?? Copilot for Microsoft 365 AI Plugins & AI Prompt Plugins with use your own data (RAG Pattern)

Microsoft 365 Copilot offers a variety of plugin types designed to enhance productivity and streamline workflows. These plugins extend the capabilities of Copilot by allowing it to interact with third-party services and APIs, providing users with real-time information and task automation within their familiar Microsoft 365 environment.

We have two types of plugins right now. Teams Message Extension Plugins (Pro-Code) and Power Platform Plugins (Low-Code). The Power Platform Plugins (Low-Code) are further divided into different types:

• Conversational plugins: These plugins are similar to standard topics in Copilot Studio
• AI plugins: AI Prompts, Power Automate flows, Power Platform custom connectors and OpenAI plugins

Today's article is about the AI Prompt Plugins (Which is just a warper for AI Builder| AI prompt). Before, we used to have only a very simple AI Prompt with some input values, but now this has changed completely with the new feature of using your own data in a prompt "Data used" feature. This allows you to implement a real data Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern with just natural language.

In the article I will explore how the Copilot for Microsoft 365 AI Prompt Plugins function by examining what happens behind the scenes.

Explaining how you could utilize the new "use your own data in a prompt" feature to implement a real data Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern with just natural language.

Finally, I will show how to utilize the AI Prompt Plugins from within the Microsoft Copilot Chat.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 AI Plugins | AI Prompt Plugins Detailed Flow

You can think of AI Builder | AI Prompt as a task or a goal you give to the large language model (LLM). With the prompt builder, you can build, test, and save your custom prompts.

AI Prompt is not just used within the Copilot for Microsoft 365 AI Plugins, but it also could be integrated with Power Automate, Power Apps, or Copilot Studio.

For Power Apps once you've created and tested your prompts using the prompt builder, you can use them within your application by calling them through Power Fx Functions.

For Power Automate the prompt can be added as an action in a Power Automate flow so it's possible to generate text from it inside an automated process.

What is common for Power Apps & Power Automate that the APP maker needs to set the AI Prompt input value at design time while creating their APP.

In the case of Copilot for Microsoft 365 AI Plugins the Copilot Orchestrator will be able to reason over user natural language prompt, mapping user's intent to slots (AI Plugin input values), then call the AI Plugin (work as a wrapper) which will call the AI prompt with the needed input values in the background.

AI Prompt Plugins with use your own data (RAG Pattern)

With this new capability, you can add Dataverse data records as an input source to your AI Prompts. This will allow you to enrich the knowledge from the LLM with enterprise data stored in Dataverse to implement a real data Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern.

In prompt builder, you can utilize the "Data used" option to select one Dataverse table. The fields of the active view of this table are used by the generative model to get more knowledge while answering based on the custom prompt defined and inputs provided.

You can filter the data, which is retrieved by expanding the table and selecting the filtered field and filter value. The value can be a free-form text, an input of the prompt, or when filtering on a choice or option set as one of its named values.

Finally, you can insert multiple data and related tables' data references in your prompt and use it with natural language by selecting insert and navigating through the data and relationships. Each data reference is used by the LLM model to answer.

And then you will have your AI Prompt ready to be called from within Microsoft Copilot Chat

AI Prompt Plugin in the Microsoft Copilot Chat

Once you save your AI Prompt it will be published automatically and exposed as an AI Prompt Plugin to be consumed from the Microsoft Copilot Chat | Plugins Flyout | Copilot Studio Group.

By default, AI Prompt plugins are only visible and usable by the person who authored them. However, the plugin author can share their plugins in the portal where they created them. For example, you can share an AI Builder Prompt from the AI prompts page by selecting Share for the prompt.

Once you activate the AI Prompt Plugin from the plugins flyout, you just have to write a prompt and then the Copilot Orchestrator will determine if your plugin should be invoked, invoke it and then return the response back to you.

?Important Note: The AI Prompt Plugins are still in the public preview stage and they may take a while to run, at least in my development tenant. Therefore, sometimes they may not be successful called by Microsoft Copilot Chat because of timeout.

Summary

Copilot for Microsoft 365 AI Prompt plugins streamline productivity by integrating natural language processing with enterprise data. with the new use your own data, users implement real data Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns seamlessly.

As organizations continue to harness AI and natural language processing, the AI Prompt Plugins will play a pivotal role in driving productivity and innovation within Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Resources

• Overview of AI prompts
• Use your own data in a prompt
• Create AI plugins for Microsoft Copilot (preview)

Sharing Is Caring!

#MicrosoftCopilotTips #ModernWorkplaceAI #CopilotForMicrosoft365