinar topic too.

SharePoint Agents vs Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents

Every SharePoint site comes with a ready-made agent that answers questions based on that site’s content. People with Edit permission can also create custom agents, which are saved as .agent files in the site’s Site Assets library, scoped to the sites, folders, or files you choose, and tailored with your own instructions.

Custom agents don’t automatically appear in any list, so you share them like any other file. People can open the .agent file, and you can also share a SharePoint agent in Teams group chats and meetings. Site owners also decide what opens when people select the agent icon, either Copilot in SharePoint or a custom agent, and access always follows the site’s permissions.

Keep in mind that SharePoint agents answer questions, while Copilot in SharePoint is the experience that runs skills and takes action. My step-by-step guide to creating SharePoint agents walks through building one.

Is a SharePoint Agent the Same as an Agent Created in Microsoft 365 Copilot?

No. A SharePoint agent lives in its SharePoint site and only uses SharePoint content. An agent you build with Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot can use knowledge from SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, public websites, and Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors, and you can share it across the organization or submit it to your organization’s catalog.

Where you build it depends on where the content lives and what the agent needs to do:

Build it in SharePoint when the content lives on one site and the audience is that site’s members.
Build it with Agent Builder when the agent needs content from several places, like Teams and Outlook as well as SharePoint. My guide to building Copilot agents with no code in Agent Builder covers the basics.
Build it in Copilot Studio when the agent needs to take actions in other systems or run without a user asking.

Agent Builder agents can do a lot more, but they’re also a bit more work to maintain and deploy.

What This Means for You

Most of these questions come down to the same thing: skills are still a preview feature, and the parts around them, like scheduling, lifecycle management, and governance, haven’t caught up yet. That doesn’t make them less useful today. It means you should be deliberate about where you use them.

If you’re an admin, decide who can edit the Agent Assets library on your important sites before skills spread, and start keeping business-critical skills in a central repository now. If you’re a builder, pick one repetitive task that stays inside SharePoint, build it as a site skill so your whole team can use it, and test it on a small set of files before pointing it at a large library.

Ready to take SharePoint skills further? On October 20, Microsoft MVP Gokan Ozcifci and I are running a free webinar on automating content in SharePoint with Copilot, covering more advanced skills, SharePoint agents, and autofill, and when to reach for each one. Save your seat for the October 20 webinar.

AB-620 Exam: What to Expect, Difficulty, and Study Tips

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 04:59:33 GMT

The AB-620 exam is the path to the brand-new Microsoft Certified: AI Agent Builder Associate certification, and after taking the beta a few hours ago, I want to share my honest first-look review. If you are deciding whether to sit for this exam, what to study, or whether you are even the right audience for it, this post covers everything I can share without breaking NDA.

Key takeaways

Passing the AB-620 exam earns you the Microsoft Certified: AI Agent Builder Associate certification.
Despite being tagged as an app maker exam on Microsoft Learn, the AB-620 is really built for developers and consultants integrating Copilot Studio with enterprise systems.
Microsoft scrapped the original AB-610 Copilot Studio Agent Maker exam and consolidated everything into the AB-620.
Expect heavy coverage of Azure AI Search, Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, the agent-to-agent protocol, and Power Platform pipelines for ALM.
Testing agents and application lifecycle management makes up 20 to 25 percent of the exam, which is enough to make or break a pass.
If you are a Power Platform app maker, the Copilot Studio Applied Skills are likely a better fit than this exam.

What is the AB-620 exam?

The AB-620 is a Microsoft associate-level certification exam currently in beta. Pass it and you earn the Microsoft Certified: AI Agent Builder Associate credential. The official exam name is Designing and Building Integrated AI Solutions in Copilot Studio.

The exam tagline tells you most of what you need to know: Develop and integrate advanced, scalable AI agents using Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Platform, and enterprise technologies to deliver robust solutions for organizations. In plain language, the AB-620 exam is about putting agents into production, not about the basics of agent building.

Why the AB-620 is really a Copilot Studio developer exam

Here is the most important thing to understand before you register: even though the exam is tagged as an app maker exam on Microsoft Learn, in my opinion that tagging is misleading. The AB-620 is built for developers and consultants who spend almost every workday building agentic solutions that integrate Copilot Studio with Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI Search, Microsoft Fabric, and more.

If you are a citizen developer who occasionally builds a topic in Copilot Studio, this exam will feel out of reach. If you live in Copilot Studio and routinely wire it up to enterprise services, you are exactly the audience Microsoft built the AB-620 for.

Having spent the last decade helping IT pros prepare for Microsoft certifications, I have seen plenty of exam mismatches between the listed persona and the actual content. The AB-620 is one of the more notable examples I have come across recently.

What happened to the AB-610?

A few months ago, Microsoft announced two Copilot Studio certifications: the AB-610 Copilot Studio Agent Maker and the AB-620 Copilot Studio Agent Developer. That two-track approach made sense. The Agent Maker exam would have covered the low-code persona, and the Agent Developer exam would have covered the integration-heavy persona.

Microsoft has since scrapped the AB-610 and consolidated everything into the AB-620. Instead of keeping the original Copilot Studio Agent Developer name, which would have been honest signaling, Microsoft renamed the exam to AI Agent Builder Associate. That broader name suggests both makers and developers belong here, but the content still skews heavily toward the developer side.

For the full backstory on these two exams, see my earlier post on the original AB-610 vs AB-620 Copilot Studio certifications.

What the AB-620 exam actually tests

The meat of the AB-620 exam is about production-grade agents and the advanced scenarios an enterprise will ask about before it ships an agent to production. Do not expect questions about turning generative AI on, what a topic is, or who should be authoring agents. That foundational content is not what this exam is measuring.

What you will see is heavy coverage of how to connect a Copilot Studio agent to enterprise services. Specifically, expect to be tested on:

Connecting a Copilot Studio agent to Azure AI Search
Connecting a Copilot Studio agent to a Microsoft Fabric data agent
Connecting a Copilot Studio agent to a Microsoft Foundry agent
Connecting to partner agents outside your tenant using the agent-to-agent protocol
Designing multi-agent solutions that span those systems

Real production agents today are rarely built entirely inside Copilot Studio. The AB-620 reflects that reality by testing your ability to design solutions that span multiple Microsoft AI services.

Testing agents and ALM with Power Platform pipelines

A second major area of the AB-620 exam covers testing agents and application lifecycle management. This bucket is marked at 20 to 25 percent of the exam, which sounds modest on paper but is more than enough to be the difference between pass and fail.

You need to know all the ways to test Copilot Studio agents and how to implement application lifecycle management for agents using Power Platform pipelines. The exam expects you to be able to take an agent from a development environment, through any required validation, and all the way to production while following a proper ALM process.

The takeaway is that the AB-620 does not assume you are only a builder. It assumes you own the full lifecycle of an agent, from build to release.

How to study for the AB-620 exam

The single best piece of advice I can give is to do every scenario in the exam objectives at least once before sitting down. Go to Microsoft Learn, pull up the AB-620 study guide, and work through the tasks hands on:

Connect a Copilot Studio agent to Azure AI Search.
Connect a Copilot Studio agent to a Microsoft Foundry agent.
Connect a Copilot Studio agent to another Copilot Studio agent.
Experiment with the agent-to-agent protocol so you know what it is and why it exists.
Build a deployment flow for an agent using Power Platform pipelines.

Why does hands-on practice matter so much? Because every associate-level Microsoft exam, including this one, leans heavily on order-list questions. You will be asked, “you want to do this, put the following steps in the correct order.” If you have not configured the scenario recently, those questions are punishing. If you have walked through it once, they become almost free.

The other point worth flagging is the question weighting. Microsoft did honor the study guide in the sense that nothing showed up in my beta that was not on the published exam objectives. However, the percentage of questions from each bucket felt off compared to the weights listed on the study guide. I cannot share which buckets were over-represented or under-represented due to NDA, but my recommendation is the same as it always is for a beta: study every skill area equally and do not lean on the weights as a planning tool.

Exam format, questions, and Microsoft Learn access

A few practical notes about the exam itself:

The number of questions is always between 40 and 60. I cannot share the exact count for the AB-620.
You have access to Microsoft Learn during the exam, just like every other associate-level exam. I did not end up using it, but it is there if you need to verify something.
Expect associate-level question types: scenario-based questions, order lists, and multi-step problems. This is not the difficulty level of a fundamentals exam.
Labs may show up. Microsoft does not publish whether a given exam includes hands-on labs, and I cannot share what was on my exam, but be prepared for the possibility.

AB-620 vs Copilot Studio Applied Skills

If you are a Power Platform app maker who does not spend all day in Copilot Studio, the AB-620 is probably too advanced for where you are right now. The better path is the Copilot Studio Applied Skills. There are two of them available, and they validate hands-on Copilot Studio skills without the integration-heavy enterprise scope of the AB-620.

If you want a deeper look at the lab-based credential for Copilot Studio, see my APL-7008 study guide for creating agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

The AB-620 is still a great goal if your job is to become a full-time Copilot Studio agent builder, or if you are already a developer integrating AI services across the Microsoft stack. For everyone else, the Applied Skills path will give you a recognized credential without the steep developer-focused prep.

What this means for you

The AB-620 is a high-value certification for a narrow audience: developers, consultants, and architects building production-grade agents that span Copilot Studio, Azure AI Search, Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, and Power Platform. If that describes your day-to-day work, this exam validates the skills you are already using and is well worth the prep time.

If you are a citizen developer, business user, or IT pro who builds simple Copilot Studio agents on the side, this exam is not the right next step. Start with the Copilot Studio Applied Skills instead. They give you a recognized credential without asking you to master enterprise integration patterns you may never use.

Before you register, pull up the AB-620 exam objectives on Microsoft Learn and do an honest gap analysis. If you can do each task on the list without looking it up, you are ready. If half the objectives are unfamiliar, build hands-on time with the missing scenarios before scheduling the exam. Beta exams take longer to score, so plan accordingly if you are aiming for a specific certification deadline.

Prefer video? Watch the full walkthrough on my YouTube channel.

Ready to build your Copilot Studio skills the right way? I have over 100 courses on Pluralsight covering Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Copilot, including hands-on agent building. Browse the full course catalog on Pluralsight to find your next step.

Copilot Studio Applied Skill APL-7008 Is Retiring June 30

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:01:16 GMT

Microsoft is retiring the Create Agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio Applied Skill, known by its code APL-7008, on June 30, 2026. If you have been meaning to add this Copilot Studio Applied Skill to your transcript, you have until the end of June to earn it for free, and after that it is gone. Below is what the credential covered, what the retirement actually means for your transcript, and which Copilot Studio credentials you can still earn once it is gone.

Key takeaways

APL-7008, the Create Agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio Applied Skill, retires on June 30, 2026.
It is free, it is not proctored, and it runs as an interactive lab, so you can earn it in a single sitting.
Applied Skills never expire. Once you pass, the credential stays on your Microsoft transcript permanently.
After June 30, the Enhance Agents with Autonomous Capabilities Applied Skill and the AB-620 AI Agent Builder Associate certification are your remaining Copilot Studio options.
This is one piece of a much larger shake-up. We are not even halfway through 2026, and Microsoft has already retired or replaced 14 certifications and 13 Applied Skills.

What the Copilot Studio Applied Skill (APL-7008) covered

APL-7008 validated your ability to build a custom agent from start to finish in Copilot Studio. It was a well-rounded credential that touched almost every core part of agent building, not just one narrow feature.

The assessment covered creating the initial agent, working with topics and trigger phrases, and configuring the different nodes in a conversation. It also covered managing variables and entities, setting up the generative AI side with knowledge sources and actions, and pulling data from Dataverse to make the agent more useful.

As someone who earned this Applied Skill myself, I can tell you it was a genuinely practical credential. It mapped closely to the work you actually do when you build an agent for a real business scenario.

If you want the full background on the credential, I covered it in detail when this Applied Skill first launched.

Why retiring this credential is a surprise

I will be honest: this retirement caught me off guard. Copilot Studio is exactly where Microsoft is pushing companies right now, so I expected an update to this credential rather than a full retirement.

There is a reason behind it, though. Copilot Studio is going through a massive change as a product. The interface is changing, topics have been deprioritized and tucked away in the new experience, and the platform now leans on skills and more AI capabilities. A refresh would have made sense to me. A complete retirement, with less than two weeks’ notice, still surprised me.

This is not happening in isolation either. The pace of credential changes has been relentless this year, which I broke down in my roundup of every Microsoft certification change in 2026.

What an Applied Skill retirement actually means

Here is where Applied Skills work differently from regular certifications, and it is the part most people miss. Applied Skills do not expire. If you pass one, it shows up as an active credential for two years after the retirement date, and then it moves to your historical credentials.

More importantly, it stays on your Microsoft transcript forever as a credential you have passed. Retirement does not erase it. It simply means no new learners can earn it after the cutoff date.

That is why earning APL-7008 before June 30 is worth doing, even though it is going away. You keep the credential permanently, and right now, you can still take it for free. If you want the bigger picture on how these two credential types differ, I wrote a full comparison of Applied Skills versus certifications.

The Copilot Studio credentials you can still earn

Losing APL-7008 does not leave you without options. Two Copilot Studio credentials are available today, and they cover different audiences.

The first is the Enhance Agents with Autonomous Capabilities Applied Skill. It goes deeper and more niche than APL-7008 did, focusing on the autonomous side of agents, but it is still firmly in the Copilot Studio world, and it is still free.

The second is the AB-620 AI Agent Builder Associate certification. This is a brand new exam aimed at developers and advanced builders creating production-ready agent solutions. I took it myself last month, and I will warn you that it is not an easy one, certainly harder than the title might suggest. I compared it to the maker-focused option in my breakdown of the AB-610 and AB-620 Copilot Studio certifications.

What this means for you

If earning a Copilot Studio credential has been on your list, the next few days matter. APL-7008 is free, unproctored, and you do not need to schedule it. You simply open the assessment on Microsoft Learn and complete the interactive lab, usually in a single sitting. After June 30, 2026, that option disappears.

So the practical move is simple. If you want APL-7008, earn it before the deadline and keep it on your transcript for good. If you miss the window or want to go further, the Enhance Agents with Autonomous Capabilities Applied Skill and the AB-620 certification are both still available.

Whatever you decide, do not assume you can come back to APL-7008 later. Once it retires, there is no way to earn it again.

Ready to earn APL-7008 before it retires? You can take the Create Agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio Applied Skill for free on Microsoft Learn until June 30, 2026. Start the assessment on Microsoft Learn. If you want to sharpen your agent-building skills first, my Pluralsight courses walk through Copilot Studio step by step.

Prefer video? Watch the full walkthrough on my YouTube channel.

AI Agents vs AI Chatbots: What Makes Them Different

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:42:52 GMT

AI agents vs AI chatbots is one of the most confusing topics in technology right now. Most people use the terms interchangeably, yet they describe two very different kinds of tools, and the difference matters if you actually want AI to help you get work done. This post explains what AI agents are, the four capabilities that separate them from chatbots like Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT, and the three main types of agents you should know about.

Key takeaways

AI chatbots respond to your prompts, but they cannot reliably execute tasks across your business systems on their own.
AI agents add four new capabilities on top of a chatbot: role-playing, memory, tool assignment, and execution loops.
There are three main types of AI agents: retrieval agents, task-based agents, and autonomous agents.
Task-based agents are the most common in business because they actually complete work, not just answer questions.
You do not need to be a developer to build an AI agent thanks to a growing range of no-code and low-code tools.

Why AI chatbots hit a wall

For the past few years, the spotlight has been on AI chatbots. The list keeps growing: ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Grok from X, and Meta AI. Most of us use at least one of them every day, and they are excellent for general questions, drafting, and exploration.

However, chatbots have real limitations once you try to push them past simple Q&A.

The first limitation is action. Chatbots can suggest what you should do or describe a procedure, but they cannot perform tasks inside your systems. They will happily tell you how to submit a vacation request in your HR tool, but they will not actually submit it for you.

The second limitation is memory. Chatbots do not reliably remember your preferences, your previous work, or your ongoing tasks. As a result, you end up repeating context every time you start a new conversation, especially when the relevant information lives in another system.

The third limitation is that they are generic. They do not automatically follow your organization’s processes, terminology, or formatting rules. You have to spell all of that out in the prompt, every single time.

The fourth limitation is execution. A chatbot responds once and stops. It does not plan a multi-step task, decide which tools to use, review its own results, and keep going until the work is finished. That last gap is exactly where AI agents come in.

What is an AI agent?

An AI agent is an AI tool that can understand a goal, use tools, and take action to complete tasks on your behalf. Instead of just talking to you, an agent works alongside you. It interprets your intent, interacts with the systems where the data and processes live, and follows through until the job is done.

Having spent the last decade training IT professionals on Microsoft 365 and authoring 100+ Pluralsight courses, I think this is the single biggest shift since the launch of ChatGPT. We are moving from “AI that answers” to “AI that does.”

The 4 capabilities that set AI agents apart from AI chatbots

There are four specific capabilities that elevate an AI agent above a traditional AI chatbot. Together, they explain why AI agents vs AI chatbots is more than a marketing distinction.

1. Role-playing

Each agent has a defined role. You can give it instructions on how it should behave, what its responsibilities are, and how it should respond. This keeps the agent focused on a specific purpose, whether that is helping with research, customer follow-ups, or an internal HR process.

2. Memory systems

Agents do not respond based on a single prompt in isolation. They can remember past interactions and use that context for future ones. They retain your preferences, ongoing tasks, and previous conversations, which makes responses noticeably more relevant over time.

3. Tool assignment

This is where agents start to actually take action. Instead of only providing information, an agent can use tools and connect with other systems to do the work. That includes retrieving data, creating or updating records, and triggering workflows in line-of-business applications. To go deeper on this, the customizing Microsoft 365 Copilot concepts and terms guide is a great companion read.

4. Execution loops

Traditional chatbots respond once and stop. Agents can plan, use tools, review the results, and keep going until the task is complete. That loop is what enables them to handle real multi-step work end-to-end, not just provide a single answer.

The combination of role, memory, tools, and execution is what moves AI from answering questions to genuinely getting things done.

The 3 types of AI agents you should know

Not every agent is built for the same job. There are three main types, and they represent increasing levels of capability from simple to more advanced.

Retrieval agents

Retrieval agents, sometimes called single-turn assistants, focus on pulling information from connected data sources, summarizing it, and answering your questions. They help you find and understand information faster, but they do not take action on your behalf. Think of them as a smarter, more grounded search experience.

Task-based agents

Task-based agents go further. In addition to retrieving information, they can take action: create records, update systems, run workflows, and complete repeatable tasks. These are the most common types of agents in business today because they actually move work forward, not just answer questions. You might also hear them called tool-using agents or workflow-based agents.

Autonomous agents

Autonomous agents do not always wait for you to ask. They can plan and execute tasks based on events, make decisions using context, and coordinate multiple steps to achieve a goal. This allows them to handle more complex scenarios with less direct input from the user.

You don’t need to be a developer to build an AI agent

A common misconception is that building agents requires deep development skills. That is no longer the case.

At the simplest level, no-code tools let you build agents through visual interfaces without writing a single line of code. If you want to see this in action, my guide to building Copilot agents with no code using Agent Builder walks through the experience step by step. If you need more flexibility, low-code tools let you customize agents with additional configuration and integrations, which is especially useful for task-based agents that connect to existing business systems. And for developers, pro-code options allow fully custom agents to be designed, integrated, and shipped into production scenarios.

Whatever your skill level, there is now a path into building agents. That is a meaningful change for IT pros and citizen developers alike.

What this means for you

If you have been using AI chatbots for the last couple of years and getting decent results, AI agents are the next step, not a replacement. Chatbots are still excellent for general questions, drafting, and exploration. Agents are where AI starts to take real work off your plate, and understanding AI agents vs AI chatbots will only become more important as both technologies mature.

For IT admins, this is a great moment to start mapping which internal processes are good candidates for a task-based agent. Anything that involves repetitive lookups, status updates, ticket triage, or cross-system actions is worth a look. For citizen developers and Power Platform builders, the no-code and low-code agent tooling means you can prototype quickly and prove value before involving a developer.

If you want to formalize your skills, Microsoft is also rolling out new agent-focused credentials. The APL-7008 study guide for creating agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio is a great starting point if you want a structured path to validate what you build.

The honest reality is that the organizations getting the most out of AI in the next 12 months will not be the ones running the most chatbots. They will be the ones who deploy agents that actually do the work.

Ready to start building AI agents in your organization?

If you want a deeper, structured walkthrough with real examples and demos, including a sales RFP agent, an HR support agent, and a custom agent build, the full course is available on Pluralsight. Watch the full AI Agents for Productivity course on Pluralsight to take the next step from understanding agents to actually building them.

Prefer video? Watch the full walkthrough on my YouTube channel: AI Agents vs AI Chatbots: What REALLY Makes Them Different

Microsoft 365 Conference 2026 Recap: Top Announcements

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 02:32:36 GMT

The Microsoft 365 Conference 2026 in Orlando wrapped with two back-to-back keynotes from Jeff Teper and Ryan Cunningham, packed with announcements across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Copilot, and Agent 365. This recap cuts through the marketing buzz and focuses on what actually matters for IT pros: the SharePoint Skills public preview, Agent 365 going GA on May 1, the new Shadow AI pane, channel agent workflows in Microsoft Teams, and the multi-model story between Microsoft and Anthropic. Here is what was announced and what it means for your day-to-day job.

Key takeaways

SharePoint Skills are now in public preview and included in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint AI licensing. Jeff Teper called this his favorite announcement of the week.
Agent 365 hits general availability on May 1, priced at $15 per user per month standalone or included with E7. A new Shadow AI pane helps IT block unsanctioned AI use through Intune policies.
Microsoft Copilot now offers a true multi-model experience: Claude models, OpenAI models, or Auto. The Researcher Critique feature pairs a GPT class model with a Claude class model for higher quality output.
Channel agent workflows in Microsoft Teams can trigger Azure DevOps, GitHub Copilot, Asana, and Jira automations from a single chat message or emoji reaction.
The new SharePoint UI announced at the SharePoint 25-year party is now generally available, and Viva Connections plus Viva Amplify are being folded back under the SharePoint brand.
Vibe coding for the enterprise launched on vibe.powerapps.com, with NASA as the headline customer running 47,000 monthly active Power Platform users on the same stack.

Microsoft 365 Conference 2026: Two Keynotes, One Story

Jeff Teper, the father of SharePoint, opened the Microsoft 365 Conference 2026 with a keynote covering Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint. Ryan Cunningham followed immediately with a session on apps, agentic AI, and governance. Because the Power Platform team and the Microsoft 365 team are now one combined organization at Microsoft, both leaders represented the same product family on stage. With no break between the two sessions, the experience felt more like one extended keynote than two separate ones.

What Was New for Microsoft Copilot

From a usage point of view, Jeff Teper shared that over 90 percent of the Fortune 500 has now deployed Microsoft Copilot. That is a significant adoption milestone. From a feature point of view, however, this keynote was less about brand new announcements and more about cementing the Microsoft and Anthropic partnership and showcasing recent investments.

Multi-Model Support With Claude and OpenAI

Microsoft is doubling down on the multi-model approach in Microsoft Copilot. As a user, you can now choose between Claude models, OpenAI models, or let Copilot pick automatically with Auto mode. If the multi-model story is new to you, my guide to customizing Microsoft 365 Copilot concepts and terms walks through the building blocks. The most memorable Copilot demo of the keynote was Dan Holm using Claude inside PowerPoint to take a boring finance slide and turn it into something visually polished. For PowerPoint work, Claude has been particularly strong, and that is a case where I would skip Auto and pick Claude directly. The multi-model story also extends into Copilot Studio, where makers can now build agents on top of Anthropic models like Opus 4.7. This is a meaningful shift for anyone building custom agents because it removes the assumption that maker tools are locked to a single model family.

Researcher and the Critique Agent

The Researcher Critique feature is not technically new. Microsoft blogged about Council and Critique a few weeks before the conference, but seeing it on stage made the value of multiple models in Microsoft Copilot click. Researcher now runs a GPT class model and a Claude class model in tandem. The first model handles the planning, research, and drafting. The second model steps in as an expert reviewer, evaluating and refining the draft before you ever see it. The result is that the first thing you read is already higher quality than a single model pass. Worth flagging for IT admins: in the keynote demo, Researcher applied the right sensitivity label and security policies to its output automatically, so the AI governance story is built in rather than bolted on.

Copilot Cowork Versus Claude Cowork

Microsoft also showed Copilot Cowork, which launched a few weeks before the conference. Copilot Cowork takes the underlying technology behind Anthropic’s Claude Cowork and adds Microsoft’s two enterprise ingredients on top: Work IQ for grounding in your organizational data, and Microsoft’s security and compliance controls. For a deeper look at Work IQ, I covered it in detail with Microsoft’s Adam Harmetz on knowledge agent licensing and Work IQ. Both products share the Cowork name, but they are not the same tool.

Copilot Cowork runs in the Microsoft cloud, so you don’t need a dedicated mini PC sitting in a closet to run overnight tasks. The trade-off is that it can reach fewer services and data sources outside the Microsoft 365 boundary. Claude Cowork runs locally on your device, which means it can access your PC directly, run PowerShell and Bash scripts, and plug into a much wider range of third-party services. The catch is that you need a PC running 24/7 for overnight tasks, and connecting it to enterprise data may raise concerns with your security and compliance team.

Personally, I run a mini PC at home dedicated to overnight Claude Cowork tasks. Most IT pros will need to figure out which Cowork is the right fit for each scenario before rolling either one into production.

Microsoft Teams Updates From the Microsoft 365 Conference 2026

Microsoft Teams got a healthy mix of fundamental improvements and new AI capabilities at the Microsoft 365 Conference 2026.

Fundamentals: Loop Pages, Threaded Discussions, and Catch Up

Jeff Teper reminded the audience that loop pages inside channels and Slack-style threaded discussions both shipped recently. If those are features you have been waiting for, you now have multiple ways to use them inside Microsoft Teams.

The brand-new feature on the fundamentals side is Catch Up. On mobile, you can now swipe through your notifications and either mark them as read or keep them unread for later. The idea is to triage on the go and answer back from your desktop where the real work happens.

Customizable Meeting Controls

The meeting toolbar in Microsoft Teams is being redesigned with customizable controls. If you have ever clicked Leave when you meant to stop sharing, this update is for you. It is a small change, but it is a good reminder that Microsoft is still investing in the fundamentals and not putting every engineer on Microsoft Copilot.

Facilitator and Channel Agents

On the AI side, the facilitator agent keeps the meeting agenda visible at the top, takes continuous notes, and merges context from the meeting transcript, the chat, and the live web to answer ad hoc questions. You can ask it to produce a one-pager directly from a chat conversation.

Even more interesting is the channel agent, which can drive real business workflows. The keynote demo showed a feedback message in a Microsoft Teams channel triggering an automation that created a bug in Azure DevOps, assigned it to GitHub Copilot, opened a pull request, and tagged the engineering manager for review. The entire chain ran in a few minutes from a single Microsoft Teams message, and the trigger could even be an emoji reaction. Channel agents can also integrate with Asana, Jira, and other systems.

If you run any kind of triage process, this is the kind of automation that can save real hours. It also lowers the bar for IT pros who never built a Power Automate flow because the channel agent can be configured with an inline prompt.

SharePoint Got the Biggest News at M365 Conf 2026

SharePoint, dare I say the best tool in the stack, got the biggest chunk of real announcements.

New SharePoint UI Goes Generally Available

The new SharePoint UI announced at the 25-year party in March is now generally available. That includes the new portal, the cleaner navigation for Discover, Publish, and Build, and the unified OneDrive experience that is now consistent across Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook. Microsoft also confirmed during keynote week that a new Outlook mobile experience is on the way, so the Outlook side of that story is not standing still either.

Viva Connections and Viva Amplify Rebrand to SharePoint

Announced just before the conference, Viva Connections and Viva Amplify are being rebranded back under the SharePoint name. Viva Connections Mobile will literally be renamed to SharePoint, and you will see that experience inside Microsoft Teams Mobile with a combined feed of news articles from across your organization.

I have to laugh a bit at this one. When Viva launched, half the internet declared it a SharePoint killer. A few years later, the apps are coming home to SharePoint where they belong. Having watched the SharePoint platform evolve for over a decade, the brand has only gotten stronger. Ten years ago people were asking if SharePoint was dying. Today nobody asks that, because SharePoint sits at the center of Microsoft Copilot grounding.

AI Comes to SharePoint Lists

Microsoft finally fixed one of the biggest pain points for SharePoint power users. AI is now built into SharePoint Lists. You can ask natural language questions on your list data, create new items by describing them, and format columns without writing a single line of JSON. The same experience now works on lists, document libraries, news posts, and sites.

SharePoint Skills Public Preview

The biggest SharePoint announcement at the Microsoft 365 Conference 2026 is SharePoint Skills, now in public preview. Jeff Teper called this his favorite announcement of the week, and I agree completely.

A quick but important note on licensing: SharePoint Skills are included in your Microsoft 365 license and the SharePoint AI license, which is included in Microsoft Copilot. They are available in public preview today, so you can start getting value from them right now.

The workflow is simple. You describe a SharePoint process in plain English, something like “Create a deal with these four folders inside, these two templates, and this metadata.” SharePoint saves it as a reusable skill that lives in your site. Anyone with access can invoke the skill by asking “Create me a new deal folder” or “Create a new deals workspace.” The skills are markdown files stored directly in the site, and they are versioned, governed, and editable using the SharePoint controls you already know.

I could spend hours talking about SharePoint Skills, and I already made a full walkthrough video on how they work, including the file structure and how to build them for your team. The link is below in the CTA section.

One detail many people missed in the keynote slides: the SharePoint Skills UI shown on stage included a grouping of “Sales skills” with multiple skills underneath, plus controls to see, create, and view site skills. None of that grouping UI is in the public preview yet, so Microsoft was clearly teasing capabilities that have not been formally announced.

Agent 365 Hits General Availability on May 1

Ryan Cunningham’s keynote opened with the biggest agent news of the week. Agent 365 reaches general availability on May 1, only a week after the conference.

Agent 365 Pricing

Agent 365 launches at $15 per user per month standalone, or it is included as part of E7. I am not going deep on Agent 365 licensing in this recap, but those numbers will help you start the conversation with your procurement team.

Agent 365 is your control plane for every agent in your organization. It provides a single registry across first-party Microsoft agents, agents built on the Microsoft 365 SDK, and even agents brought in from Amazon Bedrock or Google. The keynote demos confirmed that more platforms are on the way.

The New Shadow AI Pane

A new Shadow AI pane in Agent 365 caught my attention because I had not seen it before. The keynote demo showed a user running an unsanctioned AI client connecting to company data from a Windows PC. Agent 365 surfaced that activity, and IT pushed an Intune policy from the same pane to block it. If you are building governance around generative AI, this is a meaningful addition.

Onboarding Agents With Governance Templates

The Shadow AI pane is the discovery side of Agent 365. The onboarding side is where IT admins will spend most of their time. Agent 365 introduces governance templates, which are bundled groups of policies spanning Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender, and SharePoint. When someone in your organization publishes an agent, you decide who gets access, whether the agent should be pre-installed for those users, and which template applies. Once you accept the permissions, the agent goes live with the guardrails you set.

Templates matter because they let you scale governance instead of hand-configuring every agent. As your organization moves from a handful of agents to hundreds, that consistency is what keeps Shadow AI off and innovation on.

One Billion Agents by 2028, and Microsoft’s Internal Number

Microsoft and IDC have shared the projection that there will be over one billion agents worldwide by 2028. I was a non-believer when I first heard it. Then Ryan shared a statistic that made the projection feel a lot more realistic. Microsoft internally manages more than 500,000 agents today, against 228,000 employees globally. That is more than two agents per employee, and agents have been a real category for less than a year. Awesome and a little scary at the same time.

Vibe Coding and the NASA Power Platform Story

Ryan Cunningham’s keynote also introduced vibe coding for the enterprise on the new vibe.powerapps.com surface, paired with one of the strongest customer proof points of the week: NASA running real workloads on Power Platform.

What Vibe Coding Looks Like in Power Platform

The premise is simple. You describe the app you want in plain language, the agent asks clarifying questions, and you get back a plan covering the UX design, functional requirements, data model, and design direction before any code is written. After you accept the plan, the agent generates the app, including sample data, a responsive mobile layout by default, and the underlying Dataverse tables. Inline edits let you switch between visual point-and-click changes and prompt-driven changes inside the same surface.

Two integrations are worth calling out for IT pros. First, Work IQ is built in, so generated apps can pull context from Microsoft Teams meetings, email, and other organizational signals without manual wiring. Second, the data layer ships into Dataverse by default, the same platform that backs Dynamics 365, secured by Microsoft Entra. The app you generate is not a sandbox toy. It is publishable across your organization with the governance you already use.

You can layer a custom agent on top via Copilot Studio. In the keynote demo, Clay Westner stood up an agent powered by Anthropic Opus 4.7 with access to vendor agreements in SharePoint and the Dataverse and Power Apps MCP service, all without re-explaining context the underlying app already knew.

NASA on Power Platform: 47,000 Monthly Actives and a Real Artemis Use Case

Chris from NASA joined Ryan on stage to talk about the agency’s Power Platform program. The numbers are striking. NASA has roughly 51,000 employees with full premium access to Power Apps and Power Platform, and approximately 47,000 of them are active every month. That is essentially saturation, with hundreds of deployed applications and 800 solutions in production.

The headline use case was DWACR, the Display Work Authorization Package Operations and Maintenance Systems Requirements Compact Unique Identifier. Despite the acronym-of-acronyms name, the app consolidated three legacy systems into a single Power Platform solution that gave 20 organizations across NASA, all the way up to the administrator’s office, a real-time view of testing and prep work from T-minus 45 hours down to T-minus zero on the recent Artemis launch.

The story I appreciated most was Chris’s framing of where AI rollouts go wrong. He compared it to surfing: the worst place to be when the wave is coming is in the break, getting battered. The play that worked at NASA was a data SWAT team to clean up source data first, followed by an AI enablement team to connect the dots, applied to a focused subset of the petabytes of data NASA holds. That is a much healthier rollout pattern than “give everyone Microsoft Copilot tomorrow.”

My Top 3 Picks From the Microsoft 365 Conference 2026

If I had to call out the three announcements with the biggest day-to-day impact in the next few months, here is my list.

First, SharePoint Skills. This will change how teams use AI in SharePoint. It will help you automate boring tasks with less code, and it is in public preview already.

Second, channel agent workflows in Microsoft Teams. This makes it easier to automate the things many of us were too lazy to build in Power Automate. With an inline prompt inside a channel, you might actually build the automation this time.

Third, Agent 365. The IT pro in me is genuinely excited to get hands-on. Microsoft has been showing the same Agent 365 slides and demos for months. With GA on May 1, it is finally time to test what is included, what is missing, and what works in real environments.

What This Means for You

If you manage Microsoft 365 or SharePoint, three of these announcements should hit your radar this quarter. Start by enabling the SharePoint Skills public preview in a test site so your team can experiment before the GA wave. The licensing is already covered if you have Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Copilot, so there is no procurement friction.

For Agent 365, line up a conversation with your procurement and security teams before May 1 so you can either pilot the standalone $15 SKU or fold it into an E7 bundle. Pay specific attention to the Shadow AI pane, because it is the first solid governance answer to the BYO-AI problem most organizations are quietly facing.

For Microsoft Copilot, take the time to understand which model excels at which task. Auto is fine for general work, but for visual tasks like PowerPoint design, Claude is worth selecting manually. If you support knowledge workers, share the model picker with them and explain the difference. They will get better results.

Want to Build Your First SharePoint Skill?

Ready to put SharePoint Skills to work? SharePoint Skills is the announcement that will reshape how you automate inside SharePoint, and the public preview is open right now. Watch the full walkthrough where I break down the file structure, show how to build skills for your own team, and demo what is possible today: SharePoint Skills tutorial on YouTube.

Prefer video? Watch the full Microsoft 365 Conference 2026 recap on my YouTube channel.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Explained: What It Is and How to Use It

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:58:15 GMT

There are over a hundred different Copilot experiences across the Microsoft ecosystem, but the one that changes your daily work the most is Microsoft 365 Copilot. This is the AI assistant that lives directly inside Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, and the rest of the Microsoft 365 apps you already use, and it is grounded in your own work data. In this post, you will learn what makes Microsoft 365 Copilot different from generic AI tools, where you can use it, and the day-to-day scenarios where it actually saves time.

Key takeaways

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the productivity-focused Copilot offering that has access to the same Microsoft 365 data you do, including emails, files, meetings, chats, calendars, and contacts.
Unlike ChatGPT or Gemini, Microsoft 365 Copilot answers are grounded in your organization’s content through Microsoft Graph, a capability Microsoft calls Work IQ.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is embedded in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Stream, Loop, Planner, Forms, Whiteboard, and several Microsoft Viva apps.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is the single hub where you can query content across your entire Microsoft 365 environment and run agents your organization has built.
Permissions are security trimmed, so Copilot will never surface data your account does not already have access to.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the productivity-focused Copilot offering, and it is available across almost every Microsoft 365 app. It sits inside the tools you already use every day, so you do not need to leave your workflow to ask it for help. Whether you are drafting an email in Outlook, building a deck in PowerPoint, or running a meeting in Teams, Copilot is one click away.

What makes this Copilot different from a generic chatbot is the data it sees. Microsoft 365 Copilot has access to the same data you do in Microsoft 365, including your emails, files and documents, meetings, chats, calendars, and contacts. And before anyone worries about oversharing, everything is security trimmed. Copilot will never surface data your account does not already have permission to see.

How Microsoft 365 Copilot is different from ChatGPT and Gemini

A generic AI tool like ChatGPT or Gemini is trained on data from across the Internet. That data is a mix of accurate information and noise, and the answer you get back is generic. It is not adapted to you, your team, or your organization’s standards.

Microsoft 365 Copilot works differently. Because it is grounded in your company’s resources, it has access to the projects you have been working on, your documents, your meeting recordings, and your emails. It knows who you work with, your style of writing, and what your company’s standards and requirements look like. The answer it gives back is shaped by your organizational context, not pulled from a generic web crawl.

Microsoft refers to this capability as Work IQ or Microsoft Graph grounding. It is the single biggest reason Microsoft 365 Copilot delivers more useful answers than a public chatbot for work tasks. And you do not lose web access either. If you want, Copilot can still pull information from the Internet on top of your organization’s data.

Where you can use Microsoft 365 Copilot

One of the things I love about Microsoft 365 Copilot is that you do not have to go to a separate website or a separate app to use it. It is embedded directly in your favorite Microsoft 365 apps. You will find Copilot in:

Microsoft 365 apps: Outlook, Excel, Word, OneNote, and PowerPoint
Microsoft 365 services: Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Stream, Loop, Planner, Forms, and Whiteboard
Microsoft Viva apps: Viva Amplify, Viva Engage, Viva Insights, and Viva Glint

On top of that, there is Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, the single hub where you can ask questions about all your Microsoft 365 content in one place and interact with the agents your organization has created. If you have ever wanted one place to query everything across your tenant, Copilot Chat is it.

Catching up on missed meetings with Microsoft 365 Copilot

One of the biggest time sinks in any modern job is catching up on meetings you missed. Watching a 60-minute recording at 1.5x speed still costs you 40 minutes you do not have. Microsoft 365 Copilot fixes this in two ways.

First, every meeting recording in Teams now includes AI-generated notes that recap the discussion. That alone covers most of what you need. Second, when you have specific questions, you can ask Copilot directly. Want the recap condensed into five short bullet points? Ask. Want to know exactly what one specific person said about a budget number? Ask. Copilot will pull the answer from the recording and the transcript.

The same trick works when you join a meeting late. Instead of interrupting the conversation to ask what you missed, you can quietly ask Copilot questions like “Who is in the meeting and what are their roles?” or “What was discussed so far?” Copilot summarizes everything for you, and you can catch up without disrupting the flow.

Transforming content with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Another use case I lean on constantly is content transformation. Imagine you built a polished PowerPoint presentation, and now marketing wants the same content as a blog post. The old workflow was a long copy-paste-rewrite process. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, you open Word, click Copilot at the top, and tell it to write a blog post based on your PowerPoint deck. A few seconds later, you have a draft.

You will probably still want to spend a few minutes adjusting and polishing the output, but the heavy lifting of restructuring slide bullets into flowing paragraphs is done. The same approach works in reverse: turn a Word doc into slides, summarize a long report into talking points, or reformat a meeting transcript into a project brief.

The point is not that Copilot writes perfect prose on the first try. The point is that it removes the blank-page problem and gives you something to react to.

Drafting emails and prepping for your day

Email drafting is another easy win. Tell Copilot what you want to say, and it writes the email for you. Short, professional, in your voice. Done.

But the most powerful Microsoft 365 Copilot scenario, in my experience, is using Copilot Chat to summarize your day. From any device, you can open Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and ask something like, “Summarize my emails and Teams messages and chats from the last 24 hours, and let me know what I need to know in order to be ready for my day.” Copilot delivers a structured summary: an email recap with key points and action items, tasks assigned to you in documents, the most important Teams threads, and anything you need to follow up on.

You can take this further by asking Copilot to help you prepare for your meetings. For each meeting on your calendar, Copilot pulls the purpose, the latest context from chats and emails, what needs to be decided, and even drafts talking points and a client-ready communication. Walking into back-to-back meetings already briefed is a different experience.

What this means for you

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the most concrete productivity shift Microsoft has shipped in years. It is not a side product you have to remember to open. It is woven into every app you already use, and because it is grounded in your work data, the answers are actually relevant to your job.

If you are an IT professional, the practical implication is that your end users are about to ask you a lot of questions about Copilot. Knowing where it lives, what data it can see, and how the security trimming works should be table stakes. If you are an end user, the win is reclaiming time on the parts of work that drain you the most: catching up on meetings, drafting routine emails, and pulling together status updates.

The fastest way to get value out of Microsoft 365 Copilot is to pick one or two use cases that map to your worst time sinks and use Copilot for those every day for a week. Once those are habit, expand from there.

Ready to go deeper on Microsoft 365 Copilot

If you want to understand the full Copilot ecosystem from Power Platform to Dynamics 365 to Security Copilot and GitHub Copilot, the complete course is on Pluralsight. Watch Microsoft Copilot Foundations on Pluralsight for the full deep dive, or explore the full Microsoft 365 Copilot learning path to follow a structured journey through every Copilot you need to know.

Looking for more on Microsoft 365 Copilot? Check out my guide on how Microsoft 365 Copilot helps you catch up fast across email, Teams, and calendar, the broader Microsoft 365 Copilot feature overview for M365 and Power Platform, and the best practices for crafting the best Copilot prompts so you get the most out of every interaction.

Prefer video? Watch the full walkthrough on my YouTube channel: Microsoft 365 Copilot explained

Plans in Power Apps: Build a Full Solution With Copilot

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:18:47 GMT

What if you could describe a business app in two sentences and have Copilot build the entire solution for you, the data model, the processes, the apps, and the flows? That is exactly what Plans in Power Apps does. In this walkthrough, you will see how the feature works, what each Copilot agent is responsible for, and what it produces when you feed it a real prompt.

Key takeaways

Plans in Power Apps is a Copilot-first development tool that generates full Power Platform solutions from a natural language prompt.
The plan designer uses multiple Copilot agents (requirements, process, data, and solution) that work together to build user roles, business processes, a Dataverse data model, apps, flows, reports, and agents.
You can add files for additional context, but the plan designer is currently limited to around 4,000 tokens (roughly 3,000 words of text).
Even if you do not ship the generated solution, Plans is useful as a documentation and requirements-gathering starting point for professional developers.
Plans lives inside make.powerapps.com and is one of several Copilot features across the Power Platform.

What are Plans in Power Apps

Plans in Power Apps is a Copilot-first development tool that lets you quickly create full Power Platform solutions starting from a prompt. That includes Dataverse tables, Canvas apps, model-driven apps, Power Pages sites, Power Automate flows, and even Copilot Studio agents. In other words, you describe the business problem, and Plans scaffolds an end-to-end solution across the Power Platform instead of just a single app or a single flow.

The feature lives inside make.powerapps.com, the Power Apps maker portal. You start by writing a plain-language description of what you want to build, and Copilot takes it from there.

How the Plans in Power Apps agents work together

When you work with the plan designer, you are not dealing with a single Copilot. You are orchestrating a set of specialized agents that each own a piece of the solution design. The three primary agents you interact with are requirements, data, and solution, and the designer also surfaces a process step as part of the flow. Here is what each one does.

Requirements agent

The requirements agent takes your prompt and turns it into structured user roles and user stories. For a timesheet app, that means it will identify roles like employee, project manager, and accounting staff, then generate the requirements for each role. You can edit the output before moving on, add more requirements, or approve it as-is.

Process agent

Once the requirements are approved, the process agent maps out the business processes the solution needs. It identifies who does what (the employee, the system, the manager), the conditions that branch the flow, and the happy path versus edge cases. The result is a visual process diagram you can review, edit, and iterate on.

Data agent

The data agent generates the Dataverse data model behind the solution. It proposes tables, columns, and relationships based on the requirements and the processes. For a timesheet scenario, that typically means tables like Employee, Project, Timesheet, Timesheet Approval, and Weekly Report, all connected with the right relationships.

Solution agent

Finally, the solution agent decides which Power Platform components the solution needs. It might recommend a Canvas app for employee self-service, a model-driven app for managers, a Power Automate flow for the approval workflow, and a Power BI report for accounting. Depending on the scenario, it can also suggest Copilot Studio agents. You then click Create on each component to let Copilot build it.

Adding files for context (and the 4,000 token limit)

One of the useful parts of the plan designer is that you can attach files for additional context. That might include process diagrams, data models, screenshots of legacy apps, or any other supporting material you have. Copilot uses these as grounding information when it generates the plan.

There is a current limitation to be aware of. You are capped at roughly 4,000 tokens, which works out to about 3,000 words if your input is text only. If you add images, the math gets harder to pin down, but that ballpark gives you a realistic starting point. For most scoping documents, that is more than enough. For lengthy spec documents, you may need to trim to the most relevant pages.

The plan designer supports file uploads for context, but it is currently limited to around 4,000 tokens (approximately 3,000 words of plain text input).

Demo: Building a timesheet app from a 2-sentence prompt

Here is the exact prompt used in the walkthrough:

I want to create an app in which employees can enter the time spent on certain projects. They need to enter hours weekly, and the project managers need to approve it. The total then gets sent weekly to accounting in a report.

That is it. Two to three short sentences, no technical detail, no field list, no wireframes. Click Generate, and Copilot takes over.

Generating user roles and requirements

The requirements agent runs first. In just a few seconds, it produced three roles: employee, project manager, and accounting staff. For the employee role, it generated requirements like submitting hours worked for specific projects each week, editing submitted hours before approval, and viewing the status of weekly timesheets. You can accept the output or iterate on it before moving forward.

Mapping the business processes

After approving the requirements, the process agent kicks in. For this scenario, it produced two processes: weekly timesheet submission and approval, and weekly reporting to accounting. Opening the first process reveals a full flow diagram with conditions, branches, and participants. You can see exactly who does what (the employee enters hours, the system notifies the manager, the manager approves or rejects, and so on).

Of course, if you were shipping this to production, you would want to spend real time validating the process before accepting it. For a demo, the output is remarkably close to a reasonable first draft.

Generating the Dataverse data model

Next, the data agent generates the tables your solution needs. For the timesheet scenario, that included an Employee table, a Project table, a Timesheet table, a Timesheet Approval table, and a Weekly Report table. The relationships between them are already mapped out.

You can keep asking Copilot to add columns, add tables, or modify relationships. What Copilot produces is not final. You can iterate with it until the model matches what you actually need before moving on to the build step.

Creating the apps and flows

When the solution agent runs, it proposes the concrete Power Platform components. In this walkthrough, that included an employee timesheet portal as a Canvas app, a weekly timesheet approval flow in Power Automate, a project manager review app as a model-driven app, and a weekly report in Power BI. You click Create on each one, and Copilot builds the actual component in the background.

At that point, you have gone from a two-sentence prompt to the scaffold of a working Power Platform solution. Not a single flow, not a single app, but the full stack.

When to use Plans in Power Apps (even if you do not ship the output)

Here is a practical take. Even if you do not use Plans in Power Apps to actually build the final solution, it can be a huge accelerator for the work that happens before the build.

The generated user roles, processes, data model, and component list are essentially a free first draft of your design documentation. You can hand the output to a professional developer as a starting point, let them validate and refine it, and save hours of requirements gathering. For teams that struggle with the boring parts of scoping (writing user stories, drawing process maps, defining entities), that alone is worth the price of admission.

If the business scenario is straightforward and the generated solution is good enough, you can absolutely ship it. For anything production-critical, treat the Copilot output as a first draft and apply the same review you would to any design artifact.

What this means for you

If you build on the Power Platform, Plans in Power Apps changes the starting point for every new project. Instead of opening a blank maker portal and deciding what to build first, you describe the business problem and let Copilot produce a candidate solution across apps, flows, and data.

Practically, there are three places to start. First, try Plans on a small, well-understood scenario you already know the answer to. That will calibrate your expectations for what the output looks like and where it needs human review. Second, use it as a documentation accelerator for projects you plan to build by hand. The process diagrams and data model alone can save real time. Third, keep iterating with Copilot after the first generation. You can refine requirements, adjust the data model, and regenerate components until the plan matches what you actually need.

Having worked with Power Platform environments for over a decade, I can tell you this is one of the biggest shifts in how low-code projects get started. The design phase used to be the slow part. With Plans, the slow part is now the review.

Go deeper with Copilot across the Power Platform

Ready to put Copilot to work across your entire Power Platform stack? Plans in Power Apps is just one of many Copilot features worth knowing. My Pluralsight course covers Copilot in Power Automate, Power BI, Power Pages, Canvas apps, model-driven apps, and more, with step-by-step demos for each one. Watch the course on Pluralsight.

Prefer video? Watch the full walkthrough on my YouTube channel: Plans in Power Apps: From a Simple Prompt to a Working Solution (DEMO).

How to create content with Copilot Web Chat (no extra license needed)

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:58:51 GMT

Copilot Web Chat is one of the most underused AI tools already sitting inside your Microsoft 365 subscription. You do not need a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license to start drafting emails, writing internal blog posts, or generating social media content with AI. If you have any Microsoft 365 subscription, you already have access to Copilot Web Chat, and it can handle a lot more than most people realize.

Key takeaways

Copilot Web Chat is included free with any Microsoft 365 subscription, so you do not need a paid Copilot license to start creating content with AI.
You can use Copilot in Outlook to draft email replies using the current email as context.
Copilot Web Chat can generate internal blog posts with specific tone, word count, and content requirements when you provide detailed prompts.
Copilot’s web grounding feature lets you create social media posts from a URL without copying and pasting an entire article.
You should always treat Copilot’s output as a first draft, keep the conversation going, and ask for edits until you are happy with the result.

How Copilot Web Chat helps you create content for free

Many people assume they need a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license to get any real value from AI at work. That is not the case. Copilot Web Chat is available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 subscription, and it is capable of generating a wide variety of text-based content. Whether you need to respond to a project update email, write an announcement for the company intranet, or amplify a blog post on LinkedIn, Copilot Web Chat can get you started in seconds.

The key to getting great results from Copilot Web Chat is understanding that it works best as a conversational partner. You give it context, set expectations, and then refine the output through follow-up prompts. As someone who has authored over 100 Pluralsight courses on Microsoft technologies, I can tell you that the iterative prompting approach makes all the difference.

Draft email replies with Copilot in Outlook

One of the most practical ways to use Copilot Web Chat is drafting email replies directly inside Outlook. Because Copilot is integrated into Outlook as part of Copilot Web Chat, it can read the email you are replying to and use it as context for your response.

For example, say you receive an email from a colleague asking for a status update on project deliverables. Instead of spending time composing a reply from scratch, you can prompt Copilot with something like: “Draft a reply confirming I can deliver by next week. Let them know I have two items at 90 percent and one that still needs input from the design team. Keep the tone professional but friendly, and suggest a 15-minute sync call on Monday.”

Copilot generates the full reply in seconds. However, there is an important step here. With Copilot Web Chat in Outlook, you need to manually copy the response into your reply. Use that extra step as a chance to review what Copilot wrote before you hit Send. Always validate the output, whether it is an email, a report, or any other content.

Refine the output with follow-up prompts

If the first draft is too long, too formal, or missing something, do not start over. Keep the conversation going. You might ask Copilot to make the email shorter and add that you will send a status update document before the call. Copilot adjusts the draft based on your feedback without losing the original context.

This iterative approach is one of the most important habits to build when working with AI. You are the final decision-maker, so ask Copilot for as many edits as you need.

Write internal blog posts with Copilot Web Chat

Copilot Web Chat can also generate longer content like internal blog posts for your company intranet. The trick is front-loading your prompt with as much context, tone direction, and content requirements as possible. The more detail you provide, the better the first draft will be.

Here is an example prompt that works well: “I’m an IT administrator and I need to write an internal blog post announcing that we’ve completed the migration of Microsoft 365 to all 2,400 employees across 5 offices. The tone should be celebratory but professional. Include a thank you to the Change Champions team and highlight key stats: 89 percent Teams adoption and 92 percent training completion. Include what’s coming next. Keep it under 500 words.”

Notice all the ingredients in that prompt. You have context (what the post is about), expectations (celebratory but professional tone, under 500 words), and specific content requirements (thank the Change Champions, mention key stats). This structure consistently produces strong first drafts.

Fix generic openings and add calls to action

One common issue with AI-generated content is that it tends to start with overused phrases like “We’re excited to share.” If that happens, simply ask Copilot to rewrite the opening with something more engaging. You can also ask it to add a call to action at the end, like encouraging employees to share their favorite Microsoft 365 tips in the comments.

After the follow-up prompt, Copilot rewrote the opening to something much stronger: leading with the key stats and a punchy one-liner instead of the generic opener. The call to action appeared at the bottom exactly as requested.

Another common scenario is when your organization publishes a blog post or press release and asks employees to amplify it on social media. Writing a genuine, personal social post about content you did not directly work on can feel awkward. Copilot Web Chat solves this problem.

Because Copilot Web Chat has access to web grounding, you do not need to copy and paste the entire article. You can simply include the URL in your prompt and Copilot will read the content from the web.

A prompt like this works well: “My company just published this blog post [link]. Marketing is asking employees to share it on social media. Create two different LinkedIn posts under 200 words each with a different angle, and one short X post under 140 characters. Make them sound like they’re coming from me as a genuinely excited employee, not a corporate press release. Keep it authentic and professional.”

Copilot returns multiple options with different angles, each including the link back to the original post. You get variety without having to brainstorm multiple approaches yourself.

Remember, these are first drafts. You can ask Copilot to edit any of them, or you can copy the text into a document and refine it yourself. Always make the content your own before posting, because you are the one putting your name on it.

Bonus: use Copilot for personal content too

Copilot Web Chat is not limited to work scenarios. By switching to Copilot Personal, you can use it for everyday writing tasks. Need to write a fun invitation for a neighborhood barbecue to send in a WhatsApp group chat? Provide the details (date, time, location, what to bring, who is welcome) and ask Copilot to keep it casual and short.

Copilot picks up on the tone you are going for and delivers a message you can copy and paste directly into your group chat. It is a small example, but it shows how versatile this free tool really is.

What this means for you

If you have been waiting for a paid Copilot license to start experimenting with AI content creation at work, you do not need to wait. Copilot Web Chat is already available in your Microsoft 365 subscription, and it handles email drafts, blog posts, social media content, and personal writing tasks without any additional cost.

The most important habit to build is treating Copilot as a conversational partner, not a one-shot tool. Give it detailed prompts, review the first draft, then ask for changes. The more specific your follow-up prompts, the better the final output.

Start with a use case that saves you time today: your next project update email, an intranet announcement, or that social post marketing keeps asking you to write. Once you see how quickly Copilot gets you to a solid first draft, you will find new ways to use it every week.

Ready to go deeper with Copilot Web Chat? This post covers just one clip from the full Pluralsight course on Copilot Web Chat. The complete course walks you through everything from getting started to summarizing documents, creating images and infographics, and using Copilot responsibly. Check out the full Copilot Web Chat course on Pluralsight.

Prefer video? Watch the full walkthrough on my YouTube channel: 3 Ways to Create Content with Copilot Web Chat | No Extra License Needed

Microsoft is REMOVING free Copilot from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 02:30:11 GMT

Starting April 15, 2025, Microsoft is pulling the free Copilot experience out of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for unlicensed users in large tenants. If your organization has more than 2,000 Microsoft 365 seats and your users do not have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, they are about to lose the AI functionality they may already be using every day.

Key takeaways

Organizations with over 2,000 Microsoft 365 seats will lose free Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for unlicensed users starting April 15, 2025.
Organizations with fewer than 2,000 seats keep free Copilot in those apps, but under a new “standard access” tier that may be throttled during peak demand.
Three new branding labels are coming: M365 Copilot (Premium), M365 Copilot (Basic), and Copilot Chat (Basic).
Unlicensed users in large tenants can still use Copilot Chat in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app and Copilot in Outlook.
This change does not affect users who already have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

What is changing on April 15

On March 17, 2025, Microsoft published two Message Center posts outlining changes to how unlicensed users can access Copilot inside Microsoft 365 apps. The changes depend on organization size, specifically whether your tenant has more or fewer than 2,000 Microsoft 365 seats.

This is not just a branding update. For large organizations, it means real functionality is going away for users who do not have the $30 per user per month Microsoft 365 Copilot license. And for smaller organizations, the free experience is being redefined with new limitations.

What happens if you have over 2,000 seats

This is where the biggest impact hits. Starting April 15, users in tenants with more than 2,000 Microsoft 365 seats who do not have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license will lose access to Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote entirely.

That free Copilot button that showed up inside these apps? Gone.

However, unlicensed users in these large tenants are not completely cut off from AI. They can still access:

Copilot Chat in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app
Copilot in Outlook with email and calendar context
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents from within the Microsoft 365 Copilot app (just not directly inside those apps)

This experience will be branded Copilot Chat (Basic).

For organizations that were using the free Copilot experience as a way to ease users into AI adoption before rolling out paid licenses, this is a significant setback. Having someone who has authored over 100 Pluralsight courses on Microsoft technologies, I saw real value in that free tier as a starting point. Users could get comfortable with AI inside the tools they already use, so that when they finally got the full $30 per user per month license, they were productive from day one.

What happens if you have under 2,000 seats

If your organization has fewer than 2,000 Microsoft 365 seats, the news is much better. Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint remains available for unlicensed users. However, Microsoft is introducing a new concept called standard access that comes with some caveats.

Under standard access, Microsoft states that users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license have access to Copilot capabilities, but this access is subject to service capacity and may vary throughout the day. Specifically:

Voice features in Copilot are currently only available to users with premium access (a Microsoft 365 Copilot license).
During periods of high demand, access to Copilot capabilities with standard access may be temporarily restricted.
Quality and performance may vary throughout the day. For example, Microsoft might route your prompts to an older model instead of the latest one.

So if you are in a smaller organization, you keep the free Copilot experience in your Office apps, but Microsoft is drawing a clear line: this is not the same as the full premium experience.

This experience will be branded M365 Copilot (Basic).

New Copilot branding labels explained

Along with these functional changes, Microsoft is introducing clearer labeling so users can see exactly what tier of Copilot they are using. Here is how the branding breaks down:

M365 Copilot (Premium): For users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Full experience, no restrictions. This is unchanged.

M365 Copilot (Basic): For unlicensed users in tenants with fewer than 2,000 seats. Access to Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote remains, but under standard access with possible throttling.

Copilot Chat (Basic): For unlicensed users in tenants with more than 2,000 seats. No Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote. Access is limited to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app and Outlook.

What this means for you

If you are an IT admin in a large organization, this change requires immediate attention. Your users who have been casually using the free Copilot features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will notice when that access disappears on April 15. Prepare communications so people are not caught off guard.

For organizations that were running informal AI adoption programs by letting users explore the free tier, you now need to decide whether to invest in paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses or accept that your unlicensed users will have a much more limited AI experience.

If you are close to the 2,000-seat threshold, this is also worth watching. Imagine being at 1,995 seats, adding a few more users, and suddenly crossing that line. It is probably not a common scenario, but it is an edge case worth understanding. Microsoft should have made the distinction between free and paid Copilot experiences clearer from the start. It was already confusing to explain that unlicensed users could see Copilot in some apps but were not getting the full Microsoft 365 Copilot experience. In many ways, this change is Microsoft correcting course and drawing a sharper line between free and premium.

One ironic side effect: this may be one of the first cases where having a larger Microsoft 365 environment gives you fewer free features than a smaller one.

NEW Microsoft Dynamics 365 Certification Coming: AB-210 (AI-Powered Sales Solution)

Vlad Catrinescu — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Microsoft is preparing a new certification for Dynamics 365 professionals: Exam AB-210, Build AI-Powered Sales Solution. In this short update, I break down the public info available so far, including:

✅ The target audience for AB-210 (Dynamics 365 Sales + Copilot + agent capabilities)
✅ The proposed skills measured (the current exam “buckets”)
✅ How you can influence what ends up on the exam by completing the official blueprint survey (link below)

AB-210 is focused on designing and configuring AI-powered sales solutions in Dynamics 365 Sales, including intelligent opportunity research, AI-driven selling, lead qualification with AI, and extending Dynamics 365 Sales.

✅ Blueprint survey link

Video Summary

Microsoft is gearing up for a new Dynamics 365 certification—the AB-210 exam: Build AI‑Powered Sales Solutions—adding to their growing portfolio of Copilot Studio and AI business solution exams.
If you’ve been following the certification track, you’ll know that in 2025, we lost both Dynamics 365 fundamentals exams (MB‑910 CRM and MB‑920 ERP). Since then, Microsoft has shifted focus toward AI‑driven certifications like AB‑730, AB‑731, AB‑900, and AB‑100.
The AB-210 exam targets professionals who design and configure AI‑powered sales solutions in Dynamics 365 Sales, leveraging Copilot and agent capabilities to streamline the lead‑to‑cash process.
Skills measured include deploying and managing AI sales agents, configuring Dynamics 365 Sales features, managing products and pricing, implementing collaboration tools, setting up forecasting, tailoring AI intelligence, and deploying the sales mobile app.
The exam blueprint isn’t finalized yet—Microsoft is inviting the community to help shape the certification by filling out their survey. If you’re passionate about Dynamics 365 Sales, this is your chance to influence what gets covered.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

We’ve talked about quite a few Copilot Studio and cybersecurity certifications lately, but it looks like Microsoft is working on all their portfolios and is currently working on a certification for Dynamics 365 professionals. Now, let’s be honest. If you have been following Dynamics 365 certifications, you know that in 2025, we lost two major certifications. Actually, we lost both fundamental exams, the MB-910, the CRM fundamentals, and the MB-920, the ERP fundamentals. And meanwhile, while losing those ones, Microsoft has heavily invested in their AB or AI business solutions portfolio with exams such as the AB-730, AB-731, AB-900, and AB-100 exam, which are still in beta, or for the case of the AB-100, recently just came out of beta just a few days before me recording this video. And we also have some of the upcoming Copilot Studio certifications like the AB-610 and the AB-620, which are coming really, really soon. And by the way, if you ever missed the news on those new Copilot Studio certifications, I’ll have a link to the video in the description below.

But back to the topic of this video, it looks like Microsoft is working on the new certification for Dynamics 365 professionals coming soon, and its exam AB-210, Build AI Powered Sales Solutions. In this video, we will cover everything that we know so far about the certification. We will talk about the target audience for the certification, what are the proposed skills covered, and also how you can help shape what will be in the certification because it’s not final yet.

Let’s get started with the target audience. As a candidate for this exam, you design and configure AI-powered sales solutions using Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Copilot, and agent capabilities to help sellers work more efficiently throughout the lead-to-cash process. You translate business requirements into practical seller workflows enhanced with conversational intelligence, predictive insights, guided automation, and secure data access. You work closely with sales operations and IT stakeholders to ensure that solutions align with revenue goals, process optimization, governance standards, and responsible AI practices.

In addition, you’re able to perform the following tasks. You’re able to deploy, manage, and monitor AI-powered sales agents. You’re able to configure Dynamics 365 Sales standard and premium features. And you’re able to create and manage products and pricing. You’re able to implement collaboration features. You’re able to configure the security model, configure forecasting tools, tailor AI-powered intelligence features, and deploy the sales mobile app. That’s quite a lot of things.

The exam is currently set to have four different main skills measured, or buckets let’s say, and they are: develop deals by using intelligent opportunity research, explore AI-driven sales in Dynamics 365, qualify and prioritize leads using AI, and extend and enhance Dynamics 365 Sales.

Now, usually for most certs in the Power Platform, M365, or even security space, I like to go deep into the details on what’s covered. However, I’ll be honest. I’m not a Dynamics 365 expert. So instead, I would like to invite all of you that made it this far in this video—because you must clearly have a passion for Dynamics 365 Sales—to really go and help shape the certification by filling out the blueprint survey. And you’ll have a link in the description below.

And what I want you to do after is let me know in the comments below what you think about this certification. Do you plan to take it? Do you think it’s useful for what the market needs today? Or do you think that Microsoft is focusing on too much AI stuff without focusing on the fundamentals? Anyway you feel, please let me know in the comments below. And if you enjoyed this video, make sure you like it and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss any more Microsoft certification news. On the screen right now, you’ll see another video with more of the latest Microsoft certification and applied skills news. So, I hope I’ll see you in there.

Microsoft Copilot | Vlad Talks Tech

SharePoint Skills FAQ: Your Webinar Questions Answered

Skills vs Saved Prompts and Other Tools

Why Is a Skill Different From a Saved Prompt?

When Should I Use a Skill Instead of a Power Automate Flow, a Copilot Studio Agent, or a SharePoint Agent?

Running Skills

Can Skills Run on a Schedule, When a File Is Added, or From Power Automate?

Is There a Limit to How Many Documents a Skill Can Classify, and Can It Handle 10,000 Files?

Can a Skill Create Site Pages From a Template and Add Quick Links Web Parts?

Sharing and Protecting Skills

Why Can’t I Share a Skill I Created in a Shared OneDrive Folder?

How Do I Protect the Skill Files in the Agent Assets Library?

Governance and Lifecycle Management

Can I Maintain SKILL.md Files With Azure Pipelines in Azure DevOps?

Until Enterprise Skills Arrive, Is PnP PowerShell the Way to Govern Skills?

SharePoint Agents vs Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents

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Is a SharePoint Agent the Same as an Agent Created in Microsoft 365 Copilot?

What This Means for You

AB-620 Exam: What to Expect, Difficulty, and Study Tips

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What happened to the AB-610?

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Testing agents and ALM with Power Platform pipelines

How to study for the AB-620 exam

Exam format, questions, and Microsoft Learn access

AB-620 vs Copilot Studio Applied Skills

What this means for you

Copilot Studio Applied Skill APL-7008 Is Retiring June 30

What the Copilot Studio Applied Skill (APL-7008) covered

Why retiring this credential is a surprise

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The Copilot Studio credentials you can still earn

What this means for you

AI Agents vs AI Chatbots: What Makes Them Different

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What is an AI agent?

The 4 capabilities that set AI agents apart from AI chatbots

1. Role-playing

2. Memory systems

3. Tool assignment

4. Execution loops

The 3 types of AI agents you should know

Retrieval agents

Task-based agents

Autonomous agents

You don’t need to be a developer to build an AI agent

What this means for you

Ready to start building AI agents in your organization?

Microsoft 365 Conference 2026 Recap: Top Announcements

Microsoft 365 Conference 2026: Two Keynotes, One Story

What Was New for Microsoft Copilot

Multi-Model Support With Claude and OpenAI

Researcher and the Critique Agent

Copilot Cowork Versus Claude Cowork

Microsoft Teams Updates From the Microsoft 365 Conference 2026

Fundamentals: Loop Pages, Threaded Discussions, and Catch Up

Customizable Meeting Controls

Facilitator and Channel Agents

SharePoint Got the Biggest News at M365 Conf 2026

New SharePoint UI Goes Generally Available

Viva Connections and Viva Amplify Rebrand to SharePoint

AI Comes to SharePoint Lists

SharePoint Skills Public Preview

Agent 365 Hits General Availability on May 1

Agent 365 Pricing

The New Shadow AI Pane

Onboarding Agents With Governance Templates

One Billion Agents by 2028, and Microsoft’s Internal Number

Vibe Coding and the NASA Power Platform Story

What Vibe Coding Looks Like in Power Platform

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What This Means for You

Want to Build Your First SharePoint Skill?

Microsoft 365 Copilot Explained: What It Is and How to Use It

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How Microsoft 365 Copilot is different from ChatGPT and Gemini

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