From Power Virtual Agents to Copilot Studio: Does putting lipstick on a pig really work?

At the Microsoft Ignite 2024 Keynote, CEO Satya Nadella announced one new shiny object, app, and service after another. Somewhere in the middle of it all was the announcement of Azure AI Foundry. As a presenter demonstrated the capabilities of this "new" offering, it suddenly dawned upon me that this was just Azure AI Studio with some UI changes and a new fancy name. I was part-amused and part-annoyed at this marketing ploy to drum up excitement about an old offering by "putting lipstick on a pig" and it got me thinking, "Does this even ever work?" Later that week, as I sat on my flight back from Chicago to Houston looking through the hundreds of pictures I took at Ignite, I came across the Azure AI Foundry picture again and the thoughts came rushing back to my head. As I mulled over it, my mind drifted to Power Virtual Agents. Maybe rebranding / renaming DOES work… Let's examine…

Before we had Copilot Studio, there was the tool formerly known as Power Virtual Agents. I remember when it was first announced in the fall of 2020, not so much because I was excited about it but because it elicited a "meh" response from me. I was fully onboard the Power Platform train, eager to talk about Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI to anyone who cared to listen. But Power Virtual Agents? I wouldn't even bother bringing it up because I wasn't sure why it belonged in the Power family. It reminded me of the Sesame Street song "Three of these things belong together, three of these things are kind of the same, but one of these things doesn't belong together, now it's time to play our game!"

Out of boredom and a little curiosity, a year later in 2021 I decided to give it a try so I could at least say "been there, done that, won't be doing it again anytime soon."

Not that I remember exactly what the pricing was, but I recall thinking it was prohibitive – and just not clear enough. I think I created a trial, and I remember feeling overwhelmed by the time I'd created my first chatbot (i.e., I'd simply clicked Create, checked a few boxes and waited while it created a chatbot). I asked a few questions, and was mildly amused that it could answer stuff… but it couldn't answer a lot. Poking and prodding a little, I noticed that it was using something called Topics to make sense of my questions and was answering based on pre-written messages. I vividly remember thinking, "oh crap, I need to make a topic and an answer for EVERYTHING??! Who on earth's got the time for that? I can't possibly think of everything someone would want to ask! This is one dumb chatbot." And that was it. I closed the window, and probably came back to it once or twice more in the following weeks out of some morbid curiosity to confirm my already made-up-mind that this wasn't ready for prime time.

It was only after Microsoft rebranded Power Virtual Agents (PVA) to Copilot Studio in November 2023 that I started to take notice. This time when I went back, I recognized some of the UI elements from my previous visits but there were also a lot of new elements and features here and there. I was most drawn in by the GenAI features that everyone was buzzing about, and how it could quickly be "trained" to answer questions by plugging it to your knowledge sources like a website or uploading a file.

This time around, it all felt very intuitive. Unlike my previous visit to Power Virtual Agents, I didn't have to go looking for documentation to figure out how things worked. Within minutes, I had created a chatbot that could answer questions based on my now-defunct blog on stock trading. Now THIS was something with endless possibilities. Funny enough, I only became aware much later that these AI features like RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) that I had fallen in love with had been part of Power Virtual Agents for almost a year at that point in time. I didn't know that Actions to work with Power Automate had also been in the product for some time now. I realized in due time that Topics weren't that hard to master either, and they were actually pretty useful and powerful.

But if it weren't for the rebranding and all the hoopla Microsoft made around Copilot Studio, chances are I wouldn't have gone back to try these features for many more months or years – or even known that it existed. Overnight, Power Virtual Agents went from the Power Platform tool I cared the least about to the tool I love the most (in the guise of Copilot Studio, of course).

You could argue that there is more to the success of Copilot Studio than simply its rebranding from Power Virtual Agents. And you'd have a point. But perhaps Power Virtual Agents was way ahead of its time, before ChatGPT got everyone swooning about Generative AI. Perhaps it would have succeeded eventually even with the same name. It's possible. But what a rebrand did is give people another reason to look at it, to talk about it, even if just to validate their theory that it's still the same old thing. And when people like me came to take a look, that was the opportunity to dazzle us with new features that we never realized the offering had. And it created new users and new fans. People started talking about it, and more people came to look. In this particular instance, it also helped that Microsoft used the popularity of ChatGPT and AI, and the buzz around their new "Copilot" brand to breathe fresh life into Power Virtual Agents by calling it Copilot Studio.

To wrap this post up, this "lipstick on a pig" approach may not work every time, and certainly not for everything. But if you have a vastly improved product and you're trying to get people who previously dismissed it a reason to look again, an exciting unveil of the same product with a new name can definitely help you accomplish that goal. It certainly worked for Copilot Studio!

I'll leave you with this YouTube tutorial / walkthrough of Power Virtual Agents by Kevin Stratvert from back in 2022. In just a few minutes of watching this, you'll realize that many of the powerful features we use in Copilot Studio were already in the product over two years ago. And it doesn't look clunky or difficult to use either even though that's how I remembered my hands-on experience with PVA.

When did your journey with Copilot Studio begin? Did you ever use it while it was still Power Virtual Agents? I'd love to hear from you!