By Steve Knutson.
Imagine being able to create your very own Copilot using your own content, in just a few mouse clicks? Well that is exactly what Copilot Agents in SharePoint do. The great news is that Microsoft has a pay-as-you-go option, allowing end users without Copilot licensing to access your SharePoint Agent (learn more here)
I have to say my first impression is that this is not only easy, but also impressively powerful. It opens up a wide range of possibilities and also helps alleviate one of the big issues Copilot has around restricting the scope of content it can access. Now you have control!
An agent can be scoped to a single document, a group of documents or an entire library of documents and multiple SharePoint sites.
The setup is very easy. Navigate to a document library containing the content you want to use as a source and click “Create a Copilot agent” and away you go.
Follow the configuration wizard and you are done. It you need to update the Copilot, choose the settings option from the top right on the screen.
You can also configure the starter questions and extend the Copilot Agent further using Copilot Studio.
Once created the Copilot Agent is available in SharePoint and can be shared.
Now that I have an Copilot Agent, ask questions about the content that I selected in the setup. I can also select an individual document and ask more specific questions.
Example: Find documents mention a term
Example: Compare content between two documents
Example: FAQ generated in seconds. Note the small reference number at the end of each answer, this links to the source document.
So what are the use cases? I’ll leave that up to your ingenuity, but here are a few ideas of mine:
- Policies and Procedures Copilot – with controlled document content.
- Proposal Copilot – with existing proposals, previous RFP responses, case studies and marketing content.
- Research Copilot – with a library of Precedent library (Unlock the content in your legal Precedent subscriptions)
- Contracts Copilot – with your contracts document libraries as content.
- Project Specific Copilot – using content from a Microsoft Team used for the project
- I had better stop now or I’ll lose sleep…
To create a Copilot Agent, you need Edit access to the site and have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. The agent can be shared with anyone who has a Microsoft Copilot Agent and access to the site, however they will require a Copilot license currently. Pay-as-you-go licensing is coming soon.
Reprinted from https://steveknutson.blog/2024/11/03/sharepoint-copilot-agents/
