The new Agent Builder in SharePoint is designed to help people use and share Copilot Agents to query sibsets of data within your organistion using a simple click, point, create and tweak approach. Out of the box every SharePoint site (assuming you have a Copilot license) brings a Copilot sidebar allowing you to ask questions about the content, but you can also replace this with a custom Copilot Agent which we will walk through here.
The goal is to enable business users to easily empower their employees use Copilot to reason over specific information sources or across discrete repositories. Microsoft provide a handful of “use cases” as why a Copilot agent might be useful and what’s great is that “anyone” can create one!
Once created and tested, these custom Copilot Agents can be easily shared via a simple hyperlink that can be embedded in SharePoint pages or used in Teams.
In this how to blog, I walk you through the setup and customisation of a Copilot Agent using Agent Builder in SharePoint, customising of the agent, and sharing of the agent. Free to follow along and create your own agent.
Copilot agents are specialised AI assistants designed to enhance the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot by connecting to your organisation’s knowledge and data sources. They are custom tools embedded in Copilot Extensions, providing additional functionalities tailored to specific needs. In SharePoint, Copilot agents are natural language AI assistants that give trusted, precise answers and insights. Agents are expert systems that operate autonomously on behalf of a process or company.
Building your First Copilot Agent
Step 1 – Choose your starting point.
First, you need to navigate to a SharePoint site, library or document library you want to create an “agent” from. You will of couse need to have access to that Library and also need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to create the agent.
From here, you can select the three dots and choose “Create a Copilot agent“
Step 2 – Click and you are done!
Done (well – you will probably want to customise it and test it), but once you do this, your Copilot Agent is created for you. Click “Edit” to make changes, such as change the name, and then of course test it out.
Step 3 – Edit and Customise
Here I have clicked “Edit” to take me to the customisation pages. From here you can toggle across different options to customise your Copilot agent.
The customisation pages are split into three sections – Idenitity, Sources and Bebaviour – each of these allow you to tweak the way the agent works. There’s also the ability to edit for advanced customisation through Copilot Studio but this feature is not available at time of writing…
In the Identity Section – you can change the name, icon and description (who the agent introduces itself to the user)
In the Sources Section – you can modify the sources that the Copilot Agent uses. You can add additonal SharePoint sites, individual files or extenal sources such as websites.
In most cases, I suspect you will want to use a single library or a discrete set of files, but you can add up to 20 different information sources. These 20 information sources can be mean sites, libraries, folders, or documents. What’s more, you can have a combination of these as long as the total is 20 sources – for example, you could add 20 sites or 20 documents, or 3 sites, 5 document libraries, 2 libraries and 10 descrete files as long the total sources totals 20.
Note: You of course need to ensure that the intended users of the agent have access to the sources your specify as agents run under the security context of the user using the agent.
In the Behaviour Section, you can customise the welcome message which will help your users to understand the purpose of this Copilot agent and can also edit or change the starter prompts to help users get some tips on some of the things the agent can do for them. You can also give the agent specific instructions on how it should respond and behave based on the user input.
As you update the behviour, you will see the changes in real-time.
Testing your Copilot Agent
Once you are ready, you can test your agent, simply writing a prompt in the chat dialog as you would with any other Copilot – feel free to try one of the templates or create your own.
Be sure to test a few things, you might find you need to update the user instructions and review the sources before you share it with other people to test further.
Once you are happy with your agent, click save. The agent is saved a “file” with a .copilot extension in the root of the SharePoint folder you started creating your agent in.
Using your Copilot agent
Once saved, your new Copilot Agent launches automatically for any user accessing the SharePoint library that has a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. This replaces the default copilot interface that opens when you visit a SharePoint library.
Sharing your Copilot agent
Since the Agent is encapsulated as a manifest “.copilot” file, you can simply share the file like you would any other file, or click the three dots and select share.
Once shared, they click on the file and open it and it displays like a standalone app or can of course access it from the SharePoint library directly.
[Current] Limitations
- Currently Custom agents do not appear on the main Copilot Business Chat pages, though this is coming I beleive. On the FAQ on Microsoft’s support page it clearly states that “You can access a Copilot agent from a SharePoint site, page, or document library. You can also use it in Teams if added. We plan to make it available across Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Copilot.” https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-copilot-agents-in-sharepoint-69e2faf9-2c1e-4baa-8305-23e625021bcf.
- Advanced editing with Copilot Studio is not currently available, but is also coming soon.
- It’s not possible to “hide” the .copilot file (that I can see anyway), so make sure to change permissions on the file.
Let me know how you get on….