Microsoft 365 Copilot is a powerful AI assistant, but its true potential is unlocked through custom AI agents. By developing these tailored agents, individuals and teams can refine Copilot’s functionality with tailored instructions, contextual grounding, and automated actions, all while ensuring a seamless and intuitive user experience within the tool’s interface.

These AI-powered agents allow employees to extend beyond Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 applications, enhancing productivity and optimising workflows. By enabling users to integrate AI-driven automation and intelligent assistance internally at Microsoft, we are driving efficiency, streamlining processes, and delivering data-driven insights tailored to specific roles and team needs.

At the heart of this innovation is Microsoft Copilot Studio, a game-changing low-code platform that brings Copilot extensibility to a wider range of users than ever before. This intuitive solution empowers both technical and non-technical users to build custom agents, expanding Copilot’s capabilities to meet unique business requirements. At Digital Bricks, we have helped a number of organisations to implement Copilot Studio at scale, crafting a structured approach that empowers employees while ensuring data security and compliance.

Through this process, we’ve established best practices to safeguard employees while deploying AI-powered agents- ranging from personalised productivity tools to enterprise-wide solutions. Along the way, we’ve gained valuable insights that can help other organisations navigate their own Copilot Studio journey.

Expanding Enterprise AI with Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio, an integral part of the Microsoft Power Platform, enables employees to build custom AI agents or enhance Microsoft 365 Copilot’s capabilities. By leveraging the same low-code connector framework as Power Platform, it integrates seamlessly with both first-party and third-party services to drive automation and efficiency.

With Copilot Studio, users can develop intelligent agents tailored to their specific professional roles and business workflows. These agents can refine knowledge retrieval within Microsoft 365 Graph, extend beyond its boundaries, and even execute automated tasks to enhance productivity.

There are multiple approaches to creating agents, catering to different levels of technical expertise. Users can build them using natural language commands within the Copilot Studio agent builder, interact with them via Copilot Chat in Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, or leverage the full-featured graphical authoring environment in Copilot Studio. Additionally, more advanced users can combine Copilot Studio with Azure AI to develop sophisticated, enterprise-grade AI solutions.

Building Guardrails for AI Agent Development

Establishing safeguards around agent creation involved developing a structured system to categorise them based on their function, scope, and potential security implications.

At one end of the spectrum, basic retrieval agents may only access content that users create and control. These types of agents are typically developed by non-technical employees using natural language prompts within the Copilot Studio agent builder.

On the other end, more sophisticated tools- such as task-driven or autonomous agents that integrate knowledge, automation, and orchestration- need to cross data boundaries to execute their functions. These advanced agents are typically designed by IT professionals and developers using the full-featured Copilot Studio authoring environment to support large-scale business operations.

This straightforward classification doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Given the varying scopes and risk levels associated with different agents, we typically categorise them into three distinct groups:

• Personal self-service agents – Developed by employees to address highly individualised business needs.
• Line-of-business agents – Created by specific teams within Microsoft to support specialised work functions within a department or discipline.
• Enterprise-wide agents – Designed for deployment across the entire organisation to provide broad-scale AI assistance.

Governance, Processes, and Policies for Enabling Microsoft Copilot Studio

When helping organisations establish safeguards around the different types of AI agents employees can create in Microsoft Copilot Studio required us to ask critical questions:

What Power Platform functionalities align with Copilot Studio workflows?

‍What new risk factors do AI agents introduce?

How can we implement structured policies and governance processes around low-code AI development?

How do we ensure employees understand the broader implications of the agents they create?

Because Copilot Studio operates within the Power Platform ecosystem, it makes sense to leverage its robust capabilities as a foundation for managing AI agents. Our experience in supporting citizen developers while maintaining strong governance in Microsoft Power Platform allowed us to seamlessly apply established administration best practices to this evolving AI framework.

However, configuration, evaluation, and risk assessment are only part of the equation. It's important to launch user awareness initiatives to educate employees—not just on how to use Copilot Studio, but also on its security, privacy, and Responsible AI considerations. You can find e-learning material on the digital bricks website.

These efforts should include role-specific training, Copilot Champions sessions, newsletters, and elite learning programs. To encourage engagement, we even recommend organisations to introduced an agent-building competition, inviting employees to design and experiment with AI-driven solutions.

Providing employees with opportunities for hands-on learning and experimentation will fuel widespread interest in AI agent development. By combining structured policies, well-defined processes, and intuitive product features, we ensure that organisations unlock the full potential of Copilot Studio in a secure and compliant manner. Interested in going it alone? download our 13-page guide on DIY Governance here.

Security, Compliance, and Access Controls

From the outset, it's important to have robust security frameworks in place for safeguarding custom connectors, while Microsoft 365’s built-in governance features ensure that Copilot Studio agents adhere to established data classification policies. Additionally, you have the ability to impose sharing restrictions that control how broadly AI agents can be distributed based on their scope and intended use.

These governance capabilities allow you to seamlessly extend existing administrative policies to manage AI-driven agents. However, implementing structured review processes and compliance policies remains just as crucial- If you are interested in our step-by-step guide to an AI policy, contact us at info@digitalbricks.ai requesting a copy.

For individual self-service agents, which employees create and manage on their own, we define policies at the Copilot Studio environment level. Tenant administrators, alongside Microsoft Security teams, enforce data loss prevention (DLP) policies, ensuring that employees operate within pre-configured governance settings. Automation plays a key role in monitoring and reviewing these agents, allowing for efficient and scalable oversight.

For enterprise-wide or line-of-business agents, which impact broader organiSational operations, stricter governance measures are required. Digital Bricks has established a process for evaluating internally developed enterprise applications. Specialists in security, privacy, and compliance conduct thorough assessments to ensure all AI solutions meet enterprise-grade standards.

By building upon this existing framework, we have refined our custom environment review process for agents developed in Copilot Studio. This process includes multiple evaluation phases, such as:

• Security risk assessments
• Threat modelling evaluations
• Privacy impact assessments
• Responsible AI compliance reviews

Through a combination of proactive governance, structured oversight, and employee education, we help you shape a scalable and future-ready approach to managing AI-powered agents within Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Unlocking Copilot Studio Value

With Microsoft Copilot Studio offering both the flexibility to innovate and the security of robust governance, individuals and teams are exploring creative ways to build impactful AI agents. While we are still in the early stages of the Copilot extensibility journey, these agents are already enhancing information retrieval, decision-making, and productivity across various business functions.

While the potential of Microsoft Copilot Studio is vast, successful AI adoption isn’t just about having the right technology- it’s about implementing it effectively. At Digital Bricks, we specialise in helping organisations of all sizes strategically integrate Copilot solutions through our tailored Copilot Adoption Accelerators. Without proper change management and a structured adoption strategy, almost 91% of AI implementations fail, leading to wasted resources and underutilised technology. Our accelerator programs ensure organisations get the most value out of Copilot and Copilot Studio by providing customised role-specific training, governance frameworks, and structured rollout plans that drive measurable impact.

Beyond implementation, AI literacy is crucial for ensuring employees can confidently use these AI tools to enhance their workflows, boost efficiency, and maintain compliance. Digital Bricks offers a comprehensive e-learning program featuring 129 lessons covering the entire Microsoft Copilot ecosystem. This includes a deep dive into Copilot Studio, where learners gain hands-on experience building their own AI agents, integrating data sources, and deploying automation solutions. By fostering AI competency at every level, we help organisations unlock AI’s full potential-driving innovation, productivity, and competitive advantage.

If your organisation is looking to accelerate Copilot adoption, enhance AI literacy, or develop custom AI agents with Copilot Studio, Digital Bricks is here to help.

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