Unlocking Custom GPT Generative AI Experiences in MS Teams (Without the Expense of MS Copilot)

In the rapidly evolving world of business technology, AI stands poised to revolutionize the way we work.

As many business leaders are discovering, GPT models that can generate content and lookup answers based on proprietary company data offer unparalleled potential for streamlining processes, automating tasks, and empowering business users to make faster, more informed decisions.

However, as businesses attempt to scale up personal productivity tools that their users may have already created, for example, by using OpenAI's custom GPT builder, their IT leaders face roadblocks to implementation that most often have to do with determining the right integration points within the business IT landscape.

For Microsoft 365 users, Microsoft offers Copilot, a premium service that infuses generative AI throughout the Microsoft Office ecosystem, including in Microsoft Teams, which serves as a central hub for internal communication and collaboration for M365 subscribers.

Microsoft Teams provides a chat interface that modern office workers are already familiar with, and provides the perfect environment to embed AI experiences through chatbots and AI agents.

However, for some businesses, the per-user costs associated with AI Chatbot solutions like Microsoft Copilot can present a financial hurdle to adopting this game-changing technology -- at $30 per user per month on top of existing licensing fees, Copilot is simply too expensive for many businesses to consider, especially without a clear ROI.

In this post, we'll describe how, by working with a custom software development partner, you can harness the power of custom GPT agents within MS Teams, but without costly per-user licensing.

We're confident this solution is a clear win for small and mid-size organizations looking to affordably leverage generative AI solutions for employee productivity gains, and we're excited to share it with you!

The Promise of Custom Agents and Copilots

Custom agent generative AI Solutions like Microsoft Copilot embedded into Microsoft Teams bring significant value to an organization, enabling use cases such as knowledge base retrieval, document summarization, template filling, recommendation engines, document classifiers, sentiment analyzers, and too many more to count -- all without any custom coding.

By combining vast internal knowledge stores with the sophisticated language processing capabilities of Generative AI, Teams-based AI agents can:

• Answer complex questions: Extract contextually relevant answers from your company manuals, policies, and other documentation.
• Call functions to retrieve data and execute tasks: Initiate actions within business systems, streamlining processes and saving valuable time.
• Perform data analysis: Generate insights on company metrics or customer trends on demand.
• Retrieve and provide summaries of company information: Surface relevant content without users needing to sift through long documents.

Combined with generative AI's flexible capabilities, the ability to access these capabilities directly within the familiar chat interface of MS Teams eliminates friction for users, leading to higher adoption and more meaningful value extraction from your AI investment.

Scaling and Cost Considerations with MS Copilot Deployments

While undeniably powerful, deploying MS Copilot at scale can pose significant adoption challenges, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses.

If your goal is to simply deploy a Teams-based chatbot to accelerate your employees' knowledge retrieval tasks, such as an HR policy bot, or a support agent bot that pulls relevant information from company KB articles, paying per user may not be the most economical choice.

Here's where Microsoft Copilot falls short as a chatbot solution:

• Per-User Licensing: The $30/month/user model might not be ideal for initial testing or for use cases where a large number of users only interact with the AI agent sporadically.
• Unpredictable ROI: It can be challenging to justify the upfront investment (based on a user count) before the solution's value has been clearly proven in your unique environment.
• No Pay-as-You-Go Flexibility: The OpenAI Assistants API offers a viable alternative, charging based on usage. This aligns costs directly with the true consumption of AI capabilities, reducing financial risk when usage patterns are dynamic or less predictable.

Crafting a Cost-Effective AI Chatbot Solution for SMBs

The good news? Working alongside a custom development partner, you can achieve much of the same functionality found in Microsoft Copilot, while maintaining greater cost control, thanks to the combination of the OpenAI Assistants API and the Microsoft Teams Development Toolkit.

Indeed, as highlighted in a recent Microsoft 365 Developer Channel video by John Miller, tools like the MS Teams Development Toolkit streamline the process of building a Teams-integrated AI assistant and offer templates to get you started quickly.

The Building Blocks of a Cost-Effective AI Chatbot Solution for SMBs

Here's a high-level overview of the steps to deploying a custom GPT in MS Teams, without paying for Copilot:

Creating the Brain: Configuring the OpenAI Assistants API

In crafting a cost-effective AI chatbot solution tailored for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the initial step involves setting up the core intelligence of the chatbot—effectively its "brain."

This process starts on the OpenAI development platform playground, where you will find a user-friendly development environment that allows you to define how your custom AI assistant operates using natural language, without any coding skills.

This assistant can perform tasks ranging from answering inquiries based on your company's unique data sets to executing specific functions that streamline your operations, to analyzing and summarizing company reports.

An example of defining an Open AI Assistant is shown below.

The setup process is straightforward:

• Navigate to the OpenAI platform playground and initiate the creation of a new assistant. This step lays the foundation for the chatbot's capabilities.
• Clearly define the assistant's knowledge domain and its operational tasks. This specification ensures the assistant can handle queries relevant to your business effectively.
• Integrate the assistant with external data sources, such as your inventory management system or a database of frequently asked questions. This step is crucial for enabling the chatbot to pull in real-time data or provide answers drawn from a broad knowledge base of your own data.
• Select the appropriate GPT model that suits your functional requirements and budget constraints. The choice of model impacts the assistant's per-usage cost and its effectiveness in understanding and responding to queries.
• Secure the unique Assistant ID generated during setup; this ID is essential for integrating the assistant with other systems, and will be needed by your custom development team to integrate the bot you've defined with Microsoft Teams.

By meticulously following these steps, you can configure an OpenAI Assistant that acts as a specialized tool within your Microsoft Teams environment. This AI-driven assistant can automate routine tasks, fetch and analyze data upon request, and even engage in conversational interactions with team members, all tailored to your specific business needs.

Work with a Custom Development Partner to Integrate Open AI Assistant with MS Teams

For small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking to leverage the power of custom GPT generative AI within Microsoft Teams, working with a custom development partner to integrate the OpenAI Assistant using the Microsoft Teams Development Toolkit presents a practical and cost-effective solution.

Here's a streamlined approach to achieving cost-effective Teams integration for a user-defined custom AI chatbot:

The Bridge to Teams: MS Teams Development Toolkit

The integration process begins with the Microsoft Teams Development Toolkit, a versatile tool that supports both Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio.

?? Get started with Teams Toolkit for VS Code

?? Get started with Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio

This toolkit is instrumental in laying the foundational work for your AI assistant bot project within Teams.

• Initial Setup: Together with your development partner, you'll begin by creating a new 'AI assistant bot' project using the Teams Toolkit. This collaborative effort ensures the project is initiated with the right parameters and objectives in mind, tailored to your specific business needs.
• Custom Configuration: The next crucial step involves configuring the project to communicate effectively with the OpenAI platform. Your development partner will integrate your OpenAI API key and Assistant ID into the project's configuration files. This integration is pivotal for enabling the AI assistant to utilize the generative AI capabilities of OpenAI, ensuring a responsive and intelligent bot.
• Functionality Mapping: Your development partner will then incorporate custom functions into your project, establishing a direct linkage between the OpenAI assistant's triggers and the Microsoft Teams environment. This step is essential for ensuring that the bot reacts appropriately to user interactions within Teams, providing relevant responses and actions based on predefined triggers.

This collaborative approach not only ensures a high degree of customization but also leverages the expertise of your development partner to navigate the technical complexities of integrating AI into Microsoft Teams.

Testing and Iteration: Trial the Solution Before Deploying to Teams

Prior to deployment, it's imperative to engage in a comprehensive testing phase, leveraging the toolkit's built-in tools to prototype and validate the AI assistant's functionality within Teams.

As shown below, the test tool presents a familiar, Teams-like user interface.

Interacting with the test tool is as simple as chatting with a teammate on Microsoft Teams, illustrated here.

Given the ease of use, collaborating with your development partner on testing a generative AI solution prior to company-wide rollout is very straightforward:

• Collaborative Testing: Utilize the testing tools available in the Teams Toolkit to simulate real-world interactions with the AI assistant. This joint testing phase allows you and your development partner to assess the assistant's responses and integrations, ensuring they meet your business's specific requirements.
• Iterative Refinement: Based on the outcomes of the testing phase, your development partner will make necessary adjustments to optimize the AI assistant's performance. This iterative process is key to refining the assistant's functionality, ensuring it delivers the intended value to your organization.

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

By embarking on the generative AI integration journey with a custom development partner, SMBs can unlock the transformative potential of AI for enhanced efficiency, productivity, and innovation, all within the familiar environment of MS Teams; this strategy not only provides access to cost-effective bespoke AI solutions tailored to specific business needs but does so within a tool that users already know where to find and how to use.

We offer a cost-effective alternative to more expensive, one-size-fits-all solutions like Microsoft Copilot. Instead, we have described a Teams-based AI chatbot deployment model that features pay-as-you-go pricing that scales with your usage -- not users -- so that harnessing the power of custom GPT-based AI experiences within MS Teams doesn't need to be a budget-breaker.

Here are the key steps to economically creating a custom AI chatbot in Teams:

• Create a custom co-pilot for Teams involves setting up an Assistant on OpenAI's development platform.
• Work with a custom development partner to leverage the Teams Development Toolkit in VS Code, which offers templates for developing AI assistant bots in Teams.
• Develop custom function calls with your development partner to enable your bot to handle queries for company-specific information.
• Test the project locally for validation of the use case and verification of the developed functionality before Teams-wide deployment.

By intelligently combining the OpenAI Assistants API with the Teams Development Toolkit -- without paying for Copilot -- you gain:

• Cost-efficiency at every scale: If your initial AI usage is limited, per-user Copilot fees may not be justifiable. Instead, develop a custom bot and pay only for what you use while starting out with AI integration.
• Scalability without Surprises: Easily accommodate increases in demand without renegotiating licensing terms. With a custom solution, your costs always align directly with your usage.
• Budget-Friendly Experimentation: Explore varied use cases for internal AI agents without incurring the full overhead of per-user licenses; no need to commit to licensing before you validate your usage scenario!

Call to Action: Start Your Generative AI Journey in MS Teams with Proactive Today

While a DIY approach may be feasible for a personal productivity GPT or for an expensive Copilot deployment, for custom agent integration in MS Teams, the complexities of function development and prompt fine-tuning may warrant collaboration with a development partner with expertise in both OpenAI and Microsoft Teams integration.

Partners like Proactive Technology Management can streamline the process by:

• Guiding Model and Function Selection: Assist in choosing the right GPT models and crafting information retrieval functions specific to your needs, impacting both output quality and cost efficiency.
• Facilitating Creation of a Strategic Roadmap: Plan a phased rollout to prioritize AI deployment in areas with the highest potential for immediate impact.
• Analyzing AI Solution ROI: Continuously track and quantify the gains achieved with your custom AI agent, providing data-backed support for continued expansion.

Taken together, the combination of the OpenAI Assistants API and MS Teams Development Toolkit represents a transformational approach for generative AI business solution architecture; businesses can use this architecture to empower their knowledge workers with custom-tailored AI functionality within their existing Teams workflows, all while maintaining a usage-based pricing model that prioritizes flexibility and budget control.

Call to Action: Start Your Generative AI Journey in MS Teams with Proactive Today

At Proactive Technology Management, we're not just developers; we're your strategic partners in digital transformation; our team combines deep technical expertise with a keen understanding of business needs.

Our approach to generative AI is rooted in a deep understanding of both the technological and operational aspects of generative AI LLMs and business technologies like Microsoft 365 and MS Teams.

With in-depth experience in Generative AI models, Microsoft technologies, and successful project implementation, we ensure solutions are not just cutting-edge, but also aligned with your business objectives and ROI -- consistently delivering solutions that are affordable, practical, and immediately applicable.

Trial Our Services Without Commitment

We offer a unique opportunity to experience the power of a custom GPT agent in MS Teams, without any commitment to a longer-term engagement. Here's how the process works:

• Free Consultation: Start with a comprehensive consultation to discuss your business challenges and objectives. Our team will work with you to identify key areas where AI can make a significant impact.
• Phased Implementation: Experience our phased approach to AI integration, focusing initially on pilot solutions before broader rollouts for targeted efficiency gains.
• ROI Analysis: Benefit from a detailed analysis of the productivity gains and cost savings achieved during the pilot phase, providing a solid foundation for assessing the potential ROI of a full-scale implementation.

Take the First Step Towards Smarter Teams Today

The journey to transforming your Teams-based workflows with cutting-edge AI solutions begins with a single step.

Reach out to the Proactive Fusion Development Team today to schedule your free consultation.

Learn More about how the Proactive Fusion Development Team Can Make a Difference in Your Operations

The Proactive Fusion Development Team stands at the cutting edge of technological innovation, specializing in leveraging AI to digitally transform modern business workflows.

With a comprehensive skill set in Generative AI, Microsoft Fabric, and strategic project implementation, our team is uniquely positioned to address the complexities and challenges of modern office processes.

Visit our Fusion Development Landing Page to learn more about how we create custom cloud-based AI software solutions to streamline business processes and unleash the full potential of our clients' generative AI and Microsoft 365 investments.