Transforming Personal Assistants into Autonomous Agents with Microsoft Copilot
If you’re familiar with Microsoft Copilot, you’ve already witnessed its transformative power in creating tailored agents that act as diligent, always-available personal assistants. If this is your first encounter, don’t worry—we recommend starting with our guide, Supercharge Your Productivity in Microsoft 365 Copilot with Declarative Agents, to get an overview of what Copilot can achieve.
For those ready to take the next step, this article will show you how to elevate your personal assistant by making it an autonomous, self-initiating system that works proactively on your behalf.
At Ignite 2024, Microsoft unveiled the public preview of autonomous agents. These AI-driven systems can independently manage tasks with minimal human intervention, revolutionizing business processes such as responding to sales trends, managing email correspondence, and onboarding clients. With Copilot Studio, configuring, testing, and deploying these agents becomes effortless. In this article, we’ll explore a specific use case: automating invoice communication centralization, and we’ll guide you through setting up an autonomous agent to manage the process from start to finish.
Use Case: Automating invoice communication centralization
The challenge
In our organization’s accounting department, invoices are received via email and sent to supplier account owners. These owners manually download invoices, copy email content, and input the data into a SharePoint list. This list acts as a centralized hub for managing invoices and related communications. The process is time-consuming and prone to errors.
The solution
Using autonomous agents, we’ll automate the entire workflow—from receiving invoices to centralizing them in SharePoint—all with natural language and minimal configuration. Here’s how to set it up.
Step-by-step guide to building autonomous agents
Set up the autonomous agent
- In Copilot Studio, create a new agent and briefly describe its purpose. For now, leave the instructions field blank; we’ll revisit this later.
- Since we’re creating an autonomous agent, set up a trigger that doesn’t require interaction through chat. In this use case, the agent will be triggered by an email received.
Configure the trigger
Follow these steps to set up the trigger:
- Sign in to the relevant connection.
- In the trigger configuration window, configure these inputs:
- Subject: Filter emails containing the word “Invoice” in the subject line.
- Only with attachments: Set to “Yes” to process only emails with attachments.
- To: For testing, use your own email address.
- Additional instructions: Keep the default value.
Define actions
Once the trigger is configured, define the actions your autonomous agent will perform when triggered. For this use case, the agent will execute the following three actions:
- Create an “Item” (SharePoint): this action creates a new item in the Invoices SharePoint list, including the sender’s name and email body.
- Get attachment (Outlook 365): this action retrieves the invoice attachment from the email.
- Add attachment (SharePoint): this action attaches the retrieved invoice to the newly created item in the SharePoint list.
Configuring the “Create an item” action
- Go to the “Actions” tab in Copilot Studio and select the “Create item” action.
- In the “Details” section, rename the action for clarity if needed.
- In the “Inputs” section:
- Select the relevant SharePoint site and list name.
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- Add fields like “Body” (email content) and provide natural language descriptions for the autonomous agent to populate them dynamically. Note that the property “How will the agent fill this input?” is set to “Dynamically fill with best option” as we want the agent to dynamically populate this field. In the Description property, we tell the agent what should be added to this field using natural language.
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- Repeat this process for all needed fields
Configuring the “Get attachment” and “add Attachment” actions
- For “Get attachment” action, no changes are required: default settings suffice.
- For “Add attachment” action provide clear descriptions for inputs and reference outputs from previous actions where necessary.
Provide instructions
Return to the “Overview” tab and edit the “Instructions” section. Write clear, step-by-step guidance on how the agent should perform its tasks. For example:
Once triggered by a received email, the agent will call the actions sequentially. Each action will run based on the inputs provided.
Test your agent
- In the testing bar, select “Test trigger”. The first test requires you to execute the trigger action (e.g., receiving an email with “Invoice” in the subject line and an attachment).
- Monitor the test run in real time and verify that each action is performed as expected.
Note: During the first test, you may need to log in to the connections again.
The Results
After a successful test run:
- The received email:
- The centralized hub in SharePoint with the email content and invoice uploaded:
With just a few clicks and using natural language, we’ve created a fully autonomous agent to streamline a manual, error-prone process. This is automation at its finest! But this is only the beginning—autonomous agents can be enhanced further to include features like sentiment analysis on email content or extracting data from invoices for payment approvals. Stay tuned as we explore even more advanced applications for autonomous agents.
Ready to revolutionize your workflows with autonomous agents?
Contact us today to discover how we can help you design and deploy customized AI-driven solutions that align perfectly with your business needs.
With our expertise in Microsoft 365 and Copilot, we can streamline your processes, enhance productivity, and empower your team with proactive, intelligent assistants that transform the way you work.
Let’s take your business automation to the next level—reach out now to get started!