Microsoft opens Copilot agent building to office rank and file

Here's where agentic AI hype hits the desktop: Low-code agent builders enable rank-and-file office workers to automate their own daily drudgery.

That's the idea behind generative AI agent builders from companies such as OpenAI, Zapier, MindStudio and Salesforce, to name a few. They spread agentic AI outside the developer tribe and give frontline office workers the ability to automate manual processes. The builders can typically create agents from a chat prompt, and they plug into enterprise security policies that govern their use and access to sensitive data.

Microsoft has also entered this competitive fray, having released Copilot Studio in October 2024. Last week, the company released a no-code agent builder called Copilot Studio lite to its Microsoft Copilot users in the Frontier beta program. In Copilot Studio lite, users can make what Microsoft characterizes as "lightweight" agents. Full Copilot Studio is required for advanced workflows, large language model selection and other features.

Also included in the Frontier beta release, along with Copilot Studio lite, is Workflows, a Copilot agent that can automate tasks such as sending updates to teammates and managing calendars in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Planner. App Builder, another generative AI agent in Copilot, can track project milestones and deadlines, in addition to visualizing data.

"Microsoft is really trying to differentiate and distinguish itself from its closest rival, which is ChatGPT Enterprise," said Gartner analyst Jason Wong. "This Copilot app resembles a lot of what ChatGPT and ChatGPT Enterprise is -- so Microsoft is trying to build in hooks into this Copilot app to differentiate it. Part of that is integrating it into their existing set of applications like SharePoint."

Microsoft's Copilot Studio lite also provides users with an environment in which to build their agents without developer overhead. It takes the leap from the low-code environment of the Microsoft Apps (formerly Power Apps) and Power Automate platforms fully into the no-code realm.

"Microsoft Apps and Power Automate have been part of this citizen development movement, where companies would stand up the environments and allow business users to create applications, workflows, bots, automations. It took effort for organizations to stand this up and to track what's happening," Wong said. "[Microsoft's] app builder and workflow builder tool gets away from having to formally set up environments for citizen development -- [they're] just very simple agent-building tools inside the environment that [users are already] familiar with."

Richard Riley, general manager of low-code and agents marketing at Microsoft, said that agent designers are now table stakes for office software; it's not a situation where just OpenAI is competing with Copilot. Companies will compete not on the agents' building capability itself, he believes, but on the tooling that comes with them.

Microsoft's agentic AI tools enable users to create simple -- at least for now -- automations. Giving end users such tools has been foundational to the success of Microsoft's productivity suite in the past.

"If you think about it in the context of history, if you look back to what made Office the thing it is, a lot of that came with extensibility," Riley said. "With things like Visual Basic, things like macros, people built things on Office that you'd never have expected to be able to build."

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.