Last night Bill, Udai, Veronika and I gave our top picks from Microsoft Build at the Virtual Boston Azure AI meetup.
In order to not overlap topics, we each picked areas to cover - mine was Copilot and Copilot Studio.
My picks:
Copilot Wave 2 Spring release features – this was announced in April but still hasn’t landed for us. You’ll know when this lands due to the look of Copilot changing. The navigation will be on the left side of the screen with the new release (instead of the right where it is now).
Publish custom agents to SharePoint sites – This adds SharePoint as a channel to push a Copilot Studio agent to.
Additional maker controls for knowledge (Copilot Studio) – This is several things together:
- Ability to upload related files into a file collection
- Ability to change settings on responses such as: response model, provide response instructions, adjust response length, code interpreter
- User feedback options
- Bing Web Search option
- Azure AI Search now GA
NOTE: Azure AI Search GA, code interpreter and model choices seem most useful here
Model Context Protocol (MCP) – Adding MCP support seems to be a trend with the Copilot and Microsoft SDKs across the board.
Agent Flows – This just seems like they reworked Power Automate Flows into the Copilot Studio and surface the functionality without having to jump applications like you used to.
Agent feed – Available in Power Apps - “It shows which tasks are pending across a team of agents and provides useful insights about the agents’ work. It also flags exceptions where an agent gets stuck and needs help, so you can resolve it in real time.”
Microsoft Entra Agent ID – Copilot Agents now have an Entra ID and are findable in Entra using the Agent ID filter for Application type. This will help control the security an agent has.
Microsoft 365 Copilot API – provides API access to Copilot capabilities. Note the Retrieval and Chat APIs aren’t in public preview soon.
NOTE: The interactions Export API may be useful for auditing Copilot prompts and the Retrieval may help search items indexed by SharePoint without having to duplicate your own semantic indexes.
From the announcement blog:
- Interactions Export API: Allows you to export Copilot interactions – including user prompts, responses and metadata, for auditing, compliance reporting, or usage analytics. Supports Teams, Outlook and other Copilot-enabled surfaces. Available in Public Preview today. For more, check out developer documentation here.
- Change Notifications API: Allows you to subscribe to change notifications for Copilot interactions across Microsoft 365. Notifications can include full interaction payloads, enabling real-time auditing, analytics, or monitoring without additional API calls. Requires specific Copilot service configuration. Available in Public Preview today. For more, check out developer documentation available here.
- Retrieval API (public preview soon): Allows you to retrieve relevant extracts from SharePoint and Copilot connectors using natural-language queries. This API returns permission-trimmed extracts for grounding LLM responses and is optimized for Context Recall — no vector index or data duplication required. Expected to be available worldwide in Public Preview next month, track availability here.
- Chat API (public preview soon): Allows you to engage with Copilot from within your applications to enable multi-turn conversations grounded in Microsoft 365 content, permissions, and guardrails. Currently available in Private Preview and if you would like to participate in the preview, please reach out to your Microsoft account team.
Multi Agent Orchestration – This will allow agents to call other agents and pass state back and forth as needed. This will also allow agents from Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Fabric and Copilot Studio to be added to an agent.
Ability to integrate with external agents – this is a promised feature that will allow external agents to be added to Copilot Agents, but I have not found the details of what it will take to do this.
Agent to Agent (A2A) support – part of the above mentioned. “A2A can enable structured agent communication—exchanging goals, managing state, invoking actions, and returning results securely and observably. Developers can use tools they know, like Semantic Kernel or LangChain, and still interoperate.”
Copilot Tuning (available starting in June - Copilot 365 Copilot Tuning EAP) – This is a simple approach to fine tuning a model for specific purposes and using that model with Copilot agents. From the announcement there are going to be three “recipes” on initial release:
- Expert Q&A: Build a Customer Service Knowledge Agent trained on technical support materials from your SharePoint repositories that can instantly provide rich, detailed answers to your support reps’ questions, even when internal jargon and organizational acronyms are used.
- Document Generation: Create a Proposal Writer agent. Train Copilot using your company’s archive of successful RFPs to assemble complex first drafts written in your company’s approved format and tone.
- Summarization and Analysis: Build a Project Analyst agent that can summarize large volumes of project documentation to produce executive or customer status summaries that extract insights specific to key metrics.
NOTE: This really looks promising, but I have no idea when it will really become available to try out.
Computer user tool (EAP with really large customers for now) – “With computer use, agents can now interact with any system that has a graphical user interface!”
If you want to watch some Build sessions, here is a link to the recommended Copilot sessions at Microsoft Build.
Summary
At Build Microsoft really showed they have a comprehensive strategy for products and features related to agents in the enterprise. I really like where they are going and am looking forward to all the features they introduced becoming available.
If you have a questions or comments, please message me @haleyjason on twitter/X.