There have been numerous updates announced at Microsoft Build 2024 showcasing the capabilities of Microsoft Copilot Studio as the single Conversational AI tool to create your own custom copilots or extending Microsoft Copilot experiences.
Bill Gates had the vision to put a computer in every home almost 30 years ago and since then, technology has become ubiquitous in modern society. As seen at Microsoft Build, Microsoft Copilot is on a journey to become more ubiquitous with work and life with its ability to assist us in typical tasks, boosting productivity and creating efficiency.
Copilot Studio is at the forefront of this technology, where copilots are not just doing work for you, but also with you, such as copilots being mentioned within Microsoft Teams, just as a person would be able to be mentioned. Copilot Studio has been used by 30,000 organizations across the world, and with these latest features and improvements to the Conversational AI Platform, including Copilot Connectors, Analytics and Templates, there has been tremendous adoption of this technology across numerous industries where it enables organizations to achieve and demonstrate value that supports their objectives and organizational goals.
Student and Education Support
Within the education industry, Victoria University of Wellington realized students are bombarded with information when they begin their journey at university. Despite having access to numerous resources, it is hard for students to navigate the large amount of information—when they search, the students were given links and not actual answers. Victoria University of Wellington has the ambition to create a ‘single pane of glass’ experience whereby students can answer questions using the Copilot Studio built-in Generative AI capabilities through Knowledge, using the University’s data sources to provide natural language responses to questions. The feedback from our Pilot was overwhelmingly positive with over 90% of the students reporting a positive experience and 95% saying they would use it again. The University is now looking to utilize this technology to expand support for students.
BYU Pathway Worldwide had a manual Copilot Studio support bot in place for years, but as soon as they infused generative AI, they saw an immediate time savings of over 150 human hours per week. This savings allows the team to provide better customer service, spread support across other areas, and focus on higher-value-add efforts.
Financial Services Innovation
Financial services organizations have been at the forefront of innovation, where organizations like Rabobank and Paypal have been utilizing Copilot Studio. Virgin Money’s Copilot, ‘Redi’, was featured at Microsoft Build, their Credit Card Copilot experience that recently won an award at the Card & Payments Awards for the ‘Best application of AI in Financial Services’ where it supports credit card customers 24/7 within the Virgin Money Credit Card app.
Local Government & Services
There has been similar innovation in local government with City of Burlington and City of Kelowna utilizing the Copilot Studio platform. City of Burlington created ‘CoBy’ and are using it in production today. The digital assistant demonstrates the ability to discover, digest, aggregate, and abbreviate information-heavy content and provide the City’s residents with easy-to-understand and human-friendly responses. Questions regarding City services and/or regulatory requirements are answered, based on the content published on Burlington.ca. The addition of CoBy is expected to enhance customer service by providing 24/7 support and more opportunities for the public to engage with the City. The City of Kelowna have also utilized Copilot Studio to provide outcomes for their citizens helping build homes faster within the province together with the integration with Azure OpenAI, where ‘Using Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI Services as tools to improve our building permit application process supports the work the City of Kelowna is doing to address the housing crisis by delivering more homes, faster’ (John Brennan, Director of IT, City of Kelowna)
Transportation
London Heathrow Airport runs a passenger experience program called “Here to Help” where non-operational colleagues spend time in airport terminals to assist customers with commonly asked questions. Using Copilot Studio, they have enabled “Here to Help” colleagues with a collaborative custom copilot to provide real-time answers to customer questions in Microsoft Teams. Copilot Studio enabled developers to quickly pull together information from a range of sources – the public website, internal FAQ documentation and even bus timetables – to support colleagues using AI instead of relying on manual searches, other colleagues or phone calls. This will enhance passenger experience and the confidence of the “Here to Help” team who may only work in the terminals 4 or 5 times a year.
Supporting Non-Profit Vision
In the non-profit industry, there are numerous use cases being identified to help bring innovation to benefit the world such as through making volunteer management easier or for nonprofit organizations like Centro de la Familia, who are excited to explore agent capabilities that support teachers and case workers, allowing them to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time working with children, ultimately leading to better child outcomes.
Enterprise Transformation Journeys
Copilot Studio is also being used inside Microsoft itself. Microsoft’s HR teams create a lot of content in service of employees and the organization. HRWeb, a portal that hosts this wide-ranging content, receives an average of 8 million visits per year. But even with all this information at employees’ disposal, the HR team still received 800,000 service tickets that needed to be addressed manually. The custom copilot deflects 60% of incoming queries enabling employees to gain 21,000+ hours of productivity and reduce 27% of incoming service tickets.
Accenture has also been on a journey working with Copilot Studio that has been transformative, where Karen Odegaard, Managing Director, shares they are ‘leveraging generative AI-powered solutions and democratizing custom copilot creation. Streamlining mundane tasks like checking status to multi-turn agentic conversation with scoped knowledge is now easier than ever.”
What’s next?
It is clear to see that innovation is happening across industries and Copilot Studio is at the center.
We even saw what is on the horizon, with themes such as multi-modal interfaces and users being able to share context of what is being worked on or even show real life objects in the space with you. Additionally, the ability to use context and memory to delegate work using asynchronous agents that keep the personalization of an interaction.
For more information about the Microsoft Build 2024 sessions on the latest announcements and custom copilot demonstrations, check out the blog and read about Partners delivering customer impact with Copilot Studio.
