What are agents? - Microsoft Copilot Tutorial

- [Instructor] Copilot agents can have varying levels of complexity, but most of them fall into these categories. The most basic or simple agent is the one that can retrieve information from data it's provided with, and it can reason, summarize content and answer questions. For example, you could have a Copilot agent that's trained on your employee handbook and can answer questions about company policies and rules. Then we have task-based agents, which go a little bit further and are connected to a specific workflow or process, and can help with repetitive tasks that might normally require human interaction. For example, your company might have a process for when employees request new laptop computers. You could build a Copilot agent that can review the request to see if the employee making the request qualifies for a new laptop, and if so, then send approval emails to your company's IT service tool. Then there's the third type of agent, the autonomous agent, which operates independently, can dynamically plan and learn from the processes, as well as coordinate with other agents. For example, you could have something like a supply chain capacity agent that's connected to various data sources within the supply chain, and automate tasks like inventory management and order processing. Agents can be deployed across various platforms like Microsoft Teams and Outlook, or across websites and mobile apps, making them accessible wherever they're needed. Now, as we move from left to right here, agents get increasingly complex and advance. So while it's important to understand what Copilot agents are capable of, in this course, we're just going to dip our toes in and look at the basics of how to create agents in Copilot Studio, how to add knowledge to them, and how to get them to perform certain types of tasks, and we'll look at a very basic example of creating an autonomous agent at the end. Now, before we get started, this course does assume that you have at least some experience using Copilot or generative AI tools in general, so we're not going to spend time talking about what gen AI is or how to write prompts and so on. If you haven't spent much time with AI tools, I suggest you first check out courses like, "What is Copilot: Get Started with Microsoft's Everyday AI Companion" and "Streamlining Your Work with Microsoft Copilot" both by my colleague, Nick Brazzi.