Discover how to unlock the full potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot in this brand-new series! Join Vlad Catrinescu and Sebastien Levert as they dive into customizing Copilot for your organization.
From creating agents with SharePoint to leveraging Graph connectors and declarative agents, this series offers hands-on demos and expert insights. Perfect for IT pros and developers alike, each episode increases in complexity—so whether you’re a no-code maker or a seasoned dev, there’s something for you.
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Video Summary
- Introduction to the series on customizing Microsoft 365 Copilot, highlighting its evolving nature and importance.
- Explanation that Copilot is both a product and a suite of products, including Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and more.
- Emphasis on the value of customizing Copilot for your organization by integrating all your data and tailoring it to your needs.
- Collaboration with Sebastien Levert, a principal PM manager on the M365 Copilot DevX team, for technical insights.
- Overview of the series content, which includes seven episodes starting with basic concepts and gradually increasing in complexity.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Video Transcript
Hello everyone and welcome to this brand new series right here on Vlad Talk Tech, which is an introduction to The Ultimate Guide to Customizing Microsoft 365 Copilot. Let me start off by telling you why I’m even starting this series and why it’s important.
You see, for the past 18 months since Microsoft started talking about Copilot, the messaging has changed a lot. We all know how much we love rebranding as IT pros and users. Depending on who you talk to, Microsoft pitches it differently—from your personal assistant to the UI for AI, as Satya said at the last Ignite. Somebody recently asked me, “Vlad, what is Copilot? Is it a product, a suite of products, a platform you build on, or is it all of the above?” This kind of reminds me of the discussions we had about SharePoint more than a decade ago. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why people are confused.
First of all, Copilot is a product that you access at copilot.microsoft.com or a different URL for enterprises. That product is, in a way, like a chatbot, very similar to ChatGPT or Claude AI. It’s also a suite of products because we have Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot in the Power Platform, Copilot in Dynamics, and many more. More importantly, we talk so much about agents right now, which are built on top of Copilot. Personally, I already have over 10 hours of training on Pluralsight on how to use the Copilots built by Microsoft.
As we get into 2025, which many say is the year of agents and the year of custom Copilot, we have to admit that Copilot is an even more valuable tool when you customize it for your organization. When it not only has access to all your data in Microsoft 365 but really all your data, it answers in the tone and format that you need for your company with your logic. That’s why I’m doing this series.
I have even more good news. I won’t be doing this series alone. I’m really good at using Copilot that’s built by Microsoft. I can do a few things to customize it without code but to truly take it to the next level, sometimes you need a developer. The best developer I know is sitting right here next to me, and it’s Sebastien Levert. Seb, thank you so much for being here. I’m so excited to be here today.
I am so happy that we get to first spend some time together, which is great. The second thing is that I get to present with you on a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. I’m really happy to be here. Well, Seb, almost everybody knows you in the Copilot community. However, I prepared some intro slides for you, and I know it’s super fun when somebody prepares your intro slides, and you don’t know what’s on them. This is scary now.
First of all, a new promotion not that long ago—a principal PM. Is that a principal PM manager on the M365 Copilot DevX team? What’s that team? It’s a team that builds all the developer tooling for customizing M365 Copilot. That includes integrations in some of our VS Code extensions we have called the Team Toolkit. This is integration into some of the experiences we have in the chat experience and so much more.
We’re going to showcase all of that today. Well, you’re the right person for the job for this series then. You also have a little patent cube that I see when you’re back home in the office. I see you created something cool enough for Microsoft to say, “Hey, we’re going to patent this thing.” What was it? With three other colleagues—two advocates, Waldek Mastykarz and Garry Trinder, and Gavin Barron, who is also on my team on the engineering side—we took advantage of one of the best weeks in Microsoft, which is the hackathon week.
We created a really cool tool that helps devs test when you’re calling external APIs. It’s a product you might have seen; it’s called Dev Proxy today. Some of the concepts in there we were able to patent. It was kind of a checklist item that we wanted to get to, and we’re quite happy and honored about it. That’s awesome. And you used to be an MVP? Yes, for seven years. Six, five, six, seven—I don’t remember exactly how many.
Back when we were working together at Valo and Two to Lead and things like that. Exactly. I remember that program is still very near and dear to my heart. I still love to meet with the MVPs on an almost daily basis. It’s always such a great moment to gather everybody up together, go back to Redmond, and have these great events at the MVP Summit. We still love to bug you on the team, on the MVP team, so it’s perfect.
Sadly, sometimes. For those of you that Seb’s face seems familiar, it’s because we have already done a series together. It was the Building the Ultimate Modern SharePoint Intranet. That’s a while ago. It’s been a couple of years, but now that has over 100,000 views, which is amazing. My goal is for this series to have even more than that. That is the goal right now.
What will this series include? This series, at least to get started, will include seven videos. This one, so you’re almost done with one. It will include a ton of deep-dive demos. We have to do some slides at some point, especially as we talk about concepts, but we’ll try to have mostly demos and lots of fun and some dad jokes. Seb, since you’re a SharePoint dev, I have a joke for you. I’m listening.
Why did SharePoint go to the beach? I don’t know, Vlad. To build a sandbox. Solutions. Thank you very much for this one. That’s the best one I could come up with. I’ll work on some more for the next episode. I appreciate that. Now let’s talk about the episodes in the series. The first one, which is coming right up after this one, will be all about terms and concepts. That’s one that, Seb, I really need a lot of clarification on because so many things have changed in the past six months. We went from Copilots to agents, and then we had custom engines and declarative plugins. Some of those things remain, and some of those things changed.
This will really be that video in which we will cover the bases, that solid foundation. Then I’ll get to do one because this one has no code, so that’s for me. It will be creating agents from SharePoint. I’m really excited to do that one. I still love SharePoint a lot. I still do a lot of SharePoint, so that will be fun. After that, Seb will take it over. Seb, I’ll let you talk about what the next episodes are about. Then we’re going to dive into the next step of what the agents and SharePoint would be. We’re going to extend M365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, with Agent Builder.
We will be using the experience that lives inside Business Chat inside M365 Copilot to extend its capabilities, bringing agents that are grounded in your organizational data. That also covers some of the really cool capabilities we have in there with Code Interpreter, Graph Cards, and a couple of nice surprises. Then afterwards, we’re going to extend Copilot with built-in Graph Connectors. Graph Connectors are a great concept to bring data inside Microsoft 365 to be able to leverage that data using our semantic indexing, meaning that you can ask natural language questions and the data will talk back to you.
That is really cool, so we’re going to bring some of that. After that, we’re going to build some Copilot connectors with code. Then we’re going to dive into code, and that’s where you’ll be happy, I’ll be happy, but I think you also in the audience will appreciate the fact that there are really cool capabilities coming down the pipe on these. Finally, we’re going to build what we call a declarative agent using code. How does it play in the end-to-end story for a developer to go a little bit above and beyond what Agent Builder offers for the maker or for the information worker? How can we leverage the dev persona to really bring a ton of value straight to Microsoft 365 Copilot?
That’s going to cover my side of the house. That’s awesome. I’m looking forward to it. Again, if there are things like Seb mentioned—a declarative agent—if you have no idea what they are at this point, that’s okay. We will cover all of them. Also, I want to say that the cool thing is that this series will increase in complexity with every episode. Of course, we hope you’ll listen to every single episode. When we mean complexity, you have to assume that the cooler thing you create, the more complicated it is. As we go into code, if you have a code background, it will be a lot easier for you to understand that. Even if you don’t and you just want to know what’s possible, that is okay for you.
You will enjoy them. You’ll see what’s possible, but we would love if you actually open up Visual Studio or open up SharePoint and follow along and do all of those with us. Copilot never stops evolving. Sometimes we wish they would take a little break. At least on the rebrands, I feel like on the rebrands, I wish they would take a little break. Anyway, we have the initial plan for the first seven episodes, but we hope this series will grow even more in the future. I know that in May, Microsoft Build is coming up.
I don’t know if you know the usual dates yet, but it’s usually in May. I’m sure they’re going to announce new ways for us to customize Copilot or again rebrand something. If you enjoyed this series and want to connect with us on social media, you have all of our social networks in the description right below.
I know Seb is really active on Blue Skies these days, but of course, we’re both on LinkedIn, and both still on X, which I still want to call Twitter. It’s weird to call it X. I want to call it Twitter. And this is while we’re done with the intro. Looking forward to seeing you in the next video. If you see the playlist appear on the screen right now, and if there are any episodes that are not out yet, make sure you follow the channel. This way you’ll get notified as soon as they’re out. Thank you so much and see you in the next one. Cheers.
