AI assistants are the need of the hour! Businesses are embracing them to deliver targeted and practical support leveraging their domain-specific knowledge. These specialized AI assistants are marking a shift in how AI is utilized in the workplace.

A 2021 commissioned study by Forrester Consulting explored the financial gains a composite organization with 10,000 employees could expect from AI copilots over three years. This study found that such implementations can deliver an overall ROI of 261%, along with significant reductions in manual ticket support for internal employees (66%) and customers (50%).

However, developing and deploying them can be challenging due to privacy, safety, and data quality concerns and lack of implementation expertise, engineering know-how, customization capabilities, and governance frameworks.

Microsoft has introduced a solution to address this, enabling the easy creation of copilots with Microsoft Copilot Studio. It provisions for a low-code platform where businesses can develop custom copilots by utilizing Microsoft conversational AI tools as well as OpenAI’s Generative AI solutions. These AI tools offer different ways of creating sophisticated dialogs with built-in analytics. As a result, enterprises can create customized intelligent chatbots that can transform businesses without coding expertise and quickly turn their ideas into action. Low code chatbot design with AI capabilities and quick deployment ensures simplified chatbot creation, enhanced functionality, and accelerated business operations.

Under the hood of Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio is built on the foundations of Power Virtual Agents and other Microsoft Power Platform technologies. This platform empowers businesses to create, customize, and manage their custom copilot solutions cost-effectively without extensive coding expertise. With its drag–and–drop functionality, copilot bot authors can design conversational flows visually, making bot creation more accessible without advanced coding skills. This Copilot Studio is ideally suited for citizen developers of any company who want to simplify their daily tasks with AI assistants.

The Copilot Studio comes with flexible licensing and configuration options. With a standalone Copilot Studio subscription, the user gets access to the full range of capabilities:

• Orchestrate generative topics and actions with GenAI. Copilot Studio Bots can provide creative and informative responses to user queries beyond simple pre-programmed answers. They can take real-world actions, expanding their capabilities beyond the conversation.
• Process relevant content through retrieval-augmented generation using Azure ML and access to knowledge sources, such as public websites and SharePoint repositories. This ensures the bot stays up-to-date and delivers accurate information.
• Ensures conversation security using the robust Common Data Service tool (now known as Dataverse).
• Directly publish and regularly update bots with Copilot Studio.
• Generate tokens to turn secure access on or off, ensuring added web security.
• Enable automated, instant, and scheduled flows with Power Automate.

In addition, the Copilot Studio offers a range of features, such as multi-channel language support, multimodal interaction, natural language understanding, real-time creative content generation, and dynamic web search. All these capabilities and features translate to advantages that empower future enterprises.

Benefits of chatbots developed on Copilot Studio

Organizations of any size can benefit from these advanced chatbots developed on Copilot Studio. For instance, they can streamline internal incident management processes and improve the efficiency of their support team with a chatbot solution that analyzes user queries and create responses by fetching relevant & corresponding data and links from SharePoint sites while combining the power of Microsoft Conversational AI and Generative AI by Open AI.

• Employee productivity: Empower employees with self-service support. Whether accessing company policies, scheduling meetings, or submitting requests, these chatbots help employees, freeing up their time for creative initiatives.
• Customer engagement: Provide continuous customer support, from answering product-related questions and aiding in problem-solving to streamlining transactions, leading to customer satisfaction.
• Task automation: Make teams more efficient and help enterprises to achieve superior results while seamlessly automating a task with integrated Microsoft Power Platform.
• Omnichannel flexibility: Organizations can deploy chatbots across various touchpoints, meeting customers and employees at their preferred communication channels such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Skype, and more.

While Copilot Studio bots empower businesses to streamline workflows and achieve significant ROI, the future of AI assistants promises even more exciting advancements.

What’s shaping chatbots of the future

Today, Copilot Studio bots are chat-based experiences that support users with knowledge discovery and completion of business processes. Nonetheless, AI copilots are capable of more! Microsoft is continuously enhancing the capabilities of Copilot Studio. The recent update came during Microsoft Build 2024 and evolved beyond chatbot creation to AI-orchestrated workflows. Here are some expectations on new Copilot Studio updates and how chatbots might develop in the future:

• Enhanced GenAI capabilities: Sophisticated answers with explanations, advancements in real-time translation within conversations, and hyper-personalized responses based on user data. For instance, with future capability improvement, it will be possible to create and iterate topics by describing what the author wants, and AI will build it.
• Advanced user interaction: Integration across various communication channels, emotional intelligence incorporation allowing responses to user sentiment, and proactive assistance.
• Integration and automation advancements: Deeper integration with Microsoft products and third-party tools.

Get Copilot Studio now for enhanced workflows

The future of work is undoubtedly smarter, powered by customizable AI assistants. Over 30,000 organizations worldwide use Copilot Studio, and its latest features and improvements to the Conversational AI platform are driving the adoption of this technology across numerous industries. While it only takes a few clicks to set up and deploy a chatbot with Copilot Studio, organizations need in-depth guidance and support to review Copilot Studio projects and architectures for a smooth and effective implementation journey. Early discovery of potential issues within deployed chatbots, proactive guidance preventing future problems, and a roadmap for success with tested strategies and methods can offer businesses a competitive edge.

Therefore, partnering with an experienced technology partner is essential to derive maximum benefit from customized Copilot Studio solutions. HTC can help you harness the value of GenAI by combining Microsoft Copilot Studio with our deep strategy and implementation expertise. Contact us to learn how we can help.