Microsoft continues an aggressive cadence of delivering new features and functions in its lineup of Copilots and AI agent development tools.
Among the latest additions:
- Role-based Microsoft 365 Copilots for finance, sales, and service professionals
- Copilot Studio enhancements to simplify Model Context Protocol (MCP) connections
- Enhancements that increase security and managerial controls focused on test automation in the development cycle
Together, these enhancements underscore the dual focus on delivering pre-built automations for core business functions, as well as making tools available to developers as they build and test custom agents and copilots.
Role-Specific Copilots
New finance role-specific functions in Copilot bring data from ERP systems — including Dynamics 365 and SAP — into Copilot, Excel, and Outlook to help finance teams gain rapid insights and manage their work more efficiently. Aided by Copilot, those teams can now:
- draft customer emails that incorporate account details and payment history
- enable accelerated financial reconciliation by matching transactions, flagging discrepancies, and preparing reports for human review
- perform variance analysis to highlight anomalies and generate explanations for review by business leaders
- use data preparation to clean and structure ERP exports into reports and thereby reduce time spent on manual work
The new sales functions in Microsoft 365 Copilot add AI into Outlook and Teams with the goal of helping salespeople accelerate their work while keeping a sharp focus on engaging with customers.
The sales Copilot will assist sellers in meeting prep within the flow of their applications and work; it provides fast access to opportunity details, recent communications, and insights about the customer or prospect within an existing CRM system. Sales Copilot connects directly with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.
Salespeople can ask Copilot to assist them with specific tasks such as identifying at-risk deals, recommending steps to bring a deal to closure, or even updating a customer record. The service functions in Microsoft 365 Copilot help to resolve issues quickly while delivering personalized experiences with the goal of enhancing customer relationships.
Customer service professionals can use new features to generate a case summary and quickly get up to speed, without the need to review large quantities of notes and history. They can draft an email with resolution details and other context that can be customized, or simply view and update records without having to navigate to their CRM system. This means more efficient work and sharper focus on customers.
Role-based solutions will be available to Copilot customers through the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Store in October, the company said in a blog posting.
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Copilot Studio Updates
The latest release of the Power CAT Copilot Studio Kit – which is used to test custom agents, validate AI-generated content, and track key performance indicators – is gaining increased precision and flexibility for testing and optimizing copilots. PowerCAT is the Customer Advisory Team for Microsoft Power Platform.
New features in Copilot Studio Kit include support for Microsoft authentication within test automation, as well as custom agent usage data, which will be available through the new Agent Inventory feature.
The enhancements also include the ability to test Adaptive Card actions; Adaptive Cards let developers and users add content to Copilot Studio agents as well as exchange that content with cloud apps and services.
One other noteworthy enhancement: an MCP Onboarding Wizard in Copilot Studio that’s now in public preview; it simplifies connections to MCP servers. In order to make connections, developers and users will enter an endpoint URL to onboard an MCP server, eliminating the need for manual setup.
MCP has emerged as a key technology to connect AI clients to a diverse set of data sources. Microsoft and a wide range of other software and AI providers have embraced MCP.
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