Overview of Agents in Microsoft 365

00:00 Agents expand the capabilities of AI tools,  allowing you, your partners, and clients to work with customized AI assistants for specific jobs  or purposes. Agents can accomplish tasks within preset specifications. They can be set up to  work independently or can create workflows across multiple applications. Hi, I'm Nick. Welcome to  my full-length training course on using agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot. This is a fairly long  video, but it is organized into 11 sections. You

00:33 can use the YouTube chapter markers to jump  directly to each one. In this first section, we'll clarify what agents are and give you an idea  of what you can expect in the rest of this course. Now, there are many different AI systems and chat  assistants, including Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and many others. And most of those systems  have their own tools for working with agents. This course will focus on tools from Microsoft's  Copilot brand. Naturally, this course will assume

01:02 that you have some familiarity with Copilot in  general. And of course, anybody can use Copilot for free at copilot.microsoft.com. However,  Copilot agents are not available in the free system and they're pretty limited in subscriptions  for individual users. The copilot agents and agent building tools that we'll use in this course  do require a Microsoft 365 subscription from

01:28 a company or similar organization, also known as  Microsoft 365 business and enterprise accounts. Now, there are three main goals in this course.  First, I want to help you understand what an agent is and how agents can help you focus  or streamline your work in powerful ways. Second, we're going to see how to work with  existing agents that have already been set up and are available for you to use in Microsoft  Copilot and Microsoft Teams. Some agents are

01:58 built by Microsoft. Some are built by thirdparty  developers to support their apps and services, but there are many agents that you can work  with today. And third, we're going to give you the tools you need to build your own agents.  I believe that anybody who can use an agent in Copilot can also build an agent in C-pilot. You  just need to be willing to do a little more work and planning. However, it's very important  to recognize that there are different types

02:27 of agents. Building agents has a lot in common  with developing applications. No single training course can teach you all the ways to make agents.  There are tools and systems offered by Microsoft and others that require knowledge of application  coding and programming APIs. But in this course, when we build agents, we will be using C-Pilot  Studio and the Copilot Agent Builder. Two options offered by Microsoft which integrate into known  C-pilot systems, allowing you to build powerful

02:59 agents fairly quickly without the need for  coding or application development skills. With that in mind, the agents we build here will  not be able to work independently and will not integrate with thirdparty systems. Those are more  advanced features that are a little outside of this course. So, with the stage set, the rest of  this course will be much more hands-on. If you're taking your first steps into the world of C-pilot  agents, I want to start by helping you understand