Guide to Building Copilot Agents with NO CODE using Agent Builder

Believe it or not, you don’t need any code to build Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents! That’s thanks to the Copilot Studio Agent Builder, and thanks myself and Seb, you’ll know how to do it yourself in just 23 minutes. 🙂

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Video Summary

• Agent Sharing and Customization: You can create agents for personal use and later adjust sharing settings to make them available to specific users or the entire organization. This flexibility helps agents become viral within teams.
• Web Integration and Data Grounding: By default, agents are grounded in enterprise data, but you can enable web searches for broader information. However, it’s often best to keep the scope limited to ensure relevance and accuracy.
• Enhanced Capabilities: The Agent Builder allows you to add capabilities like code interpretation and image generation. These features enable agents to perform tasks such as creating word clouds and generating images based on document content.
• Continuous Updates and Improvements: Agents can be continuously updated with new capabilities, data sources, and instructions. This ensures they remain useful and aligned with evolving organizational needs.
• Future Enhancements: Upcoming features will allow users to upload specific documents for agents to analyze and compare against vetted presentations, enhancing the customization and utility of agents in providing best practices and improvements.

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

Video Transcript

Do you want to take Microsoft 365 Copilot to the next level? One sure way to do it is to create your own agents. However, many people think that you need code to create agents, which is not always true because you can create custom agents without a single line of code with the Agent Builder. Welcome back to the ultimate guide to customizing Microsoft 365 Copilot series. I’m joined again by Sebastien Levert, Principal PM Manager at Microsoft, an amazing developer. Seb, how are you doing?

“I’m doing pretty okay, Vlad, I don’t think you’ll ever get tired of me calling you an amazing developer.”

“Oh no, I won’t. I see the smile on your face every time, and I love it. I love it. I’ll change your contact in my phone to ‘SE Amazing Dev Levert.’”

“So, Seb, earlier in the series, we covered terms and concepts, and we covered how to create agents in SharePoint. Now, what’s next?”

“Well, today in this episode, we will be covering how we can customize M365 Copilot with Agent Builder. Agent Builder is an offering that sits right inside Microsoft 365 Copilot and helps anybody create agents. In the previous episodes, we discussed how we can build great agents using SharePoint. Well, it’s a similar experience that we have that adds a little bit more capabilities but also sits directly within the regular experience for Copilot, which is M365 Copilot. So, let me go. I have one slide, one slide, I promise. It’s a single slide, and I’ll go through this. What is currently flashing on the screen is really what M365 Copilot powers, right? It’s what it offers and what it’s providing. Today, we’re going to talk about how we can bring instructions and grounding as knowledge but also how we can bring actions and capabilities as skills directly inside M365 Copilot. That’s it. Let’s do it. Let me show you. In Copilot, we have it here. I don’t have any real custom agents right now. I have two existing agents. One’s called Visual Creator, which is a default agent that lives within Copilot that helps you create really creative images, but also I have a GitHub agent. We’re going to come back to that in a later episode. But for now, I want to be able to create an agent. So, how would I do that? I would look at my screen. Where would I see ‘Create an Agent’? Well, right there. It’s super simple. It’s not big enough. It needs to flash like the flight.”

“Exactly. So, and the experience here is really seamless. You’re going to see how easy it is to create an agent from scratch. So, let’s do it. Let’s create an agent. Let me ask you an admin question. Who can create an agent right now?”

“Basically, a lot of people. So, all the users in your organization can create agents to empower them in their own personal productivity as part of this. So, it’s open to everybody to see that button.”

“Exactly. It is open to everybody. There will be some controls down the line to allow a select set of users, but right now, everybody can create an agent.”

“Awesome. So, I hit ‘Create an Agent,’ and I have a Copilot Studio experience that comes in. This Copilot Studio experience is what we call Agent Builder. See it as a lightweight version of the full-blown Copilot Studio that is focusing on one thing: building declarative agents that are customizing M365 Copilot. Not the custom engine you’re going to leverage. You’re going to build on top of our AI. You’re not going to be using some of the work that we’re doing with the custom engine and so on. So, while this…”

“I was going to say a quick question for you. So, from a tooling perspective, the first thing, the easiest thing is SharePoint agents. Then after that, you have the Agent Builder, which is a light version of the Copilot Studio. Then you have Copilot Studio that can do everything that SharePoint agents can do, everything that Agent Builder can do, but Copilot Studio can also do custom engine.”

“Yes, the full version.”

“And then, of course, code can do everything.”

“Exactly.”

“But that’s kind of the pyramid: SharePoint, Agent Builder, Copilot Studio.”

“I was going to say Visual Studio. You can use other stuff, but yeah, exactly. In our world, Visual Studio is a pro-code experience that we’re providing. So, the first experience you’re going to see here, I think it’s brilliant. It starts with a conversation. How do you use Copilot today? Well, you talk with it. Why wouldn’t you use Agent Builder to actually talk with it? So, the first question is, ‘Hey, what do you want to do?’ Or maybe you want to try from a template. We are giving you three templates that you can start from. We’re not going to do that today, but if you want, you can either create them out of the box and use them as is, or you can then customize them to your own needs. For example, from the writing coach, maybe you have some writing principles or guidelines that you also have in your organization. You would be able to ground it in a specific set of documents, for example. But now, okay, so what do I want to do? Well, I want to build an agent that is an expert at summarizing documents and should always end its answers with a fun fact about poutine. So, I’m just going to hit send, and now it’s going to start crafting the experience. It’s going to ask me a little bit more questions. So, right, the agent is now… Now let’s decide on a name. I will call it Poutine Expert. Okay, we’re going to call it the Poutine Agent. Okay, so now it’s going to build all of the… So, there we go. Now, on the right here, you see my Poutine Agent is now all updated. It adds the starter prompts that we learned about. It adds the description. So, do you have an agent that creates an agent?”

“It is kind of that, an agent that creates an agent. Okay, so what should be emphasized or avoided in the agent’s response? Always be professional and emphasize and put more light on technical requirements from the document set. Something interesting also, you’re going to see I’m going to make a bunch of typos. Copilot is clever enough to correct what you’re giving it, so it should not be too much of an issue unless your typo means a completely other word, and then it will. But okay, that’s pretty good. So now it does stuff. Should be formal. I already did it, but I wanted it… I want it to be funny.”

“So, professional but funny.”

“Yeah, exactly. So, it’s going to get the data, but it’s going to return that to me as some funny statements. Now it’s ready to go. I can go here and say, ‘Hey, I need a summary of this doc,’ or ‘I need an overview of the doc.’”

“But which doc?”

“Yeah, but there’s no attach button.”

“No, there’s no attach button here. Well, what I want to do here is ground it in more data. We just added the instructions, so let’s ground it in data. And that’s where you flip onto the configure experience of Agent Builder. You’re going to see here, look at that. All of the name, the instructions have been fully made for me. I don’t even have to think about it. Everything is there, so I won’t even touch any of those.”

“So, I have a question for you. You see the way that it formatted the instruction. Is this the way that Copilot prefers? Because you know when I do it in SharePoint, I just type it as a paragraph. Should I do it in this bullet point format? Is it better for Copilot, or it doesn’t change much?”

“It depends. In some cases, you will want to be very formal, especially when you have a set of steps that you want to put in. And that’s where bullet points are definitely a great thing. When we think about these things, also providing some sort of markdown-ish format like ‘this is a heading,’ ‘this is step number one,’ ‘this is step number two’ is also something that helps with grounding it.”

“Awesome. So now let’s go to our knowledge. So, I’m going to add some knowledge. I’m going to browse here. I’m going to go to my production department. It’s going to automatically find my latest. And I saw really quick, so similar to SharePoint, up to 20 sources, right?”

“Yes, it’s the exact same. It’s living on the same platform. So, it’s the same limitation. So, I’m going to go here and say, ‘Hey, you know what? I want to have all of that doc, all of that doc lib. That’s it. I’m good with that.’ So now I just literally grounded it in the root folder of that documents library. If I want, I can go here and open the location. It’s going to open it up directly here, and I will be able to find the documents folder that I have here. All of that is good. You can also ground it in the web. You can decide. Yes, by default, it’s off. If you want to put it in, now it’s going to also ask the web for some questions, maybe related to the poutine areas that you want to do. It might invoke some of that. So, it really depends. And we’re going to see later on that when you’re building with pro code, sometimes you even have more capability into deciding which website.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to go everywhere. You just want a few websites that you trust.”

“Exactly, in that case, it’s all the web, so as the Bing index, but later on, we’re going to see that we have a little bit more control. So, I’m going to put it on, and we’ll see what happens out of this.”

“Sorry, one quick extra question for you because I’m seeing this for the first time. That’s excellent. Under SharePoint, I see docx, doc, txt, pptx, ppt, no PDF, or is it just lack of space?”

“I would say it’s probably lack of space. PDF or so, we’re basically grounding in the same index that SharePoint is doing, so the same content that lives in SharePoint should also live here.”

“Awesome, thank you. Then, you also have the opportunity to ground into your organization. What is the data that lives in the organization? Is it graph connectors or co-pilot connectors?”

“Actually, these co-pilot connectors are ways to ingest data inside M365 that you can also ground your answers in. Right now, I will not be using it. We’re going to come back to this capability a little bit later, but you have the opportunity to ground it in data that comes from external sources without the complexity of thinking about an API and how to authenticate and so on. Then, I want to stay there for now.”

“So now, I can actually go here and say, what are the two policies? Let’s do it to eat poutine at least once a week. Hopefully, that’s the healthy guide here in Quebec. So now, it does a couple of things. First, it got me an answer based on the content. The content is here. It’s actually coming straight from that website that lives in my production department. It summarized it, and something that is really interesting is because we said you’re an expert at summarizing, it does a little bit more than just finding the content. It summarizes some of these guidelines for us. You can see it here, and at the end, we have the fun fact. Did you know that poutine, a delicious Canadian dish, consists of fries topped with cheese curds and smothered in gravy? It’s a must-try.”

“Yes, it is a must-try, but it also gives you that. So, it’s quite interesting. We have the exact same scenario we had earlier, and now we’re good to go. Let’s see, we’re ready. I’m going to hit create. What create means, it means that now I tested it, I’m happy with the results, I’m happy to publish it. Let’s do it. I’m going to hit create. The first thing it’s going to do, it’s going to create an agent for yourself. So, that’s why it’s really powerful. It creates an agent for you, just for you.”

“Okay, and then these things are now available for you as part of your regular workflow. What does it mean? It means that anytime you go back to Copilot, you’re going to have this opportunity. Then afterwards, it’s going to give you a link, and the link only works for you.”

“I like that. So, it’s only for you. I cannot share it with you just yet. You can change, yes, and then I can go and change the sharing settings. I can say it’s anyone, specific users, or only you. So, depending on this, then I will be able to share this across the organization.”

“That’s really how agents become viral because now you can say, hey, I built, and now I go into a Teams meeting, I drop the link in the chat, everybody goes on and acquires it, and now it’s part of their right trail directly inside.”

“Question, yes. Does this follow the same approval as the Teams app? So, if you do anyone, does it go into an approval queue for the team’s admin, or it’s really everyone?”

“It’s really everyone in that case, the same way document sharing works in, I would say, a regular organization or organization. Don’t apply specific policies. We’re going to talk about the Teams aspect of things when we’re going to come into Pro code.”

“Okay, so I’m just going to leave it to only me here, and I’m good, and I’m happy, and I just cancel. I’m going to hit go to agent. Let’s go. So now, it deep links directly here, and I can say, what are the greatest features at Contoso? Not 100% sure of the content that lives in that site, so I don’t know.”

“There you go. Looks like there is some content coming up here from some of our documents. Interestingly, not here. We said we enabled web. We did, and it got some. It’s really funny. It got an A900 study guide about Contoso and the learn.microsoft.com.”

“Exactly. So, it tries to also, when it searches, like, it’s interesting. Do you think that most people should have it only? Do you think there’s more value in only having it on your enterprise data versus the web?”

“I think there are scenarios where web makes sense. I think that’s why it’s turned off by default. I think it’s preferable, I think, to have it turned off by default because here you want to ground your agent in as little content as possible. So, I think that’s where it really makes big. If the admin turns off web at the tenant level, this will also go off, right?”

“Absolutely, absolutely. So now, I can go back here, and I can just say here, you’re going to see the uninstall. What you can do here is you can go back to create an agent, and you can actually select all agents.”

“Ah, so that’s how you edit it. Yeah, a menu is coming. Okay, but right now, that’s how. What I want to show is other capabilities that we can actually support. So here, you see all the starter prompts first. You can customize them, you can remove them, and you can add more than SharePoint. You can add six instead of only three.”

“Exactly. So, six is kind of the default experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot. Now, you can have two capabilities here. There’s the code interpreter, which helps convert natural language into code that then gets generated or gets run by some random service somewhere that helps you with this.”

“So, I’m random service somewhere within your geographical boundary. Yes, absolutely, within everything. I’m the admin, you know. Yeah, and image generator. So here, we’re basically leveraging the same capability that Designer is using to generate capability. So, what I’ll do, I’ll just turn these two on, and you’ll see. See, I’m just updating it. I just added two new capabilities. You remember, you can add skills, and these skills include either actions or capabilities in Agent Builder. As of today, you cannot yet add any actions, but you can add capabilities.”

“So, let me go here. I’m going to go to Agent. So, based on the top, what did we ask earlier? Based on the top features of Contoso, can you generate an image diagram? Oh, looks like it was not. And as you can see, it’s a live demo. Yeah, it is absolutely a live demo. We’re not faking here, but probably here, it was not able to answer to that.”

“So, what we can do here is, I wonder, do you have the right one open? Because I see two of them there. That’s interesting, actually. I wonder if it just needs a quick refresh for the demo. Let me refresh here. That’s possible. So, list the top features of Contoso. That’s good. And create a word cloud out of it. So, what’s going to happen here, it’s going to get the document, we’ll get all of these words. Now, it’s going to tell you, it’s going to create, based on all of these, it’s going to create a word cloud. We use some Python libraries in the background. You don’t need to know about them. You don’t need to know what is available. But what you need is that it’s going to generate a great visual.”

“So now, it generates the top 10 of these capabilities, and there you have a word cloud that was just created. That’s amazing. Based on that, and remember, we always have our fun fact about poutine. Always. It’s very important. And something else here is, we can do the exact same thing. Based on these features, create an image that represents the diversity of Contoso. So now, it’s going to take the, it’s part of the same conversation, right? Yeah. So, it’s going to be able to take some of that, and now what it’s going to do, it’s going to go and use Designer, and will automatically use Designer to create these images. It’s going to take a couple of seconds. Then afterwards, you will be able to use these images inside your presentations, inside your documents, as a meme, as a way to make your colleagues laugh, and so on and so forth.”

“And when I click here, you’re going to see some of them are really around some of the capabilities that we had listed here. Remember, AI and image generation and words are not the best friends. You never ask it for text, exactly. But here, you see how different the options have been created by the graphic art capability that is really funny.”

“So, okay, so, and sorry, I saw too.”

“Yeah, it gets really creative sometimes.”

“It is, absolutely. So, image generation adds Microsoft Designer to your agent.”

“Yes, and code, code generator, right, code interpreter. Code interpreter, that one, for me, I don’t know why I thought you can give it code and it explains it to you, but that’s for diagrams, whether it’s a word cloud, it’s visualization. You can also do math with it, like get data. I have a very complex formula. I want to get the data from there. I want to, give me, give me, I don’t know, the average per year of data that lives in my M365 environment. You can do a lot of really interesting things that really only code can do. LLMs are not great at math. LLMs are not great at generating images, so you need to train them, and that’s exactly what code interpreter does to do these kinds of things.”

“Actually, that’s amazing. That’s not what I would have thought code interpreter is, but it’s even better than I thought.”

“Exactly, and people are sometimes kind of thrown off by the name code interpreter because that’s really how the capability is thought of in the industry. But when you see it in real life and with real code, I think it’s really, really powerful.”

“It is, it’s really cool. So, I wanted to show you that just for today. So, with only this, think about it. You just created an agent. You might have made it available to all of the users in your tenant. Yeah, you shared it. Now you can update it. You can add or remove capabilities, add or remove sites, add or remove content from SharePoint, update your instructions, republish it, and now your regular information workflow is now a full AI workflow. One final question for you. Go back in the message box here. So, you cannot, if you give it knowledge, you cannot upload your own document. I see that is still grayed out.”

“Exactly, but that is something that is coming up. In addition to that knowledge, you can also upload specific, more knowledge specific to that problem. So, think about that scenario. Think about you have a great library of vetted presentations that were able to convey a great storyline. Yeah, now you can bring your own conversation, your own presentation to that and say, tell me where I can improve based on the underlying data that lives in that agent.”

“Oh, and then it’s going to compare your presentation to these presentations that were vetted in the past. Help me with best practices based on that.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Exactly. So, these capabilities are coming also to agents. So, with the poutine agent, we have the equivalent of what we have in SharePoint with a little bit more. And that’s, you remember that Indigo Studio experience that you had? Well, that would bring you to a similar experience where you would be able to add these capabilities also to that agent and make it available as part of M365 Copilot. And we’ll see in the next couple of episodes on how we can do that in a more detailed way. We’re going to really dive into M365 and Visual Studio. But also, the advantage of it being here is that I’ll have it from the Teams app. I’ll have it eventually, I think, in Word and PowerPoint. I’ll be able to call it from everywhere. I’m not sure if it’s there yet. I think if it’s not there, it’s literally coming out very, very soon. But it is available as part of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, soon Teams. And so, directly from Word, I’ll be able, PowerPoint, I’ll be able to compare the slide with that presentation best practices.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s amazing. That’s exactly the point.”

“Awesome. Well, Seb, thank you so much for sharing this amazing content. I can’t wait to go try it on my own and build an agent this way. For everyone, I really hope you enjoyed this video and found it valuable. Make sure to check out the next episode in the series, which should be on your screen right about now. And of course, make sure you hit that subscribe button to get notified as soon as new episodes are available. Thank you so much, everyone, for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one.”