Microsoft AI Agent

 

In this post we will create an agent using Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Disclaimer About Microsoft

I've known Microsoft for more than 30 years. It used to be a monopoly company with good products, but overtime they lost their path and vision. What left of it is a monopoly company with bad products. Still, as a monopoly company Microsoft can force the market to use their new products even if they're bad and expensive. An good example for this is the creation of AI  agent using Microsoft Copilot studio.

License

Unlike other providers, to work with Microsoft products you need a license, regardless of the usage amount. This license is extremely compared with other providers. In case you only want to check abilities, and not willing to pay yet, check if you're eligible for the Microsoft E5 developer program.

Copilot Studio

Open the Microsoft Copilot Studio site, select Agents, and create a new agent.

Now we can use an AI to create our agent by simply describing the agent, or we can configure it manually.

Once we click on Create agent, the agent is ready, and we can test it.

We can also configure MCP server to be used under the tools section, for example I've used the public Docusign MCP server.

Once we're done, we can publish the agent, and since Microsoft is a monopoly company where office is the standard application for almost all companies, you can place the agent in an easily accessed location such as Microsoft Teams.

Purview Audit

A must-have method of an agent service is to track the chats, and tune its configuration to make it more useful. To track the chats we can use Microsoft Purview.

In Microsoft Purview site, select Solutions, Audit, and the run a new search filtered by time, and optionally filtered by RecordType=CopilotInteraction.

After some time between 5 minutes and 5 hours (it is Microsoft, so have no high expectations), you will get a search results record.

Final Note

We've seen how to use Microsoft products to create an agent and to track the agent actions. There are other related products that should be used to get a complete solution for agents creation, such as: Microsoft PowerApps, Microsoft PowerApps Admin, Microsoft Dataverse. And yes, you will need to pay for each one of these regardless of the usage amount. Have fun.