Understanding Microsoft Copilot Studio: Agents with SharePoint Integration

In today's digital workplace, organizations are constantly seeking ways to enhance productivity and automate routine tasks. Microsoft Copilot Studio is a powerful solution, combining advanced AI capabilities with seamless SharePoint integration to create intelligent virtual agents.

While much has been written about its features and capabilities, this article focuses on several key aspects that are often overlooked or not immediately apparent. Let's explore some interesting insights about how Copilot Studio works, particularly in conjunction with SharePoint integration.

The Power of AI in Copilot Studio

• At its core, Copilot Studio represents Microsoft's next generation of AI-powered automation. Part of Microsoft's AI at Scale initiative, it hosts multiple AI models and capabilities within a single service.
• The foundation of this technology is a sophisticated transformer-based natural language understanding (NLU) model that revolutionizes how virtual agents interact with users.
• Copilot Studio, employs a language understanding model that uses an example-based approach, powered by a deep neural model.
• This type of large-scale model only needs to be trained once, with large amounts of data, using AI supercomputing. The AI is then used with a few examples without further training.

Generative AI and Knowledge Management

• Generative answers allows the agent to find and present information from multiple sources, internal or external, without having to create specific topics.
• Copilot studio uses customized NLU model to understand what a user types, then responds with the best Copilot topic.
• When an agent user asks a question that does not match with an existing topic, the agent searches the knowledge repository and generative answers summarizes the content into a targeted response.
• Published agents that contain knowledge use the configured knowledge sources to ground the published agent.

Knowledge Integration Options

1. Agent-Level Knowledge: Configure knowledge sources at the agent level for broad access to information
2. Topic-Level Integration: Use generative answers nodes within specific topics for targeted knowledge access
3. AI General Knowledge: Optionally allow the AI to supplement your content with its general knowledge base. If you prefer that your agent is grounded with your specific knowledge sources, disable this setting.
4. Generative orchestration doesn't support custom data or Bing Custom Search as knowledge sources. To use such knowledge sources, you must embed them inside a generative answers node in a topic.

Content Moderation

• The content moderation settings allows the agent to provide more answers. However, the increase in answers might affect the relevancy of the given answers.
• The moderation levels range from Lowest to Highest. The lowest level generates the most answers, but they might be inaccurate. The highest level generates fewer answers, but they're likely to be more relevant. The default moderation level is High.
• Content moderation can be configured in the following two areas -
• The setting in the Generative AI settings page sets the moderation at the agent level
• The setting in the generative answers node sets the moderation at the topic level
• At runtime, the setting at the topic level takes precedence. If content moderation isn't set at the topic level, it defaults to the Generative AI settings configuration.

SharePoint Integration

SharePoint integration is where Copilot Studio truly shines, offering seamless access to your organization's document repositories and knowledge bases.

How SharePoint Integration Works

The integration operates through Microsoft's Graph API search endpoint, with some important characteristics:

• Utilizes the top three search results to generate responses
• Processes files under 3 MB due to memory constraints
• Supports multiple file formats including: Modern SharePoint pages, Word documents (docx), PowerPoint presentations (pptx) and PDF documents
• When using the classic orchestration mode 4 URLs per generative answers topic node are allowed.
• When generating responses, Copilot Studio moderates content that's harmful, malicious, noncompliant, or in breach of copyrights. When content gets moderated, generative answers don't provide a response or an indication that content was moderated.
• However, moderation events are logged when Copilot Studio is configured to send telemetry data to Azure Applications Insights.

Looking Forward

This article highlights just a few key aspects of Copilot Studio and its SharePoint integration. The platform continues to evolve, and there's much more to explore beyond these insights. As organizations continue to discover new ways to leverage this technology, understanding these less obvious aspects can help in making better implementation decisions. Copilot Studio is a rapidly evolving platform, and Microsoft regularly introduces new features and capabilities. For the most current and comprehensive information, always refer to the official Microsoft documentation and stay engaged with the Copilot Studio community.