Ignite 2024 Summary - Agents, agents, agents!

I prepared for You the summary of the most important news, announcements and articles about Microsoft 365 from the last week. Enjoy!

Agents in SharePoint now in general availability

we introduced agents in Microsoft 365 to drive the next level of business value for organizations. These agents are ready to use, each with specialized skills and knowledge to support unique roles. They work alongside or on behalf of a person, team, or organization to handle simple tasks and more complex, business processes.

As part of agents in Microsoft 365, we’re excited to announce the general availability of agents in SharePoint today, enabling users to turn SharePoint sites and documents into scoped agents that are subject matter experts for your business needs. These agents empower everyone to quickly surface insights, scale expertise, and make informed decisions. Agents in SharePoint will begin rolling out this week with expected completion by the end of this calendar year.

Employees create a vast amount of digital content. Every day two billion files are added to SharePoint and OneDrive, and two million new SharePoint sites are created. This expansive amount of knowledge is key to your organization’s success but it’s often hard for employees to find, absorb, and act efficiently with all this information. AI is a critical tool to unlock your organizational content to enable productivity and better business decisions.

Agents in SharePoint offer a powerful capability for everyone to define agents as specifically as needed. These agents are designed to empower site owners and users to quickly access valuable information and insights for their projects and tasks. Agents created in SharePoint are like subject matter experts for you and team members, helping to streamline workflows and enhance productivity.

Autonomous Agents in Microsoft 365

We’re introducing the preview of new agents in Microsoft 365. These agents supercharge Copilot – adding specialized skills and knowledge while automating specific tasks. These out-of-the-box agents take on unique roles, working alongside or on behalf of a team or organization to handle both simple, mundane tasks to more complex, multi-step business processes. These agents in Microsoft 365 will drive the next level of business value for every organization. Meetings and chats are the backbone of collaboration – yet managing meetings is cumbersome and costly, and tracking multiple group chats can be overwhelming with important information getting easily buried. And it’s expensive to hire a dedicated resource to ensure that meetings are run efficiently.

Copilot Studio is enhancing its platform with knowledge improvements, Azure AI integration, and more

Microsoft Copilot Studio is the place to build agents. Here, organizations can build the agents they need to augment their workforce and execute business processes. Microsoft is investing in agent capabilities that help customers boost the quality of their agents to unlock business value. Here is a summary of the key announcements for Microsoft Ignite 2024:

• Copilot Studio expands knowledge with advanced tuning capabilities and third-party sources. Makers will be able to boost the quality of their agents with the latest generative models, new knowledge sources, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enhancements. They will also be able to curate and fine-tune their knowledge—seeing what works well and what doesn’t—so that agents can provide relevant answers to its users. Analytics on knowledge sources will also be available.
• Use Azure AI capabilities directly in Copilot Studio. Makers will now be able to utilize custom Azure AI Search indexes as a knowledge source for custom RAG scenarios and call any of the more than 1,800 prebuilt or custom-built Azure AI models from within Copilot Studio.
• Autonomous agents are now in preview. Makers can now build agents that work on their behalf, without having to prompt the agent, saving human hours and increasing efficiency. They can create these agents from scratch or configure agents that are prebuilt in Copilot Studio.
• New multi-modal capabilities allow agents to interact beyond text. Organizations can now add generative AI to their voice solutions, including to their interactive voice (IVR) system, or deploy agents in applications and other experiences for users to interact with using their voice. Not only will users be able to speak to these agents, they will also be able to upload images and prompt their agent to analyze and answer questions about the image.
• The Microsoft 365 Agents SDK is in preview. Developers can now build enterprise-grade, scalable, multi-channel agents with code using the SDK. These agents can operate across a variety of channels including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, web, and more. They can also access Copilot Studio agents, to extend its capabilities, enabling continuity from Copilot Studio to code-first scenarios. The SDK is available in C# and, developers can call AI services of their choice, including Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, or others.
• New analytics are available. In addition to analytics on knowledge sources, makers will now also be able to see session data and trends sooner. Key KPIs, such as engagement rate and satisfaction scores will show trends from the previous period.
• Information workers can build agents directly in Microsoft 365. With Copilot Studio’s simplified agent builder experience, accessible directly within Microsoft 365 Copilot, information workers can easily build and share their own agents.
• Copilot Control System enables IT to confidently adopt and deploy Copilot and agents. The Copilot Control System is a collection of IT capabilities that include data access and security policies, management controls for Copilot and agents, and measurement reports and tools to track adoption and business value.

Copilot Actions - Process automation in Copilot

New Copilot Actions automate everyday tasks with simple, fill-in-the-blank prompts that you can set and forget. For example, you can automatically receive a summary of your most important action items at the end of each workday, create an action to gather inputs from your team for a weekly newsletter you send each Thursday, or automate customer meeting prep with a recurring action that summarizes your last few interactions ahead of your next sync. In private preview.

Introducing Copilot Analytics for ROI

AI is revolutionizing work today, enhancing productivity and business processes to deliver new value. As AI continues to evolve, measuring usage, adoption trends and impact of AI-powered assistants like Copilot and agents is crucial for achieving business transformation. While measuring minutes and hours saved has been fundamental to the journey, what you really need is data-driven insights to truly see and measure the impact Copilot has on your bottom line.

Today we’re announcing Viva Insights will be included in Microsoft 365 Copilot at no additional charge as part of the new Copilot Analytics. Copilot Analytics is designed to empower every IT and business leader to measure adoption and business impact of Copilot and agents — with out-of-the-box experiences (Copilot Dashboard & Microsoft admin center) and customizable reporting for deeper analysis against your KPIs. With Viva Insights included, IT admins and analysts can now tailor advanced prebuilt Copilot reports with their business data or create custom reports with organizational attributes, longer usage data sets, and more granular controls.

Copilot Analytics is a component of the new Copilot Control System, designed for IT to confidently adopt and accelerate the business value of Copilot and agents. Copilot Analytics can be accessed via Microsoft 365 admin center, the Copilot Dashboard and Viva Insights and will be generally available in early 2025

Loop governance, lifecycle, manageability for IT Admins

It's hard to believe it's been almost a year since Loop became generally available at Ignite 2023. We've listened to your feedback and have some exciting updates to share! If you prefer a video format, check out ?? Microsoft Loop IT governance and management controls.

In this update, we'll cover:

• Why IT Admins will love Loop
• How IT Admins can think about Loop
• Timeline for remaining capabilities
• Data lifecycle, governance, and Loop workspace types
• Admin policies to get Loop enabled
• Common Loop configurations
• Managing Loop content in the SharePoint Admin Center
• Admin usage dashboards
• Purview and compliance

How to use Microsoft Copilot free: Top 4 use cases

Have a great weekend ??

Szymon