Copilot for Teams: Enhancing Collaboration with Plugins

In January 2024, Copilot for Teams became available. Microsoft Copilot for Teams is designed to streamline teamwork and boost productivity by integrating AI capabilities directly into your Teams experience. One of the standout features of Copilot for Teams includes Copilot agents, which allows users to enhance their workflow with various plugins tailored to their specific needs.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents come in a few flavors
Some agents are built into Copilot, like the Visual Creator that lets you generate images. You can use this to create a picture of a cat riding a unicorn in space wearing a construction hat.

Another flavor of agent includes prebuilt agents from software vendors. You can easily add these powerful agents by simply hitting the ‘Get Agents’ option and selecting from a large list of companies that have built these agents to plugin to Microsoft 365 Copilot. For example, you could add the Procore agent to connect Copilot directly to your Procore data, allowing you to ask questions about your Procore projects and receive summary responses and related project information.

The last flavor of agent includes agents that you can build yourself using Copilot Studio. When you build your own agent, you can set it up to handle specific tasks, look up data from specific sources, or interact with outside data sources. For ex-ample, you could build an ‘HR Agent’ that is connected to a PDF of your employee handbook so users can ask questions like ‘What is our vacation policy?’ and you can be confident it will pull the answer from the correct source.

Brief Summary of Copilot Overall
Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered assistant that helps boost productivity and streamline workflows by offering contextual assistance, automating tasks, and analyzing data. Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your content in the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.

With Copilot, you can enhance your productivity and creativity across the Microsoft 365 suite of applications. For example, you can use Copilot to add animations to a PowerPoint slide, summarize your inbox and prioritize your emails, create a proposal from your meeting notes, and summarize a Teams meeting you missed to get the key takeaways. Copilot is not just a tool; it is a partner that understands your needs and preferences, offering personalized suggestions and solutions.

Whether you’re drafting documents, analyzing data, managing projects, or communicating with your team, integrating Co-pilot can help you work smarter and more efficiently.

Here are four ways to use Microsoft 365 Copilot:

Synthesizing and Summarizing Documents: Copilot for Teams can quickly synthesize and summarize documents, making it easier for users to understand the key points without having to read through the entire content. Imagine using this to consolidate contract requirements, summarize insurance guidelines, or other lengthy documents!

Asking Questions About Content: Users can ask Copilot questions about specific content within their Teams environment, helping them to quickly find answers and insights.

Drafting Responses to Emails: Copilot can assist in drafting professional (or fun!) responses to email threads, ensuring that the tone and content are appropriate. Ask Copilot to sound professional, make it more personal, or add humor.

Summarize Meetings: Copilot can summarize Teams meetings that users missed, providing key takeaways and decisions made during the meeting, or see where their name came up in the conversation! – CMW, Copilot