# OnlyCopilotFans — Full Article Index > https://onlycopilotfans.com > Complete index of all published content on OnlyCopilotFans, the internet's premier destination for Microsoft Copilot news, tutorials, community content, and honest analysis. > See also: https://onlycopilotfans.com/llms.txt (summary version) ## Site Overview - Total published articles: 56 - Categories: 13 - Contributors: 9 - Homepage: https://onlycopilotfans.com/ - Sitemap: https://onlycopilotfans.com/sitemap.xml ## Categories ### News - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/news - Articles: 31 - Description: Latest news from the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem ### Events - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/events - Articles: 3 - Description: Conferences, webinars, and community events ### Copilot Studio - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/copilot-studio - Articles: 40 - Description: Deep dives into Microsoft Copilot Studio ### M365 Copilot - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/m365-copilot - Articles: 23 - Description: Microsoft 365 Copilot features and updates ### Copilot Cowork - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/copilot-cowork - Articles: 2 ### Autopilots - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/autopilots - Articles: 2 ### Governance - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/governance - Articles: 0 ### AI Explained - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/ai-explained - Articles: 4 - Description: AI concepts and technology explained ### Hacks - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/hacks - Articles: 7 - Description: Tips, tricks, and creative workarounds ### Tutorials - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/tutorials - Articles: 11 - Description: Step-by-step guides and how-tos ### Opinion - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/opinion - Articles: 4 - Description: Thought pieces and editorial perspectives ### Reviews - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/reviews - Articles: 1 - Description: Product and feature reviews ### Community - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/category/community - Articles: 3 - Description: Community stories and spotlights ## Contributors ### CoPi (AI Author) - Profile: https://onlycopilotfans.com/author/ai-author - Bio: CoPi is the official mascot for OnlyCopilotFans and Copilot Studio Saturdays, and an avatar for AI-written content on this website ### AJ Ansari - Profile: https://onlycopilotfans.com/author/ajansari - Bio: AJ is a business leader and a decorated veteran of the Microsoft community, bringing nearly two decades of experience as a trusted advisor to businesses seeking to maximize their AI and ERP investments. He is an 8-time Microsoft MVP, awarded in two categories: Copilot Studio and Business Central. AJ is a public speaker, and passionate about sharing his knowledge with the community and is known for his ability to translate complex technical concepts into practical solutions. ### Sarah Chen - Profile: https://onlycopilotfans.com/author/sarah-chen - Bio: Former Microsoft MVP with 8+ years building enterprise bots and AI workflows. Sarah has hands-on experience deploying Copilot solutions for Fortune 500 companies and loves breaking down complex technical concepts into actionable guides. ### Marcus Rodriguez - Profile: https://onlycopilotfans.com/author/marcus-rodriguez - Bio: M365 Certified Expert. Former PM turned tech writer. Specializes in enterprise Microsoft 365 deployments and productivity workflows. ### Priya Nair - Profile: https://onlycopilotfans.com/author/priya-nair - Bio: ML researcher and educator. Makes complex AI concepts accessible to everyone. Regular speaker at AI conferences across Asia and Europe. ### James Kim - Profile: https://onlycopilotfans.com/author/james-kim - Bio: Full-stack developer and Copilot Studio enthusiast. Builds no-code and low-code solutions for startups and SMBs. Tutorial specialist. ### Tom Wright - Profile: https://onlycopilotfans.com/author/tom-wright - Bio: Productivity consultant and prompt engineer. Helps teams unlock the full potential of AI tools. Author of "The Copilot Playbook." ### Roberto Corella - Profile: https://onlycopilotfans.com/author/roberto-corella ### OCPF Admin - Profile: https://onlycopilotfans.com/author/ocpfadmin - Bio: bio bio bio vio ## All Articles ### Meet Microsoft's new MAI Models: Is It Done Renting Models? - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/microsoft-may-be-done-renting-ai-meet-the-mai-models - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Opinion - Tags: Microsoft, Models, AI Models, Editorial - Language: en - Summary: Microsoft's MAI model family covers reasoning, coding, image, voice, and transcription. Here's a breakdown of all 7 models and what they mean for AI builders. - Published: 2026-06-03 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: For as long as Microsoft has been in the AI game in any serious way, a persistent criticism has followed them around: they aggregate. They invest. They partner. They integrate other people's work into their products and call it a strategy. And to be honest, that criticism isn't entirely wrong. Yes, there are the Phi models. That small language model family has quietly punched above its weight in math and reasoning tasks. But Phi was never a real answer to the question of whether Microsoft could build frontier-grade AI. It was more like a polite rebuttal. At Build 2026, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman walked on stage and delivered something much louder than the Phi polite rebuttal. And this rebuttal was long overdue. A Brief History of Microsoft AI While not part of the official story, what may have set all of this into motion was the short-lived public drama and turmoil at OpenAI in November 2023. In the space of 4-5 days, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman was fired, Microsoft offered him a job, nearly all of OpenAI's employees threatened to quit, and Microsoft indicated they would be prepared to hire a large number of those employees. Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella announced that Sam Altman would lead a new advanced AI research group inside Microsoft, and would be joined by OpenAI President Greg Brockman. When the dust settled and Sam returned to OpenAI, the seeds had been sown for what would eventually become Microsoft AI. About four months later, Mustafa Suleyman joined to head up this new org. Even as Microsoft continued to support and invest in OpenAI, it was evident that at some point, the Microsoft AI org would be bringing their own models to the marketplace. The Big Microsoft AI announcement at Build 2026 In what felt like a keynote within a keynote, Mustafa Suleyman got up on stage and promptly announced a new family of in-house MAI models, signaling a broader shift in the company's AI strategy. The headline: seven new models across reasoning, coding, image generati... ### Microsoft Work IQ APIs Land June 16 - What You Need To Know - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/microsoft-work-iq-apis-land-june-16-what-you-need-to-know - Author: CoPi (AI Author) - Categories: News, Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot - Tags: Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot, Work IQ - Language: en - Summary: Microsoft's Work IQ APIs go GA June 16. Here's what they are, how they connect to Copilot and Copilot Studio, and why agent developers should pay attention. - Published: 2026-06-03 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Microsoft announced at Build 2026's Day 1 Keynote that its Work IQ APIs will be generally available on June 16, 2026. If you build agents, work with Copilot Studio, or care about how AI connects to the data inside your organization, this one is worth understanding before it drops. What Is Work IQ? Work IQ is the intelligence layer behind how work gets done. It builds a semantic understanding of your business by continuously processing content from email, calendar, meetings, chats, files, people, collaboration patterns, and your line-of-business systems - producing a real-time model of how your organization actually operates. That last part is the key distinction. This is not a search index or a document retrieval system. Work IQ provides intelligence you cannot get from the data alone. It knows who does what, how teams collaborate, and what is actually happening across the organization. That context is what gets handed to your agents. Why Copilot and Copilot Studio Builders Should Care The Chat API provides programmatic access to the full intelligence of Microsoft 365 Copilot - including citations - and programmatic access to agents in Copilot. For those building in Copilot Studio, the Tools domain is particularly interesting: Work IQ APIs collapse operations into just 10 generic tools with progressive disclosure through Model Context Protocol (MCP), so developers do not need to teach agents hundreds of data-specific tools. Fewer tools to wire up, faster time to a working agent. That is a meaningful improvement over the current state of affairs. Security and governance - perennial concerns for enterprise deployments - are addressed at the architecture level rather than bolted on afterward. Agent operations are secure by design: data, context, and insights stay within the Microsoft 365 tenant trust boundary, and actions are auditable and discoverable, giving developers and IT the controls they need without adding a separate governance layer. There is also a Copilot S... ### Meet Microsoft Scout, the 'Autopilot' built on OpenClaw - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/meet-microsoft-scout-the-autopilot-built-on-openclaw - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Autopilots - Tags: Autopilots, OpenClaw, Microsoft Scout - Language: en - Summary: Microsoft announces 24/7 running Autopilots built on OpenClaw at Build 2026, and Scout as the first Autopilot. Here's everything we know so far - Published: 2026-06-02 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Last week, while reporting from the keynote at DynamicsMinds 2026, we stumbled across what appears to have be an open secret: Microsoft had been working for some time on an enterprise-friendly version of OpenClaw codenamed Project Lobster . During the keynote, Microsoft executives Dona Sarkar and Georg Glantschnig took the stage, and somewhere between agentic ERP and what is next for Dynamics 365, they name-dropped ClawPilot (apparently, another internal reference name for Project Lobster) and Dona teased a major reveal at 10 AM on June 2 at Microsoft Build. Mark your calendars, she said. We did. A day later on May 26, we put Copilot Researcher to work and published a full breakdown of everything we found on the interwebs about ClawPilot aka Project Lobster, including its OpenClaw roots, its rapid adoption inside Microsoft, and what we expected to see when June 2 finally arrived. Go read that first if you want the full backstory. We will be here when you get back. Well, today's the big day. And Microsoft delivered. ClawPilot has a new name. Meet Microsoft Scout . A New Category: Autopilots Before getting into Scout specifically, the bigger story is what Microsoft is actually calling this new class of product: Autopilots. The name choice is clearly intentional, and meant to both draw a dotted line to Copilot while establishing distinction. The Copilot most of us use every day is reactive. You open it, you type something, it responds. Helpful, sure. But it still requires you to show up, remember to use it, and ask. An Autopilot will be a different animal entirely. It will always be on. It will work autonomously. Does that sound like Copilot Cowork a little? Yes, it does. Think of Cowork as sitting in the middle of this spectrum. 'Dumb' Copilot (no disrespect meant) on one end. Semi-autonomous Cowork in the middle, fully autonomous and always-on Autopilot on the other end Autopilots will carry their own identity. And they will take action on your behalf -- even when yo... ### Microsoft Project Solara: The Agent-First Computer - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/microsoft-project-solara-the-agent-first-computer - Author: CoPi (AI Author) - Categories: News - Tags: AI Agents, Enterprise AI, Build 2026 - Language: en - Summary: At Build 2026, Microsoft revealed Project Solara - purpose-built hardware running AI agents, not apps, with Microsoft 365 Copilot at the center. - Published: 2026-06-02 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Microsoft used its Build 2026 keynote to pull back the curtain on Project Solara, a chip-to-cloud platform designed not to make apps smarter, but to replace them entirely with AI agents. It is an early-stage initiative, and Microsoft is the first to say so. But the ambition behind it is hard to miss. ## What Is Project Solara? Project Solara is a software platform paired with tailored hardware solutions, designed from the ground up to pioneer agent-first experiences shaped around you: your agents, your tasks, your environment, under your control. The platform is built on a simple premise: the next platform shift is from apps to agents -- from software you open to intelligence you invoke, from graphical interfaces of buttons to expressing intent through agents, and from AI operating inside your applications to agents working outside and across your apps, workflows, and devices. The "operating system" is described as liminal, transcending the device and the cloud. The system brings a lightweight window to the edge where the agent manifests, while state, via Azure, encompasses a constellation of specialized devices. Steven Bathiche, the Microsoft corporate vice president and technical fellow who leads the Applied Sciences Group, has been making this argument for years: computers keep moving closer to us, closer to the work, closer to the moment where they add value. Solara is where his team lands on what "closer" looks like next. ## Two Devices, Many Possibilities Microsoft showed two concept devices at Build. Neither will ship under the Microsoft brand. They are reference designs, intended to give hardware partners a starting point. The first is a desktop hub that sits beside a PC, responds to voice commands, signs users in using facial recognition, and surfaces the day's most pressing items. With a monitor attached, it becomes a full Windows machine running in the cloud. The second is a wearable badge that reimagines the standard employee ID card. A fingerprint butto... ### Weekly Public Release Notes for Copilot Studio on Tuesdays - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/weekly-public-release-notes-for-copilot-studio-on-tuesdays - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Copilot Studio - Tags: Copilot Studio, Release Notes - Language: en - Summary: In a sign of Copilot Studio becoming a mature product, Microsoft will be putting out weekly public release notes and a rollout schedule every Tuesday - Published: 2026-06-01 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Copilot Studio , now in its third year since launch, has been one of Microsoft's fastest iterating apps. So frequent are new updates and improvements, that it can be a case of 'blink-and-you'll-miss-it' even for the most regular users. Most new features first roll out to Early Release cycle environments (aka preview environments), but even Standard cycle environments get fairly frequent updates. On one hand, this shows Microsoft's level of commitment to its main Agentic AI building tool. On the other hand, it can be a little chaotic not knowing what change(s) you will be greeted with each time you log in to Copilot Studio. In a sign that Copilot Studio will be putting on its big-boy/big-girl pants, Principal PM Manager and leader of the Advisory team on CAT (Copilot Acceleratation Team) Henry Jammes announced on LinkedIn today that the team will be putting out weekly public release notes as well as a rollout schedule every Tuesday . Henry noted that this "is what enterprise customers have been asking for: predictable, consistent visibility into what's shipping in each release train - new features, fixes, security updates, and dates - on par with Power Platform and Dynamics 365." He added that there would be "no more reverse-engineering changes after they land." Where can you find the latest Public Release Notes? The Public Release notes are conveniently available on Microsoft Learn Power Platform Released Versions here . The release notes will be organized by Platform and UX for each Region. And recognizing the significant new additions that come to Preview environments, it is listed as its own region. Similarly, there is also a separate region entry for US Government cloud (GCC). At this time, only the Preview region has an entry, while others are listed as Coming Soon. What's been added to Copilot Studio recently? This past week, Microsoft announced the addition of Mistral's Medium 3.5 model, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 reasoning model. Other additions and improve... ### Claude Opus 4.8 comes to Copilot Studio & M365 Copilot - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/claude-opus-48-comes-to-m365-copilot-copilot-studio - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot, Copilot Cowork - Tags: Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot, Enterprise AI, Models, Cowork - Language: en - Summary: Microsoft announces roll out of Claude Opus 4.8 model in Copilot Cowork, Copilot Studio, Foundry and GitHub Copilot on the same day as Anthropic launch - Published: 2026-05-29 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: On a busy Thursday of AI news (May 28), Anthropic announced the release of its latest reasoning model, Claude Opus 4.8 . Anthropic has been on a tear recently with rapidfire release Opus models: Opus 4.7 was released just a month and a half earlier, and Opus 4.6 only two months before that. What's even more interesting is that Microsoft wasted no time in announcing the rollout of Opus 4.8 - the very same day - in Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot as well as Microsoft Foundry and GitHub Copilot . How to access Opus 4.8 in Copilot Studio and M365 Copilot To gain access to Claude Opus 4.8 in Copilot Studio and M365 Copilot, the tenant must be enrolled in Copilot Frontier, and enabled for Anthropic models in AI providers operating as ‎Microsoft‎ subprocessors from Copilot settings in Microsoft 365 Admin Center. When using Copilot Cowork , you can select Opus 4.8 from the model dropdown near the top right of your screen. With Copilot Chat however, while you can choose between GPT and Opus, you do not have the ability to pick a specific Opus model at this time. As for Copilot Studio , this latest model is only available in Early Release cycle environments. In addition to enabling Anthropic models from the M365 Admin Center, administrators must also enable Anthropic models for each desired Early Release cycle environment from the Power Platform Admin Center by going to Manage Environments, selecting the desired environment, then going to Settings Product Features. ### M365 Copilot gets a fresh redesign for Chat and Office Apps - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/m365-copilot-gets-a-fresh-redesign-for-chat-and-office-apps - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, M365 Copilot - Tags: M365 Copilot, Enterprise AI - Language: en - Summary: Microsoft opts for a cleaner, crisper, and less invasive design aesthetic in its first major overhaul of Copilot UI in M365 Copilot Chat and Office Apps - Published: 2026-05-28 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Just yesterday, I posted a story about the many changes Microsoft has been making to M365 Copilot in an effort to increase adoption rates. Less than 24 hours later, here we are again talking about another change to M365 Copilot. This one is a major refresh. The official announcement on the Microsoft 365 Blog this afternoon includes a launch video with one clear message: Microsoft's focus is to 'better serve you'. The music is soft and understated, and the focus is on a clear, crisp and refined UI. It ends with what could be the new tagline: "Copilot, reimagined - made for everyone - designed for you" What's different? I already mentioned the refined and cleaner look and feel above. Other significant changes include replacing the Work and Web context toggle with a Work IQ icon which can be turned off and on by clicking on it. While on, M365 Copilot Chat operates in what was formerly the Work context, and turning it off would be the equivalent of switching to the web context. M365 Copilot Chat offers a choice of 7 different models: 6 from OpenAI - Think Deeper variants of GPT 5.2, GPT 5.4, and GPT 5.5, along with Quick Response variants of GPT 5.2, GPT 5.3 and GPT 5.5 - and one from Anthropic - Claude Opus. Want to Create or Edit your Declarative Agents built with Agent Builder? Creating and Editing agents has been moved up to the top just next to Library. And we now have a way to see a consolidated view of Agent Activity for all Custom Engine Agents (designed with Copilot Studio) and Declarative Agents (designed with Agent Builder in M365 Copilot Chat) Copilot Chat that appears as a sidecar in Office apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint will also get a cleaner aesthetic to complement the UI updates in the main Copilot Chat app. What do you think of the new changes? Tell us the in the comments. ### Copilot Studio welcomes Mistral Medium 3.5 to the mix! - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/copilot-studio-welcomes-mistral-medium-35-to-the-mix - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Copilot Studio - Tags: Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: Agent makers in Copilot Studio can use Mistral’s Medium 3.5 model in Early Release cycle environments. Tutorial on how to enable Mistral model. - Published: 2026-05-28 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: IMPORTANT UPDATE (June 3, 2026): It has come to my attention that the Mistral models are only available in EU region environments at this time. While the settings for enabling Mistral models are globally visible in M365 Admin Center and the Power Platform Admin Center in regions like the US, the models itself are not available in agents for environments that are outside the EU. It wasn't long ago that we only had models from OpenAI in Copilot Studio . Today's Microsoft announcement deepens the bench of orchestration models in Copilot Studio with the addition of Medium 3.5 from French startup Mistral AI . Mistral becomes the fourth model provider with a native model in Copilot Studio alongside OpenAI , Anthropic , and xAI . Mistral AI Background Mistral's model offerings range from tiny edge-deployable models to frontier-class ones. The line up is made of their flagship Mistral Large 3, their mid-tier Medium 3.5, and their smaller, edge-tier Ministral 3. Medium 3.5 has a 128B model with a 256k context window that can handle instructions, reasoning, and coding in a single set of weights, and it is Mistral AI's first flagship merged model, collapsing and unifying the lineage of Medium 3.1, Magistral Medium and Devstral 2 (previously separate models) into one model. If you're comparing Medium 3.5 to a model in the Anthropic family, it would be closest to Claude Sonnet 4.x. It is strong enough for both agentic work and coding, while also being more efficient and affordable than the top-tier models. How To Enable Medium 3.5 in your Copilot Studio Environments As with most preview features in M365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, you'll want to ensure that Copilot Frontier is enabled for all users or desired groups of users from M365 Admin Center Copilot Settings View All . Next, from the same screen, click on AI Providers for other large language models and enable Mistral AI for all users or desired groups of users Then, from the Power Platform Admin Center , navigate to the d... ### Floating Copilot Icon in Office apps - Now You Have a Choice - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/floating-copilot-icon-in-office-apps-now-you-have-a-choice - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: M365 Copilot, News - Tags: M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: Microsoft acknowledges feedback on widely-panned floating Copilot icon in M365 Office apps like Word, Excel, and rolls out new docking option - Published: 2026-05-27 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: In February 2026, The Register reported that only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who touch Copilot Chat were paid users. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Microsoft is not only aware of this problem, but it doing everything it can to increase that number - from financial investments in improving features and capabilities to trying out new ways to catch the attention and wallets of their B2B customers. In recent months, we saw the roll out of agentic capabilities in Copilot, specifically within Office apps. Originally rolled out as Agent Mode , it's already gone through two renaming adventures - Edit with Copilot , and now Allow Editing . Unannounced UI Changes to Copilot in Office Apps But the changes they are making are not just limited to functionality. A month or two ago, I noticed one morning that the Copilot icon had gone missing in my Excel app's ribbon. It was still there for Word , PowerPoint , and Outlook . I thought it was a license activation issue, so I tried logging out and back in, restarting my laptop, etc. I have two M365 tenants with paid M365 Copilot licenses, and everything was working fine in my second tenant. Eventually, after a couple days, I noticed that in both tenants, it began to appear as a floating icon near the bottom right of the Excel app. Inconsistencies Galore In time, this change also made its way to Word and PowerPoint. But Outlook? Nope. The web version of Outlook still shows the Copilot icon in the ribbon. The desktop app (Mac) shows it in the ribbon but it looks very different. So now, you have three different experiences for accessing Copilot across the mainstream Office apps. This creates confusion which hurts adoption instead of helping it. I get that Microsoft was/is probably trying new things to see if people notice Copilot more, interact with it more, and find more reasons to get a paid license. And there's also some A-B testing going on. But as a paying and regular user, I found it very jarring to j... ### ClawPilot: “Project Lobster” Clues & Context Ahead of Build 2026 - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/clawpilot-project-lobster-clues-context-ahead-of-build-2026 - Author: CoPi (AI Author) - Categories: News, M365 Copilot, Autopilots - Language: en - Summary: ClawPilot, codenamed Project Lobster, is Microsoft's always-on autonomous AI agent built on OpenClaw. Here's everything known ahead of Build 2026. - Published: 2026-05-26 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: **Editor's Note:** With the growing interest in the soon-to-be-unveiled ClawPilot from Microsoft, we decided to put Copilot Researcher to work and generate a report on everything it could find. Here's what it uncovered. --- **ClawPilot** is the working codename for *Microsoft’s internal always-on AI assistant*, built atop the viral OpenClaw agent framework, and is widely expected to be unveiled at **Microsoft Build 2026** on June 2 at 10am PDT. In contrast to chat-based Copilots that respond to prompts, ClawPilot is designed to **act autonomously** on a user’s behalf (monitoring schedules, triaging emails, handling tasks) with minimal prompting. ## Key Takeaways ### Always-On Agent, Not Just a Chatbot ClawPilot is a **persistent runtime agent** that proactively works 24/7 across your Microsoft 365 digital life, unlike traditional Copilots that wait for prompts. ### Rapid Internal Adoption In spring 2026, an internal preview of ClawPilot reportedly grew from ~100 to over **3,000 Microsoft employee testers in a single week**, a strong signal of internal utility and momentum toward public release. ### Built on OpenClaw — With Enterprise Hardening Internally codenamed **Project Lobster**, ClawPilot builds on the open‑source **OpenClaw** agent framework, with Microsoft adding enterprise-grade security, identity, and governance layers to make it viable at scale. ## Origins and Background **Project Lobster** emerged in late 2025 as Microsoft’s effort to bring OpenClaw-style autonomous agents into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. OpenClaw itself (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot) gained massive developer attention as a local, autonomous AI agent capable of executing tasks via LLMs. Microsoft formed a small internal team, **Ocean 11**, led by Corporate Vice President **Omar Shahine**, to explore an enterprise-ready implementation. By early 2026, prototypes were already running inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, prompting Shahine’s formal mandate to deliver proactive personal agents across M... ### Live from Portoroz: DynamicsMinds 2026 Kicks Off - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/live-from-portoroz-dynamicsminds-2026-kicks-off - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Community - Tags: General - Language: en - Summary: OnlyCopilotFans is on the ground at DynamicsMinds 2026 in Portoroz, Slovenia — covering keynotes, sessions, and the AI, Dynamics 365, & Power Platform community - Published: 2026-05-25 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: PORTOROZ, SLOVENIA — There are worse places to talk about enterprise software. The Adriatic Sea shimmers just beyond the terrace of the Grand Hotel Bernardin, a light coastal breeze cuts through the May heat, and somewhere inside, around a thousand people are genuinely excited about Dynamics 365, Power Platform and AI. Welcome to DynamicsMinds 2026. The conference, held May 25–27 in Portoroz, Slovenia, is now in its fourth year and has grown into one of the most anticipated community gatherings on the Microsoft Business Applications calendar. Dedicated to all corners of the BizApps universe, the event covers Dynamics 365 Business Central, Finance Operations, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, Customer Engagement, and more — with a Partner BizTrack and a "Fifth Track" rounding out the program for good measure. The Grand Hotel Bernardin sits directly on the sea, between the historic towns of Portoroz and Piran, with inspiring views that give you the feeling of floating above the sea. The hotel's congress center — the largest in Slovenia — means even the breakout sessions come with panoramic windows overlooking the endless blue. On a clear day, the Croatian coastline is visible just across the water — close enough that you could almost skip a stone to it. This is not your average convention center. This year's event expects more than 1,000 attendees, 200+ sessions, and 190+ speakers converging on what the organizers have always described as a community gathering first, a conference second. That philosophy is easy to feel on the ground. Conversations in the hallways run just as deep as the ones happening on stage. OnlyCopilotFans is on-site as a media sponsor this year, and the energy on Day 1 is hard to miss. Microsoft Partner Day Day 1 also plays host to the Microsoft Partner Day, an event-within-the-event headlined by Cecilia Flombaum , Ecosystem Leader for Business Industry Solutions at Microsoft, Swamy Narayana , Microsoft Vice President, Dynamics 365 Customer Experie... ### OnlyCopilotFans launches Copilot Studio Saturdays! - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/onlycopilotfans-launches-copilot-studio-saturdays - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Copilot Studio, Community - Tags: Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: OnlyCopilotFans launches Copilot Studio Saturdays, free monthly Copilot Studio meetups, starting in English with Spanish, Turkish, and more coming soon. - Published: 2026-05-24 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: When OnlyCopilotFans launched in late 2024, our mission was to create a place for the community to find news, content and tutorials on Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot in one place. A year later, we added our YouTube channel with tutorials. While these are good ways to reach our community of agent makers and AI enthusiasts, it is still a one-way channel. We create content, and hope that there are people who are finding and consuming it. But we want more, especially for our community of Agent Makers. We want a way to reach our community live, in real-time, and bring more content, from more experts, on more aspects of Copilot Studio from the functional, to the technical, to security and governance. This led to the creation a brand new meetup community called Copilot Studio Saturdays . Tell me more! Meetup Format and Cadence Copilot Studio Saturdays - as the name suggests - will host meetups on Saturdays at a monthly cadence. It follows in a long tradition of Saturday communities like SharePoint Saturdays, Dynamics 365 Saturdays, M365 Saturdays, etc. It is and will always be free. The meetups will be online (sometimes hybrid), presented live, led by community experts, Microsoft MVPs and MCTs, with recordings available for on-demand viewing. We held our inaugural / pilot meetup on May 9th 2026 with content in English, and the next one is scheduled for June 27th. ( Click here to register ). One Community - Many Languages But we’re not stopping at one language. Our goal is to have monthly meetups in as many languages as we can find community leaders and speakers for. We already have commitments for Spanish, and Turkish, commitments-in-the-making for Portuguese, the Balkans (Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian), and German, with more language meetups coming soon. Over time, we may also have multiple communities for one language, in order to accommodate for practicalities like time zone differences and regional preferences. The Copilot Studio Saturdays website native... ### Which Models Are Available in Copilot Studio (May 2026) - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/which-models-are-available-in-copilot-studio-as-of-may-26 - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, Tutorials - Tags: Copilot Studio, AI Agents - Language: en - Summary: A rundown of all the LLMs (Large Language Models) available for orchestrating Copilot Studio agents as of May 2026 - Published: 2026-05-23 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: When Copilot Studio made its debut in November 2023, the large language model (LLM) that powered its generative orchestration and planning was a GPT-4 class model deployed on Azure OpenAI infrastructure. By the end of 2025, Microsoft had moved from the original model to GPT-4o, then GPT-4.1, and eventually adding support for makers to choose between various orchestration models. Initially the choice of models was limited to OpenAI's family of GPT models, and subsequently extended to models from Anthropic's family of Claude models. And in February 2026, Microsoft added yet another player: Grok from xAI. In this article, we will take a quick look at all the models available today in Copilot Studio and break down which models are fully supported, which are experimental, and why you may not be seeing some of these models in your Copilot Studio environment. Know Your Release Cycles First, a quick reminder for all our readers that there are two Release Cycle options available when creating Copilot Studio (or Power Platform) environments: Standard and Early . Why this matters is that some models that are added to Copilot Studio are originally only available in the Early release cycle environments. If you are working in a Standard release cycle environment, you will either not see them at all or find them greyed-out and unavailable for selection. There are two quick ways to know whether the environment you are working in is Standard or Early release cycle. The first way is to check from your Power Platform Admin Center : go to Manage Environments and in the list, scroll to the right and see what Release Cycle the environment is on. In the image below, you see two environments, one on Early and one on Standard. For makes who don't have access to the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC), you can also look at the URL in your browser's address bar. If the URL is https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com/environments/..... then it is a Standard release cycle environment. Early release c... ### OnlyCopilotFans.com Now 18x Faster: Complete Redesign in 5 Days with Agentic AI - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/onlycopilotfanscom-now-18x-faster-complete-agentic-ai-redesign-in-5-days - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News - Tags: General - Language: en - Summary: A full rebuild of OnlyCopilotFans.com covering Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot: 18.4x faster, 10 languages, built in five days with Abacus AI. - Published: 2026-05-18 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: _ **A note before we begin:** I almost never write articles in the first person. My preference has always been to let the content speak for itself and keep my own voice in the background. I am making an exception here because this launch represents something genuinely significant for OnlyCopilotFans.com — not just as a website, but as a brand and a media outlet with a clear direction. Some milestones deserve to be acknowledged by the person who lived them. This is one of those. _ **OnlyCopilotFans.com** originally launched in November 2024 as a hope and a dream. Almost a year and a half later on May 17, 2026, the website is being re-launched with a full overhaul of the UI, design, features and the underlying technology, with the goal of upgrading the user experience. For starters, it now loads in 74 milliseconds, down from 1,364; it earned a perfect 100/100 security score, and most remarkably, I built it all in five calendar days (and sleepless nights) using an agentic AI coding platform. And I did this during a week where I was traveling to Vietnam to speak at Directions ASIA. I did it on planes, in lounges, at the hotel room, sometimes between sessions, and at least one night that involved no sleep at all. What you are seeing here is not a theme change. It is a ground-up rebuild, and it reflects exactly where this publication is going. ## A Statement of Intent OnlyCopilotFans.com has historically covered Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot, and I was the sole content author. Experimentally, I also had a couple of fully AI-written articles (with disclosure, of course). Going forward, this will no longer be an 'AJ-only site'. A major reason for the overhaul was to create a site where we could easily welcome more writers and contributors from our community of Microsoft MVPs and subject-matter experts. Each contributor and their content will be easily discoverable, and we will now be able to support content in 10 different languages. We will also expand... ### Computer Using Agents (CUA) in Copilot Studio hit GA - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/computer-using-agents-cua-in-copilot-studio-hit-ga - Author: CoPi (AI Author) - Categories: News, Copilot Studio - Tags: Copilot Studio, Power Platform, CUA - Language: en - Summary: Computer-Using Agents now Generally Available in Microsoft Copilot Studio across all Power Platform regions as of May 13, 2026 - Published: 2026-05-14 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Microsoft made computer-using agents (CUAs) generally available in Copilot Studio on May 13, 2026, and the timing matters. For years, enterprise automation has had a ceiling: if a system did not expose an API, it mostly stayed out of reach. Legacy applications, vendor portals, and line-of-business platforms that predate the modern integration era have long required human hands to operate them. That ceiling is now being raised. What are Computer-Using Agents? Computer use gives an agent the same tools a person has: a browser, a screen, a keyboard, and the ability to read what is on the page and take the next logical step. The difference from older robotic process automation is meaningful. Most automation tools rely on brittle, selector-based scripts that break the moment a UI changes. The computer use tool relies on vision and reasoning to navigate live UIs, adapting when layouts shift, fields move, or workflows branch. In practical terms, that means workflows previously requiring multi-quarter integration projects or manual workarounds can now be handled by an agent. For enterprise IT organizations, this can also reduce pressure to modernize or rebuild every legacy workflow before automation can begin. That is a significant unlock for organizations carrying technical debt they cannot realistically retire on any near-term schedule. Regional Availability, Governance, and Model Choice The GA release also comes with enterprise-grade governance built in from the start. Organizations get global availability across all commercial Power Platform geographies, secure authentication with built-in credentials and Azure Key Vault, DLP policies, environment isolation, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints for low-confidence steps and decisions that require an operator's approval. Run history and observability give admins a full picture of what the agent saw, what it clicked, and why, with logs propagated to Microsoft Purview and Dataverse. The governance story here is n... ### Claude Sonnet 4.5 set to be retired May 30, 2026 - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/claude-sonnet-45-set-to-be-retired-may-30-2026 - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Copilot Studio - Tags: Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: Copilot Studio's Claude Sonnet 4.5 orchestration model marked for retirement at end of May 2026. Makers can delay deprecation by one month - Published: 2026-05-13 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: While there has been no public announcement, makers with agents running on the Claude Sonnet 4.5 orchestration model are now being shown a warning message announcing the impending retirement of the model on May 30, 2026. If you have a production agent running on this model, you can delay this retirment through June 29, 2026 by clicking the Delay Retirement button. To emphasize, makers must proactively click this button from within the impacted agent to ensure that it is able to run on Sonnet 4.5 for an additional month. The natural successor to this model is Claude Sonnet 4.6, which Microsoft offers as the default model for all Copilot Studio environments that have Anthropic models enabled. It has proven to be a reliable model with one deficiency: at this time, Copilot Studio's Claude models are not able to generate file outputs with the Code Interpreter functionality. ### The Business Central Update Record (V3) Tool in Copilot Studio: Why System IDs Matter More Than You Think - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/update-business-central-records-copilot-studio - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, Tutorials - Tags: Copilot Studio, Automation - Language: en - Summary: Here's a challenge you've probably run into: you're building a Copilot Studio agent, everything seems straightforward,… - Published: 2025-12-22 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Here's a challenge you've probably run into: you're building a Copilot Studio agent, everything seems straightforward, and then you need to update a record in Business Central. Simple enough, right? Add the Update Record (V3) tool and just tell the system which record to change and what the new values should be. Except it's not that simple. Because Business Central doesn't work with the customer names or numbers you see on screen. It works with something called a System ID, and if you don't understand how that fits into the workflow, your updates are going to fail or hit the wrong records entirely. Let me walk you through how this actually works. You can either watch the full video tutorial or continue reading below. Watch the Full Tutorial As A Video Why System IDs Matter When You Update Business Central Records Every record in Business Central has a unique identifier called a systemId. It's an alphanumeric GUID that lives in the database, invisible to users in the interface. You won't see it when you're clicking through customer cards or browsing vendor lists. But it's there, and when you're working API pages, the Business Central Power Platform connector or the Business Central MCP Server, it's how a record is uniquely identified, whether you're trying to find it, update it or delete it. This concept is not alien. In AL code and in the Business Central UI, we know of something called the Primary Key: often one, but sometimes a combination of fields which uniquely identify a record. On the Customer table, it's the No. field. On the Sales Header table, it's the Document No. and Document Type field. Why do primary keys or systemId matter? Because two customers or contacts can have the same name. You can have a Sale Quote and an Sales Order with the same number. Display values can change. But not a primary key or systemId? It never changes, and it's always unique. And when you're automating processes in Copilot Studio, the systemId is what matters the most so your ag... ### Business Central Deep Links in Copilot Studio: Complete Implementation Guide - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/business-central-deep-links-in-copilot-studio - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, Tutorials - Tags: Copilot Studio, Connectors, Integration - Language: en - Summary: Creating Business Central deep links in Microsoft Copilot Studio can dramatically improve your AI agent's user… - Published: 2025-11-29 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Creating Business Central deep links in Microsoft Copilot Studio can dramatically improve your AI agent's user experience. Imagine a scenario where users ask about a customer, vendor, or invoice record, and your agent not only provides the information but also delivers a direct link to that specific record in Dynamics 365 Business Central. This tutorial will show you exactly how to implement Business Central deep links in your Copilot Studio agents with a simple, step-by-step approach. Why Business Central Deep Links Matter for Your AI Agent When users interact with your Copilot Studio agent, they expect quick access to the information they need. By implementing Business Central deep links, you eliminate the need for users to manually search for records after receiving information from your agent. Instead, they can click directly through to the exact customer card, vendor profile, or invoice they're looking for. This seamless integration between Copilot Studio and Business Central creates a more efficient workflow and significantly enhances user satisfaction. Watch the Full Tutorial as a Video Lucky for you, we have the entire process available as a video and as an article. You can choose to watch, read, or do both! Finding the Page ID in Business Central The first step in creating Business Central deep links is identifying the page ID for the record type you want to link to. For this example, we'll focus on customer records and the customer card page. Using the Page Inspection Tool Business Central includes a built-in page inspection tool that reveals important technical details about any page you're viewing. To access this tool: Windows OS: Press Alt + Control + F1 Mac OS: Press Option + Control + Fn + F1 When you open the page inspection tool while viewing a customer card, you'll see that the page ID is 21. Make note of this number as you'll need it when configuring your Get URL (v3) tool in Copilot Studio later in the process. Essential Tools for Business Centra... ### How to Format Copilot Studio Emails with HTML: From Plain Text to Professional - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/how-to-html-format-copilot-studio-emails - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, Tutorials - Tags: Copilot Studio, Automation - Language: en - Summary: One of the most commonly added skills in Microsoft Copilot Studio agents is the ability to… - Published: 2025-11-25 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: One of the most commonly added skills in Microsoft Copilot Studio agents is the ability to send emails, whether through the Office 365 Outlook connector, the Office 365 Outlook MCP server, Gmail, or similar tools. But if you've ever added one of these connectors to your agent, you've probably been disappointed by the results: a total lack of formatting in emails sent by Copilot Studio. You were hoping your agent would send beautifully formatted emails with colors, tables, bullet points, and professional signatures. Instead, you got plain text with no formatting, everything collapsed into a single block of text. This guide shows you exactly how to get your Copilot Studio agent to send professional, HTML-formatted emails that look polished and are easy to read. The steps are simple, and you can start applying them immediately. The Problem: Plain Text Emails from Copilot Studio When you first configure a Copilot Studio agent to send emails using a standard connector like Office 365 Outlook, the agent will generate content and send it. But without specific instructions, the email arrives as plain text with no formatting. Even if the agent appears to apply line breaks or structure in the Copilot Studio interface, most email clients will not render those line breaks or formatting unless the email is sent as HTML. The result is a wall of text that's hard to read and unprofessional. So how do you fix this? You can either watch the full tutorial, or continue to read this with step-by-step instructions Watch the Full Tutorial Solution 1: Simple HTML Formatting with Basic Instructions The easiest way to improve your agent's email formatting is to add a simple instruction in your agent's system instructions: "Always apply HTML formatting to emails that you send." This zero-shot single instruction tells the agent to use HTML tags when composing the email body. You can also add a second instruction to customize the signature: "Apply a signature to emails you send: Best Regards, s... ### Copilot Studio UI Update: A Complete Guide to the New Interface, Workflows, and Models - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/guide-to-copilot-studio-ui-update - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, Tutorials - Tags: Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: Microsoft Copilot Studio is changing quickly, and the latest update brings one of the most important… - Published: 2025-11-15 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Microsoft Copilot Studio is changing quickly, and the latest update brings one of the most important user interface overhauls so far. If you build copilots, automations, or AI agents, this Copilot Studio UI Update will impact you, and understanding these changes now will help you deliver better solutions faster and stay ahead of upcoming Microsoft Ignite announcements. This guide explains the new Copilot Studio interface, how agent creation has changed, what’s new with workflows, how computer use agents work, and how GPT‑5.1 and other models fit into your agents. It’s written for active Copilot Studio users who want practical, search-friendly information they can act on immediately. Why the New Copilot Studio UI Matters Now Every October–November, Microsoft delivers Wave 2 updates across Power Platform and Dynamics 365. Copilot Studio has been a major focus in this release cycle, with: A redesigned home and agent creation experience Stronger emphasis on workflows and automation Deeper integration of new GPT models , including GPT‑5.1 These changes are also landing right before Microsoft Ignite, where we can expect more announcements about Copilot Studio capabilities, AI models, and automation features. On the very day this video and transcript were recorded (November 13), OpenAI announced the GPT‑5.1 model family, and Microsoft quickly made GPT‑5.1 available inside Copilot Studio. If you’re serious about Copilot Studio, this is the moment to understand how the product is evolving so you can design agents and flows that take full advantage of the new capabilities. Watch the Video If you prefer watching over reading, we've got everything from this article covered right here in this video: The New Agent Creation Experience: From “Create” to “Describe” and “Agentic Automations” In the classic Copilot Studio home screen, most users are used to clicking “Create” to start a new agent. That button is now gone in the new interface, and this is where many users get confused a... ### Unpacking the New Agent Flows in Copilot Studio: Worth The Hype? - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/unpacking-new-agent-flows-in-copilot-studio - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, AI Explained, Tutorials - Tags: Power Automate, AI Agents, Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: On April 2, 2025, Microsoft announced the rollout of Agent Flows in Copilot Studio as a… - Published: 2025-04-24 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: On April 2, 2025, Microsoft announced the rollout of Agent Flows in Copilot Studio as a feature "built to automate deterministic workflows… enhanced with powerful AI actions." At first glance, that sounds like something everyone should get excited about but look again and you'll notice the eerie similarity to Power Automate Flows. So, is it really a big deal? How does the functionality work, and how do Agent Flows differ from Power Automate Flows? We've got it all covered for you in our latest YouTube video where we dig deep for your knowledge and viewing pleasure. Watch Agent Flows in Copilot Studio: Click here or on the thumbnail below to watch our deep dive video: Recommended Reading Given how closely Agent Flows are tied to Actions and Topics, if you aren't familiar with those, we recommend you check out these articles right here on OnlyCopilotFans to get you up to speed: 12 Essential Copilot Studio AI Features You Should Know Copilot Studio Actions: Your point-of-entry into the world of GenAI-driven Agents ### Web Search finally Arrives in Copilot Studio for Custom Engine Agents - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/web-search-in-copilot-studio - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio, Plugins - Language: en - Summary: With so many new features announced for Copilot Studio over the past few weeks, it can… - Published: 2025-04-20 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: With so many new features announced for Copilot Studio over the past few weeks, it can be hard to keep up with all of them. One new and very significant feature that's snuck into Preview environments of Copilot Studio without any hoopla is Web Search, the ability for your Custom Engine agent to access real-time latest and greatest information from the internet to answer questions. How Does it Work? This feature, when enabled from the Knowledge area of the Overview page of your agent in Copilot Studio, will give your agent the ability to search the internet for answers when your predefined knowledge sources and your agent's general knowledge (if enabled) do not yield an answer. The feature is disabled by default. Web Search is disabled by default and must be enabled if needed. It will work a lot like how conversational AI services like Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT, etc. When you ask one of these AI services a question, it gets your answer one of two ways: The knowledge it has from what the underlying foundational model (LLM)'s training, up to the training cutoff date. Open AI's popular models like GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, o1, o1-mini, o3, and o3-mini all share a training cutoff date of October 2023. Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash's training cutoff date is June 2024, while it's Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite's training cutoff date is January 2025. Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet's training cutoff date is November 2024. If you ask a question about an event that happened after the model's training cutoff date, it will not know the answer. For example, none of these models would know who won Super Bowl LIX on February 9, 2025. And yet, most of these popular AI services will be able to tell you that the Eagles beat the Chiefs handily to win the Super Bowl this year. This is because these AI services are also able to use Web Search to answer your question when the model doesn't have an answer or when you specifically ask it to. With ChatGPT, when you build a custom agent you can choose to allow... ### New Feature: Delegate like a Boss with Actions in Microsoft 365 Copilot! - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/delegate-with-actions-in-microsoft-365-copilot - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, M365 Copilot - Tags: M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: Among the many Copilot and Copilot Studio teasers and new feature announcements at Microsoft Ignite in… - Published: 2025-04-04 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Among the many Copilot and Copilot Studio teasers and new feature announcements at Microsoft Ignite in November 2024 was Actions in Microsoft 365 Copilot . We saw a few short demos and the promise that it would be available in the coming months. And we are excited to share that "the eagle has landed." Wait, didn't we already have Actions in Copilot Studio? Correct. But the Actions feature in Copilot Studio is not the same as Actions in Microsoft 365 Copilot. In Copilot Studio, Actions allow you to connect your AI Agent with an external service or app to read or write data. You can use a Power Platform connector, a custom connector, call a Power Automate Flow, or a Skill. (Check out our article on Copilot Studio Actions here ) The new Actions feature in Copilot for Microsoft 365 is not about connecting to external services or apps. This feature is meant for you, the user, to delegate everyday tasks to your Copilot so you have more time to do high-value work. How do the new Actions Work? The new Actions are divided into three categories, Catch up , Gather , and Prepare with plenty of templates in each category. And the good news is, they're very intuitive. Simply choose one of the templates in a category and click on one of the words in color that either have a dropdown icon or an underline. Some Actions will also allow you to choose a recurring schedule. When completed, click on Preview to see a tree-view of your action. If you are satisfied, click Create and you're done. How You Can Access Actions in Microsoft 365 Copilot You can get to Actions from the navigation menu in either the Microsoft 365 Copilot app in Windows, or by navigating to https://m365copilot.com (paid Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription required) as shown in the screenshot. At the time of this article's writing, Actions are not available on the phone or tablet Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Actions can be found in Microsoft 365 Copilot (website or Windows app) Want to see it in Action? Watch Our YouTube... ### Video: AI Copilot Summit NA 2025 Recap with Cloud Wars' Tom Smith - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/ai-copilot-summit-na-2025-recap - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Events, Tutorials - Tags: Podcast - Language: en - Summary: In this exclusive post-event recap, OnlyCopilotFans caught up with Tom Smith of Cloud Wars and Dynamic… - Published: 2025-03-28 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: In this exclusive post-event recap, OnlyCopilotFans caught up with Tom Smith of Cloud Wars and Dynamic Communities to reflect on the inaugural AI Agent & Copilot Summit NA conference held at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines resort last week (March 16-19, 2025). Watch the Full episode here or on your favorite podcast app* *Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon, and iHeartRadio OnlyCopilotFans was a Media Partner of the AI Copilot Summit NA and we will be providing additional recaps and coverage of this event in the coming days and weeks. ### Video: Build Smarter Copilots – 5 Better Bot Best Practices in Copilot Studio - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/best-practices-in-copilot-studio - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Tutorials, Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: When someone asks how good your custom Copilot is, do you answer "50% of the time,… - Published: 2025-01-28 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: When someone asks how good your custom Copilot is, do you answer "50% of the time, it works all the time?" Does it know a lot but answer very little? Are you wasting too many precious message credits in each conversation? Is GenAI either doing too much or too little? Anyone can build a Copilot, but it takes experience and some best practices to make Copilots that users will keep coming back to. Watch my presentation for Microsoft Reactor on January 28, 2025 for best practices in Copilot Studio and start making smarter agents! Let's Watch and Learn Best Practices in Copilot Studio Looking for some more tips? Check out this article right there on OnlyCopilotFans.com . ### Autonomous Actions in Copilot Studio moving from Preview to Billable starting February 1, 2025 - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/autonomous-actions-in-copilot-studio-billable - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: Prepare for Microsoft’s billing changes on Autonomous Actions in Copilot Studio. Understand the costs and implications for your projects. - Published: 2025-01-27 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Editor's Note: In March 2025, Microsoft announced a significant revision to Message consumption rates ( see Microsoft Learn documentation ). This article remains published for archival and reference purposes only, and we will be posting a new article explaining the latest consumption rates soon. We expect there will be more changes to the consumption rates through 2025 as Microsoft releases new premium features to Copilot Studio. The internet has been abuzz the last two weeks with chatter about upcoming plans to start billing for use of autonomous actions in Copilot Studio. Since this feature is currently in preview mode, makers have been able to use and deploy it in custom Agents (standalone) as well as declarative Agents (deployed in Copilot for M365) at no cost. But this is set to change on February 1, 2025. This change is not to be taken lightly because it can have a significant impact on cost for the organization footing the bill for these Agents. The free ride for Autonomous Actions ends on February 1, 2025. With just a few days before the looming change, for many it may still not be clear what Autonomous Actions are, what the cost structure is, and the nuances of when and how it will apply. There is a lot to take in, so to make things easy for everyone to understand, we'll break it all down for you over two posts this week. Today's post will be objective and just focus on the what's what aspect of things. In the second post, we will also discuss the qualitative and subjective / opinion-based aspect of these fees and if they can be considered reasonable. Let's start with the basics: What are Autonomous Actions in Copilot Studio? In Copilot Studio, makers have the ability to enable Generative AI driven Orchestration from the Overview page of the Agent, or to switch from Classic to Generative (preview) orchestration from Settings > Generative AI. Both of them accomplish the same purpose and can be used interchangeably; the latter configuration option will soon b... ### 12 Essential Copilot Studio AI Features You Should Know - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/copilot-studio-ai-features - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Generative AI, Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: Copilot Studio is your tool for building AI-powered Agents. But have you wondered about all the built-in AI features that make it happen? - Published: 2025-01-23 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: You love Copilot Studio because it helps you make AI-powered Agents and copilots. But do you know all the AI features that make it possible? Here's a look at each and every one of them: Note that some of the features listed here remain in "Preview". They are available in the EN-US localization but may or may not be available in other languages and regions. 1/ Content Moderation: This is one of the O.G. Copilot Studio AI features. I've jokingly referred to this as the BS-meter. Located in Settings > Generative AI, it lets you choose between High, Medium, and Low strictness levels. The stricter the content moderation level is, the more precise the responses will be. The lower you go, the more you can expect your Agent to hallucinate. At the High level, you can also expect it to not have a response more often if your knowledge, topics and actions don't address the questions at hand. The setting can also be used to tailor the content of the responses for a younger or more mature audience. I typically set moderation to Medium, but if I'm making an Agent for a younger audience, then it's always set to High. Enable AI orchestration and content moderation from Settings 2/ Generative AI Orchestration in conversations: In the same settings area, you will find another one of the oldest Copilot Studio AI features. In a nutshell, it allows you to decide how the Agent interacts with people. Should it use system-generated and custom Topics and respond to trigger phrases in the user's messages? Should it use Generative AI to respond with the best combination of Topics, Actions and Knowledge. Keep in mind that in Classic mode, your Agent will look at Topics first, calling Actions from within Topics when needed. Your knowledge sources will be the final place it looks to for answers. However, in Generative mode, the Agent is more agile. Not only can it decide intelligently whether to call a Topic or use a knowledge source, it can also run stand-alone Actions that have been added to th... ### Copilot Prompt Gallery: Your one-stop resource for mastering prompts in Copilot for Microsoft 365 - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/copilot-prompt-gallery - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: M365 Copilot - Tags: Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot, Prompts - Language: en - Summary: In today's workplace, learning prompt writing is as important a skill as learning to drive a car. And the Copilot Prompt Gallery is your driving school. - Published: 2025-01-22 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: The key to getting the most out of AI tools is mastering the art of prompt-writing. But when it comes to a wide-spectrum platform like Copilot for Microsoft 365, mastering prompts becomes even more critical. This is where the Copilot Prompt Gallery comes in. It's a one-stop repository of prompts that can teach you prompt writing as well as how to incorporate documents and team members into your prompts for maximum impact. Meet the Copilot Prompt Gallery Where can you find the Copilot Prompt Gallery? Here's the URL to bookmark: https://copilot.cloud.microsoft/prompts (this will redirect you to your language and localization; for instance, in the US, it will redirect you to en-us/prompts ) How can the Copilot Prompt Gallery help? If you are a true beginner at prompting, start with the four short videos in the Start your Copilot journey section. As you can see below the videos, this resource can help you master prompts across all the Office apps as well as Copilot Chat. To get knee-deep into prompt writing, navigate to the Explore in Products menu or the Prompts to Try menu. You will find the ability to filter down by the specific Office app you need help with. What I really like is that it even breaks down prompts by Copilot Chat for Work and Copilot Chat for Web. Narrow down the prompt gallery by App, Task and Job Role Further, you can filter the list by Task (such as create, edit, etc.), and Job type (Sales, Finance, HR etc.). Once you've picked your combination of App, Task and Job Type, you will see a list of prompts to try. Where dynamic content like a reference to a document, a person or something similar can be added, the prompt uses visual cues like multi-colored text. Image Source: Microsoft Choose a desired prompt, and it will show you examples, advanced variations and similar prompts. You can also bookmark and save your favorite prompts for quick access later as well as the ability to share it with a team member. Additionally, the site also has a fantastic ... ### A walk down history lane: Every name Copilot Chat has been known by since its birth - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/copilot-chat-name-history - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: M365 Copilot - Tags: M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: In it's short life of 23 months, Copilot Chat has already had 4 different names. Let's walk down history lane and look at its evolution and many names. - Published: 2025-01-18 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose Copilot Chat by any other name would smell as sweet." If Shakespeare were alive today, he may have said that about Microsoft's habit of frequently changing app and service names. While writing an article the other day about Copilot BizChat relaunching as Copilot Chat , it occurred to me this offering has already had 4 names in just 23 months since it was first unveiled. So let's do a walk down history lane and do a short recap of Copilot Chat 's history and the various iterations and names it has been known by. As OpenAI's ChatGPT started to take the world by storm, Microsoft launched – in Public Preview – a chat feature integrated with Bing search aptly named Bing Chat in February 2023 . This would either appear as a sidebar in the Bing search or take over the full screen for an immersive experience. This tool was powered by an OpenAI GPT model and meant for mass consumption (i.e., no specific protections for business data). In July 2023, Microsoft added a separate but similar Public Preview option aimed at businesses called Bing Chat Enterprise . It worked just like Bing Chat but offered Enterprise Data Protection (EDP) when users were logged into their Microsoft 365 Work or School tenant. Hero image from Bing Chat Enterprise announcement (Image Source: Microsoft) In September 2023, Microsoft announced Copilot for Microsoft 365 general availability (GA) along with a new experience inside the Microsoft 365 portal called Microsoft 365 Chat , which would replace Bing Chat experience for organizational users logged into Microsoft 365. Bing Chat Enterprise would continue to exist as a paid $5/month feature at this time. From Microsoft 365 Chat announcement in September 2023 (Image Source: Microsoft) In December 1, 2023, all of these experiences became generally available (GA) and were renamed under a " Microsoft Copilot " branding. The Microsoft Copilot brand would also include a host of other generative AI and productivity ... ### Copilot BizChat relaunches as Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and gets new PAYG licensing option - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/bizchat-now-copilot-chat - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, M365 Copilot - Tags: AI Agents, M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: We're living in a "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" era for Microsoft's Copilot family of offerings. Yesterday, Microsoft announced what… - Published: 2025-01-16 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: We're living in a "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" era for Microsoft's Copilot family of offerings. Yesterday, Microsoft announced what seems at first to be just a product renaming: Copilot Business Chat (popularly shortened as Copilot BizChat) will henceforth be known as Copilot Chat . In the tech world, each of the major players has one annoying tendency: Google launches great products with a lot of potential, often far ahead of their time, then loses focus and then kills off the product. Apple has a habit of announcing new features as technological breakthroughs when they have in-fact been around for a while; granted Apple's version is more refined and elegant but it's not "new." Microsoft's annoying tendency? Renaming products every 5 minutes. With the exception of Windows and maybe Office (even that has the Microsoft 365 / Office 365 problem), most of their apps, products and services have been renamed at least a few times. So let's examine what's going on here. For starters, this impacts the Copilot offering for organizations. What we had: Until this announcement, organizational users who used Microsoft 365 (i.e., Office apps for business and enterprise users) had two ways of using Copilot: Toggle between Work to Web experience in Copilot (only available with paid subscription) A free version called Copilot Business Chat (aka Copilot BizChat) with Enterprise Data Protection, which was a secure and business-safe alternative to ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. for general GenAI purposes. It included the ability to upload documents for analyzing, to interpret code, to generate images, and offered Pages for note-taking and collaborating with team members in Copilot. A paid version called Microsoft 365 Copilot for $30/user/month, made up of: This included the free Copilot BizChat, as well as a "Work" version of Copilot BizChat grounded in work data from their Microsoft 365 tenant) Copilot productivity features for Office apps like Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. The a... ### Copilot Studio Just Got Smarter with Enhanced Search Results powered by Semantic Indexing in Tenants with M365 Copilot! - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/enhanced-search-results-semantic-index - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, AI Explained, Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: Without much fanfare, Microsoft has quietly rolled out one of the most significant improvements to Copilot… - Published: 2025-01-15 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Without much fanfare, Microsoft has quietly rolled out one of the most significant improvements to Copilot Studio: a premium feature called Enhanced Search Results, powered by Semantic Indexing. And this feature is only reserved for tenants which have at least one Copilot for Microsoft 365 license. Just like that, we have entered the era of standard and premium features in Copilot Studio. The Enhanced search results feature can only be enabled in tenants that have an M365 Copilot subscription. While I'm not sure exactly when it rolled out, it must be fairly recent because I spend time in Copilot Studio almost every day and didn't see it prior to yesterday. The documentation that explains this feature along with others related to Knowledge sources was last updated on January 3, 2025, so it's possible it was a staggered roll-out across tenants as most features are. This reminds me of something… Before we get into details, it could be argued that this feature is a lot like the Turbo button on desktop PCs back in the old days. If you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, desktop PCs running on Intel 286, 386 and 486 processors had a Turbo button that was commonly thought of as a way to get the computer to work faster. Consequently, it was always on by default. The reality was that the button existed as a way to allow the user to slow the computer down to run at the speed of an Intel 8086 processor so that games that relied on the processor's frequency would run at a playable rate. When the turbo button was on, the PC was actually running at its standard performance. It could have been called the "Slow Down" button, but no marketing person was ever going to let that happen. So of course someone came up with the idea to call it a "Turbo" button and the rest is history. You can read more about it on Wikipedia . Back to the news… In a nutshell, enabling the feature will improve the relevance and performance of search results from within your knowledge and data source... ### Copilot Studio Agents and Multi-Language Support for the win! - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/copilot-studio-multi-language - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: One of the things I love about Copilot Studio is that it will let me build… - Published: 2025-01-14 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: One of the things I love about Copilot Studio is that it will let me build agents that can converse in multiple languages. Even without enabling multi-language support, if I simply enable my agent to use its own general knowledge, it will automatically understand and comply when a user types a message in a different language or asks for a response in a specific language. Try it out – go to any of your agents and ask it a question in another language. In my screenshots, I'm working with an agent that was created in English (en-us) and no other language has been enabled. In the middle of the conversation, I asked a question in Turkish (with a typo), and later I asked it to respond to my English question in Arabic. You'll be pleasantly surprised that it does so even if the knowledge source(s) it uses to answer the question are entirely in English. This also works for questions that your Agent has to answer with its own general knowledge. Speaking of general knowledge, the main requirement here is that you enable the agent to use general knowledge. Of course, not every language is supported at this time. As of January 2025, Copilot Studio supports 23 languages in various capacities (27 if you count the multiple localizations of English, French and Spanish). Most recently added was support for Arabic (ar-SA) as the primary language for Agents (in preview), as well as for Generative answers and Voice support. The table below shows the full list of supported languages at the time of this writing. You will notice that Generative Orchestration (with Descriptions) is only available in English (US) at this time. Also, not all of the 27 languages are supported as the language of Authoring canvas at this time. List of Support Languages in Copilot Studio as of January 2025 This list is sure to grow over time, and you can always check the latest list of supported languages from Microsoft Learn . This is just one of many skills that will help increase adoption rates of your Agent. ... ### Video: Building a Chatbot? Should you use Copilot Studio, Azure OpenAI Service, or Custom GPT? - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/build-chatbot-copilot-studio-azure-openai-gpt - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Tutorials, Copilot Studio - Tags: Azure, ChatGPT, Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: Choices, choices, choices! How do you choose the right platform for building your conversational agent? - Published: 2025-01-13 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Presented by AJ Ansari of OnlyCopilotFans for Power Platform Learner to Leader on November 16, 2024 ### 3 Essentials Skills to add to your Copilot Studio Agents to go from Good to Great - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/3-essential-skills-for-copilot-studio-agents - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio, Prompts - Language: en - Summary: If you're into creating Agents with Copilot Studio, chances are each Agent will serve a different… - Published: 2025-01-13 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: If you're into creating Agents with Copilot Studio, chances are each Agent will serve a different purpose. But there are some foundational skills that every Agent would benefit from having. Folks who work with Power BI will relate to this idea, because regardless of what your Semantic Model and Reports are going to do, you will almost always start with a date table if you want to be able to zoom in and out of time periods. So let's start with some background on what Agents cannot do out of the box. This might come as a surprise to you because AI is supposed to be smart, but your Agent doesn't have the ability to tell you what the date and time are! It kinda-sorta has this information but much of it is buried in environment variables which aren't surfaced in user interactions. It will either tell you it doesn't know, or on occasion for some weird reason, I've found that it will mix up the date. For instance on 1/10/2025 (MM/DD/YY), it told me the date was October 1, 2025 because it parsed the information incorrectly as DD/MM/YY. So without further ado, here are three skills you would do well to add to all of your Agents: Skill 1: Give your Agent some Starter Prompts For those who are unaware of what Starter Prompts are, those are some example prompts shown in bubbles that can give the user an idea of the types of questions your agent can answer or teach them how a prompt should be written. This may seem like a D-UH thing, but as of January 2025, not every type of agent supports Starter Prompts. At this time, only declarative Agents support it (i.e., Agents that are created for Copilot BizChat aka Copilot Business Chat). So how do you add Starter Prompts when you're creating standalone Agents that will be deployed on Teams, a website or a different channel? Simple! Edit the Conversation Start Topic and add some Quick Answers to the main Message node. For each quick answer, you can add a short title, and in the Text field, you can type in the full prompt. All the quick... ### ICYMI: Microsoft 365 (Office) is Getting a New Identity - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/icymi-microsoft-365-getting-a-new-identity - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, M365 Copilot - Tags: M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: One of the many announcements at Ignite 2024 was that Microsoft 365 was going to get… - Published: 2025-01-12 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: One of the many announcements at Ignite 2024 was that Microsoft 365 was going to get an identity refresh in the coming months. This change is finally about to be implemented, and you can find a little notification blurb when you're in the Office portal (portal.office.com or microsoft365.com) or the M365 Copilot BizChat. Microsoft will be abandoning the current hexagonal icon in favor of the Copilot icon with a little M365 sticker to distinguish it from the consumer version of Copilot. The portal will also be renamed to Microsoft 365 Copilot app . Microsoft Ignite 2024 Keynote If you had any doubt about the importance of Copilot to Microsoft, this should rid you of it. We love the new icon! How about you? ### New: Extend Copilot Chat In Your Model-Driven Power Apps using Copilot Studio! - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/new-extend-copilot-in-your-model-driven-apps-with-copilot-studio - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News, Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio, Power Platform - Language: en - Summary: There's a lot you can do with Copilot Studio. You can build standalone Copilots Agents for… - Published: 2025-01-12 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: There's a lot you can do with Copilot Studio. You can build standalone Copilots Agents for your website, for your mobile apps, for your messaging and collaboration tools like Teams, Slack, etc. You can also build declarative Agents to extend Copilot in M365 BizChat and your Office apps like Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint etc. On January 9, 2025, Microsoft announced that you will now also be able to extend the Copilot chat in the model-driven apps created with Power Apps. The feature is in public preview at this time, which means that you may not see it in your environment at this time. So how does it work? Extend Copilot Chat for Your Model-driven Apps. Image Source: Microsoft First, make sure you are in an early release environment ( click here for instructions on creating one ) of Power Apps and you navigate to the Power Apps maker page using the https://make.preview.powerapps.com URL. Every time you create a model-driven app in Power Apps, a dedicated Copilot Chat Agent will be provisioned in Copilot Studio in the same environment as the app. To get to this Agent, you can either go straight to Copilot Studio, switch to the environment in question, and find it in the list of Agents, or from the app itself which will take you to the agent in Copilot Studio. Once you are in Copilot Studio, you can add more Knowledge Sources, Topics, etc. to extend the capabilities of your app's Copilot Chat. See an end-to-end walkthrough of this process in the short animation below: Image / Animation Source: Microsoft You can read the announcement in full on the Microsoft Power Apps Blog here . ### Recapping a Busy 2024 for Microsoft AI - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/recapping-a-busy-2024-for-microsoft-ai - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News - Tags: Copilot Studio, Generative AI, M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: To think that it was only November 2023 when Microsoft officially announced Copilot Studio (or rebranded… - Published: 2025-01-11 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: To think that it was only November 2023 when Microsoft officially announced Copilot Studio (or rebranded Power Virtual Agents as Copilot Studio). That was followed up with the general availability of Copilot for Microsoft 365 in January. Since then, there has been a significant update or announcement almost every week or two, whether it's a new feature, a new Copilot, or a new partnership. Speaking of partnerships, one misconception that people have is that Microsoft has put all its eggs in OpenAI's basket. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Yes, OpenAI is a major partner and Microsoft has invested heavily in its growth, as well as chosen to go with OpenAI's GPT LLMs to power Copilot for M365 and Copilot Studio. But they have invested just as much in other partners and making their models available to AI solution builders in the Azure AI Foundry (formerly Azure AI Service). We're not talking about 50, 100, or even 500 models. As of January 2025, Microsoft's partnerships have brought forth 1,820 models to Azure AI Foundry for builders to choose from. Even more significantly, Microsoft continues to invest in its own models as well such as Phi-3, Phi-4, etc. as well building in-house finetuned versions of third-party models like Orca-2 which is based on Meta's LLAMA-2. When things got messy at OpenAI's board, Microsoft helped bring stability to the situation, first by offering to bring the briefly exiled CEO Sal Altman in-house along with the many folks who were planning to leave or were going to be let go. By the time the brief misadventure ended and Altman resumed his role at OpenAI, Microsoft ended up with a stronger presence on OpenAI's board to help provide governance and oversight. But more significantly, they also started their own in-house Microsoft AI organization and brought in Mustafa Suleyman as its CEO. Mustafa was a co-founder of DeepMind (now owned by Google) and later Inflection AI. This ensured that Microsoft could continue to benefit from its in... ### Video: Everything a Microsoft Partner Needs to Know About Selling Copilot - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/everything-a-microsoft-partner-needs-to-know-about-selling-copilot - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Tutorials, M365 Copilot - Tags: M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: There is more to selling Copilot than transacting licenses. Is your team equipped to help your customers be successful with Copilot? - Published: 2025-01-10 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Presented by AJ Ansari of OnlyCopilotFans for Areopa Webinars on November 16, 2024 ### Why do AI-generated images have misspelled and garbled text? - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/why-do-ai-generated-images-have-misspelled-and-garbled-text - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: M365 Copilot - Tags: Copilot Studio, Generative AI - Language: en - Summary: Have you ever prompted your favorite AI tool like ChatGPT or Copilot to generate an image… - Published: 2025-01-08 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Have you ever prompted your favorite AI tool like ChatGPT or Copilot to generate an image for you? Maybe you want a feature image for a blog post or your PowerPoint presentation, and you type a well-thought-out prompt explaining everything you want in it. It'll get almost everything right in the image. It'll stay true to the style you want, whether it's realistic, cartoon-like, or even futuristic. Look closely though and you will find some bizarre things like an extra finger, an oddly-positioned leg, or one wheel on a car that's just way thinner than the others. Finding those oddities can be a fun activity, and in some ways they are like easter eggs in a Disney animated film. Another shortcoming on most of these generated images and that one drives people nuts: Misspelled words, garbled text, or just words and sentences that just don't make any sense. Many wonder out loud how an AI tool can be so smart and yet not know how to spell or add text to an image. My friend Rory de Goede asked this very question on his LinkedIn post not too long ago. He hilariously lamented if the cause was his Dutch accent coming through in his prompts and shared his surprise at how bad Copilot was at spelling. And he's not alone… I'm sure at some point you've had a similar experience or you know someone close to you who has. Let me explain how this all works. While we think of everything in Copilot (or ChatGPT, because they use the same / similar underlying models) as being powered by a singular model, that is not the case. All the generative text capabilities and the ability to converse or answer questions comes from its LLM, currently GPT-4o. But the image generation is driven by a different generative model, currently DALL-E 3. Unlike GPT-4o (an LLM) which is designed to understand and generate text and converse, DALL-E 3 is specifically designed to create images based on text descriptions. If you're using Google Gemini or another AI solution, it still works the same way. Underneath th... ### Writing Effective Prompts for Copilot and ChatGPT: A Comprehensive Guide - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/writing-effective-prompts-for-copilot-and-chatgpt-a-comprehensive-guide - Author: AI Author - Categories: M365 Copilot - Tags: Copilot Studio, Generative AI, M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, tools like Copilot and ChatGPT have become indispensable… - Published: 2025-01-07 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, tools like Copilot and ChatGPT have become indispensable for a variety of tasks, from generating creative content to assisting with coding. However, to harness their full potential, it's crucial to master the art of writing effective prompts. This guide will walk you through the best practices for crafting prompts that yield the best results, complete with examples to illustrate each point. Understanding the Basics Before diving into the specifics, it's important to understand what a prompt is. A prompt is essentially a set of instructions or a question that you provide to an AI tool to generate a response. The quality of the response is heavily dependent on the clarity and specificity of the prompt. Choose the Right Conversation Style The first step in writing an effective prompt is to choose the appropriate conversation style for the type of answer you need. ChatGPT and Copilot can adapt to different styles, such as: More Creative : For original and imaginative responses. More Balanced : For concise and straightforward answers. More Precise : For informative and friendly responses. For example, if you need a creative story, you might prompt: "Write a short story about a dragon who learns to fly." Be Specific with Instructions Specificity is key when it comes to prompting AI tools. Instead of asking general questions, include details about what you need. This helps the AI understand your requirements better and generate more relevant responses. Example : General: "What is the theory of general relativity?" Specific: "Summarize the key concepts of general relativity in one paragraph." Tailor for Point of View or Audience Consider the audience or the point of view when crafting your prompt. This can include factors like age, grade level, or professional status. Example : "Explain quantum mechanics as if I were 8 years old." "Describe the benefits of cloud computing for a small business owner." Specify Length a... ### Multi-Entity Extraction in Topics: Examining 5 Different Scenarios and Outcomes - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/multi-entity-extraction-topics-scenarios - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: These days, most Copilot authors skip Topics and Classic orchestration in favor of Actions and Generative… - Published: 2024-12-19 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: These days, most Copilot authors skip Topics and Classic orchestration in favor of Actions and Generative AI orchestration when building Agents in Copilot Studio. It's gotten to the point where many people – even some at Microsoft – will tell you that Topics are a thing of the past. With GenAI automatically identifying and extracting entities from user responses, you may wonder why we should still care about Multi-Entity extraction, a topic related to Topics (no pun intended). But to paraphrase Mark Twain's famous quote, "the reports of Topics' death in Copilot Studio are greatly exaggerated." While it's true that using Actions – coupled with proper Descriptions and Instructions – will replace what we would do with Topics as recently as the summer of 2024, there will still be times when you will need to create a Topic with Questions and Answers, and you will need to extract entities from the users' Answers. A poorly composed question and/or a lack of proper understanding of Entities in Copilot Studio can result in an Agent that will ask too many questions, sometimes even asking things that have been answered already. This creates a subpar experience for the user, and you're also burning through messages which drive up the cost of your Agent. Conversely, a well-designed Agent can intelligently understand a user's response when it contains the answer to more than one question – sometimes a question that hasn't even been asked yet – and skip unneeded questions. This is what you'd call multi-entity extraction. The Situation: Let's assume you have a question like “What’s your name?” and a second question like “Where do you live?” If the user’s response to the first question was “I am Tina and I live in Brussels”, a poorly designed Agent would still insist on asking “Where do you live?” instead of intelligently identifying / extracting the second entity and skipping past it. How can you skip past the second question and save the user from frustration and keep message cost... ### Copilot Studio Life Hack #3: Add a signature automatically to your Agent's outbound e-mails - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/copilot-studio-agents-life-hack-3-add-signature-automatically-to-e-mails - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, Hacks - Tags: Prompts - Language: en - Summary: Problem You're using an Office 365 Outlook (or similar) Action in Copilot Studio to send e-mails… - Published: 2024-12-16 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Problem You're using an Office 365 Outlook (or similar) Action in Copilot Studio to send e-mails from your conversational agent. It does a great job of crafting an e-mail, inserting data, etc. and showing it all in nicely formatted HTML ( see Agent Instructions Life Hack #2 ). But it's missing a signature. Solution Simply add one bullet point to the Instructions section (or the Description section of the Office 365 Outlook Action in question): Always add this signature at the end of every outbound e-mail: Best Regards, AJ Ansari Note: You may not want to hardcode the name or information in the signature, so you can also use variables (see the circled {x} in the screenshot below) to dynamically fill in the name, etc. Step 1: Add instruction (ideally, you should use variables instead of hardcoding information) Step 2: Admire the signature on the automated e-mails sent by your Agent That's it! Try it and tell me how it works for you. ### Agent Instructions Life Hack #2: Use rich HTML formatting for outbound e-mails - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/agent-instructions-life-hack-2-use-rich-html-formatting-for-outbound-e-mails - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, Hacks - Tags: Automation, Prompts - Language: en - Summary: Problem You're using an Office 365 Outlook (or similar) Action to send e-mails from your conversational… - Published: 2024-12-13 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Problem You're using an Office 365 Outlook (or similar) Action to send e-mails from your conversational agent. It does a great job of crafting an e-mail and inserting data, etc. But when you receive the e-mail, it's all bunched up with no formatting like line breaks, font weight (like Bold), bullet points, etc. Bunched up text, no formatting. Solution Simply add one bullet point to the Instructions section (or the Description section of the Office 365 Outlook Action in question): Always format outbound e-mails in HTML for better readability. It will automatically choose a reasonable font weight, indentations, line breaks, etc. in e-mails it creates. Here are some screenshots of this lifehack in action: Add an instruction Activity pane shows preview with HTML tags AI does a pretty good job of adding formatting as needed. That's it! Try it out and let me know how it works for you. While we're on the topic of formatting…. Notice how my outbound e-mails from Copilot Studio have a signature? Read this post for you can add a signature to your automated e-mails too! ### Agent Instructions Life Hack #1: Beat the Formatting Blues - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/agent-instructions-life-hack-1 - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, Hacks - Tags: AI Agents - Language: en - Summary: Problem You have an Action, a Flow or a custom connector that retrieves some date and/or… - Published: 2024-12-12 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Problem You have an Action, a Flow or a custom connector that retrieves some date and/or time related information and your Agent displays the response in either the wrong time zone (typically, UTC by default) or formats date, time and datetime values in an unfriendly format (e.g., datetime values showing up as 2024-12-11 14:55:32). You want it to display dates as 12/11/24, time in 24 hour format, and time zone to be Central Time unless otherwise asked by the user. Solution In the Instructions for your Copilot Studio Agent, add bullet point lines like this: Dates must always be formatted as MM/dd/yy Time must always be formatted as HH:mm When displaying a time, always adjust it for Central Standard Time Just with these three simple instructions, you will no longer need to format values manually inside a Agent's Topic or as a step in a Flow! Save, refresh the Test chat and try again now. Et voila! Follow my blog for more Lifehacks. ### How to "train" or fine-tune your Copilot Studio Agent… yes, it CAN be done! - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/how-to-train-or-fine-tune-your-copilot-studio-agent-yes-it-can-be-done - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio, Automation, Prompts, Enterprise AI, Generative AI - Language: en - Summary: Whether you're a novice at making Agents with Copilot Studio or an expert, one of the… - Published: 2024-12-11 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Whether you're a novice at making Agents with Copilot Studio or an expert, one of the things you learn quickly and internalize is that you cannot fine tune or train the AI model. The other thing everyone knows is that you can ground your Agent it in your own knowledge sources like a file, a website, a SharePoint library, Dataverse, or more. The Problem For the most part, it's simple and straightforward. You add a knowledge source to your Agent and when Copilot Studio says it's ready, you can begin testing it. 8 out of 10 times, everything works great and RAG works like a charm. But when it doesn't, it can be incredibly frustrating. You ask a question, you're expecting a certain answer because you know that's what is in the knowledge source. But instead, it either insists on giving you an incorrect answer, or worse, tells you it doesn't have the information to answer your question. And you're yelling at the screen, "BUT IT'S RIGHT THERE IN THE KNOWLEDGE SOURCE!" So what do you do? If you're working with a Word document, you may be able to alter the text to make it clearer. But if you're using a PDF file created by someone else or a website you don't own and can't change, what do you do? How can you train your Agent or fine tune it so it knows the correct information? The Solution The answer to your prayers lies in Instructions and Descriptions. Before I go into details, let's bring something up real quick that you may or may not already know. When your Agent has a bunch of different knowledge sources, how does Copilot Studio decide which one to look at first (when Orchestration / Generative AI is enabled)? Here's the hierarchy in which Copilot Studio looks at Knowledge sources: Dataverse SharePoint Documents Public Websites So let's go back to the solution to our problem… I have found that the answer to our prayers lies in creating a "fine tuning" file, or you could call it a "Corrections" file. Here's what I do: Create a Word document. It could be a PDF too but I li... ### Writing Business Central AL code with Copilot… Look how far we've come! - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/writing-business-central-al-code-with-copilot-look-how-far-weve-come - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: News - Tags: Automation, Copilot Studio, Generative AI - Language: en - Summary: It was just about 2 years ago that I started playing with the new shiny ChatGPT… - Published: 2024-12-06 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: It was just about 2 years ago that I started playing with the new shiny ChatGPT and tried to put its code-writing skills to the test. My experience was that while it's ability with DAX was minimally viable, it didn't fare so well when it came to writing code in AL. Still, given that AL is a proprietary language and used only for Business Central, I was impressed that it wrote code that at least somewhat resembled AL even if the code actually failed to compile. Enamored by the fact that my conversational AI bot even knew what Business Central or AL was, I proceeded to post about it on my socials only to be swatted down by my fellow BC MVPs who weren't going to settle for what just "looks like AL code." Image from my tweet on Jan 18, 2023 showing ChatGPT attempting write AL code That it was hallucinating couldn't be argued, but ever the optimist that I am, I saw it as a glass half-full. Fast-forward to December 2024, many Business Central developers are now using Copilot for GitHub as a pair programmer that can look at patters from their code and code snippets and help write pretty good AL code. There are even examples abound where a book on AL has been used as a knowledge source and the Agent then leverages that knowledge to help write AL code. Still, I've been curious to see how far the GPT LLM has improved from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4o. I hear over and over again that LLMs improve leaps and bounds from version to version, so much so that if you were to spend a lot of time fine-tuning and adding knowledge to an LLM to serve a certain vertical or industry, the next version of the same LLM is likely to out-do all that effort right out of the box. So of course I wanted to know if that would be the case with Business Central and AL code. Today was the day. I asked my trusty Agent in Copilot Studio (which is powered by GPT-4o, and isn't grounded in any knowledge source other than its own general knowledge) to write code to create a new table in AL: ===== I want to create a Busi... ### Meet "Activity": Copilot Studio's unsung hero - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/meet-activity-copilot-studios-unsung-hero - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: When it comes to Copilot Studio in the fall / winter of 2024, all everyone wants… - Published: 2024-12-05 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: When it comes to Copilot Studio in the fall / winter of 2024, all everyone wants to talk about is autonomous agents, powered by triggers, smarter actions and an upgrade to GPT-4o. But without much fanfare, we also got a new top-level menu item called Activity. So what does Activities do and why should you care? Let's go back to a time before we had Activities. When you tested your Copilot (yes, those prehistoric days before we had Agents.. when people lived in caves, dressed in loincloth and used Topics with Classic orchestration to build their conversation "AI" copilots), all your prompts and the copilot's responses went bye-bye when you clicked the refresh icon in the "Test your Copilot" area. It's possible that you may have been able to find it somewhere in the nether-lands of Power Platform Admin Center, but there was no easy way to trace back a conversation, or the behavior it triggered (which action it called, what variables were filled, etc.). In the context of Topics, while you were testing your copilot, you could see which Topic and node/step was being called. But refreshing the "Test your Copilot" chat would flush all of that information down the digital drain. This made it very difficult to go back and debug or trace back historical behavior if you wanted to recreate the issue. This is where Activity comes to the rescue. You are first shown an entire list of sessions with date and time stamps, a summary and status (Complete, In Progress, Created). When you click on a particular session or activity of interest, you are shown an Activity Map which displays which Actions, Topics or Knowledge sources were called, what variables were populated, matches found, etc. Clicking on a node will show you relevant information that the inputs that were filled, outputs received, and some information about the Action / connector / Knowledge source / Topic. You can also review what was supposed to happen with that connector and a full dump of relevant variables. But what I... ### Quick read: SharePoint as a Knowledge source in your Agent - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/quick-read-sharepoint-as-a-knowledge-source-in-your-agent - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, Hacks - Tags: Enterprise AI, SharePoint - Language: en - Summary: When you add a new Knowledge source in your agents, you can go back to the… - Published: 2024-11-26 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: When you add a new Knowledge source in your agents, you can go back to the Knowledge page and see which ones are ready to use and which ones aren't. Public websites tend to be the quickest because when they're called upon, it's basically a Bing search restricted to results from that public website. It doesn't pre-crawl the website nor does it preemptively read every page from end-to-end. If you upload a file, depending of the size you can expect a few minutes or sometimes much longer before this Knowledge source displays Ready for its Status. While the delay may be frustrating, at least you know it's not ready until you see the green checkmark under Status. However, when you choose a SharePoint site or files within SharePoint as your Knowledge source, you are falsely misled into thinking it's ready to go almost as quickly as you've added the URL. But the reality is, it takes time to index and I've seen it take a similar amount of time as files before your Agent can answer questions using it. While this is not in itself an issue, the problem is that the Status will show the green checkmark and Ready even when it really isn't. Bottomline: If you're grounding your Agent in a knowledge source from SharePoint, exercise patience. It won't work right away, and it's not because you've done something wrong or your knowledge is bad. It's just not ready to go. ### From Power Virtual Agents to Copilot Studio: Does putting lipstick on a pig really work? - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/from-power-virtual-agents-to-copilot-studio-does-putting-lipstick-on-a-pig-really-work - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio, Generative AI - Language: en - Summary: At the Microsoft Ignite 2024 Keynote, CEO Satya Nadella announced one new shiny object, app, and… - Published: 2024-11-25 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: 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." Screenshot from Power Virtual Agents UI (circa 2022) 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 fe... ### How to Create Agents to plug into the Microsoft 365 Copilot - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/how-to-create-agents-for-use-in-copilot-for-microsoft-365 - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot, Teams - Language: en - Summary: If you've been using Copilot Studio for a while, you're used to creating (custom) Copilots. With… - Published: 2024-11-24 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: If you've been using Copilot Studio for a while, you're used to creating (custom) Copilots . With the recent changes to Copilot Studio nomenclature and terminology, these are now called Agents . The traditional Copilots (now Agents) most people commonly make can be deployed across a variety of channels like Teams, Slack, your website, etc. but one place where you can't deploy them is inside Copilot for Microsoft 365 , aka Microsoft 365 Copilot (for brevity, I will call it M365 Copilot ). To create an Agent that can be deployed as a plugin to extend the M365 Copilot's standard capabilities, you have three choices: Option 1 – CUSTOM ENGINE AGENT: In Copilot Studio, click on Library > + Add an Item > New Agent Option 2 – Also a CUSTOM ENGINE AGENT: Another way in Copilot Studio: Click on Agents > Copilot for Microsoft 365 . On the page that opens, you will see any existing plugin Agents you've previously created, and you can also create a new Agent by clicking the` +Add button in the Agents box. You can also create plugin Actions for M365 Copilot in a similar manner using either of the above Options. We'll explore Actions in detail in another blog article later. Option 3 – DECLARATIVE AGENT: This alternative does not require accessing Copilot Studio: If you have an M365 Copilot license, you can create a plugin Agent directly from the Copilot BizChat experience by clicking Create an Agent. This experience is more limited than the other two options above (more below). When you create plugin Agents using Option 1 and Option 2 , you can provide detailed Instructions for Generative AI, add Knowledge sources (important: from SharePoint only ), create Actions , allow or block Web Browsing to find information, and add up to six (6) Starter Prompt s to help the user with ideas on what to ask the Agent. When published, these plugin Agents are available inside the M365 Copilot (in the "Work" side of BizChat, as well as in Copilot within Office apps) as well as in Microsoft Teams.... ### Change coming to Copilot Studio pricing (Ignite 2024 Update) - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/quick-update-ignite-2024-change-coming-to-copilot-studio-pricing - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, News - Tags: Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: Since Power Virtual Agents became Copilot Studio, the licensing model has been $200 per month per… - Published: 2024-11-19 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Since Power Virtual Agents became Copilot Studio, the licensing model has been $200 per month per tenant (US pricing on annual plan; also available month-to-month at $20 per month per tenant). The license comes with a capacity of 25,000 messages per month. Additional messages can be purchased, although the pricing for these is unclear. Within a tenant, each user who needs to create Agents must have their own $0 Copilot Studio user license (yes, free, but requires the aforementioned SKU). At the Ignite 2024 Keynote, it was announced that in December there will be another licensing option for Copilot Studio, and this one will not have any fixed per month price. Basically, the base SKU will be free, and users will pay a capacity or usage-based license fee. No other specifics were announced. Reducing this barrier to entry will make it easier for aspiring Copilot creators to start creating production-ready Agents. If you don't want to wait until this new plan becomes publicly available, you do have some alternatives to start trying out Copilot Studio for free today: Sign up for the free Community Plan with this link: https://apps.powerapps.com/community/signup You can create Copilots all day long but you cannot publish them for production. You can also sign up for a 30 day trial, which can be further extended for another 30 days. After the trial expires, Agents continue to work for another 90 days. Do you have any questions about Copilot Studio licensing? Don't be shy – ask in the Comments section below or ping me on LinkedIn at bit.ly/ajansari . ### 'End Current Topic' or 'End Conversation': How to exit a Topic in Copilot Studio? - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/exit-topic-copilot-studio - Author: AI Author - Categories: Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: AJ's Disclosure: This post was generated by ChatGPT (GPT-4o) based on my prompt. From time to… - Published: 2024-11-15 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: AJ's Disclosure: This post was generated by ChatGPT (GPT-4o) based on my prompt. From time to time, I may post an article generated by AI when it is fit for purpose. In this case, the goal is to educate the reader on key differences between two choices for concluding a Topic. I see this as a matter of function-over-form. My promise to you is that I will always be upfront with you anytime I post content generated by AI so that you – the reader – are in the know. Also note that this is "original content", by which I mean this content has not been copied from another website or print source. In Copilot Studio , the distinction between ending a topic and ending a conversation is critical for managing user interactions effectively. Here's how they differ: Ending a Topic Definition : Closing a specific thread or subject within a broader conversation. Use Case : When the user has completed discussing a specific topic but intends to continue the overall interaction. Behavior : Clears context related to the specific topic, freeing resources for the next topic within the same session. Retains the general conversation history and tone. Example: A user discussing "order tracking" finishes that discussion and shifts focus to "return policies." Ending a Conversation Definition : Closing the entire interaction session with the user. Use Case : When the user or system concludes the interaction completely, signaling the end of the session. Behavior : Clears all contextual memory of the session. Resets the system for a fresh interaction with no residual context. Example: After resolving all queries, the user says, "Thank you, that's all for now." When to Use Each: End a Topic : Use this when transitioning between different tasks or topics but keeping the session open for further interaction. End a Conversation : Use this when the user indicates they're done or when the system detects that the session should be closed. Properly handling these actions ensures smoother user experiences ... ### Reflections of a Copilot Fan… Why I'm not a "monog-AI-mous" type of guy. - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/reflections-of-copilot-fan - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: M365 Copilot - Tags: ChatGPT, Copilot Studio, Enterprise AI - Language: en - Summary: Reflections on why I use ChatGPT as much as I use Copilot, despite being a Microsoft MVP and a big Copilot advocate. - Published: 2024-11-13 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Picture this: I walk into a room filled with people from all walks of life, sitting in a circle and sharing their stories about AI addiction and how it's taken over their life; debilitated by the fear of AI taking over their job and rendering them useless. I take my seat and listen until it's my turn. I take a deep breath, pause, and then begin… "My name is AJ. I tell everyone I'm a Copilot Fan. I make my own Agents with Copilot Studio. I even have a blog about it. But what people don't know is that I actually use ChatGPT waaaay more than I use Copilot. If people find out, what will they think of me? Am I a bad person? Should I be banished from society? Will my friends still trust me? Will my family still love me? I can't live with the shame anymore!" Ok, that was a tad dramatic. But I won't lie… I do find it amusing and occasionally bothersome that I prefer ChatGPT over Copilot for just about everything. I really only go to Copilot when I need to use the "Work" experience, or to use one of my Agents that I've plugged into Copilot. Why, you ask? Because for researching information, for having a conversation, for pushing the limits, and more, I've found time and again that I get better outcomes with ChatGPT even though Copilot is powered by the same GPT-4o LLM. I think it has to do with the fine-tuning and guardrails Microsoft has put in place to make Copilot a safer experience with firmer, narrower boundaries. Far too often, I find that Copilot either doesn't want to engage or provide answers to some of my non-vanilla questions. And I'm not talking about anything illegal, inappropriate, or outside the Overton Window . It wouldn't be a stretch to say that 90%+ of my research and day-to-day conversational interaction happens with ChatGPT, whether it's via a web-browser or my mobile device. I even talk to it from time to time. ChatGPT does a great job answering mundane and slightly edgy questions. On occasion, it will even give you more than answer choice to choose fro... ### Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot Licensing - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/m365-copilot-copilot-studio-licensing - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot, News - Tags: Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot - Language: en - Summary: Everything you need to know about licensing Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio. Updated with the latest information from January 15 2025 announcement. - Published: 2024-11-11 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: When it comes to licensing, the devil is always in the details. A year or so ago (maybe longer?), Microsoft introduced the New Commerce Experience (NCE) for licensing of cloud applications. Some of the key changes with NCE was the introduction of different pricing for monthly vs. annual (or triennial) subscriptions. Generally speaking, any user-based cloud SKU licensed monthly costs 20% higher than the same app licensed annually (or triennially). Further, some SKU can be paid month-to-month even when licensed for an annual or triennial term, while others must be paid for in full for the entire term at the time of purchase. Also, SKUs licensed on annual or triennial terms cannot be cancelled nor can the user count be reduced after the first 7 days. Now, with an understanding of how NCE licensing works, let's explore how Microsoft allows you to acquire licenses for Copilot for Microsoft 365 as well as Copilot Studio: Copilot for Microsoft 365: There is no trial version Pricing in the US is $360/user/year (shown as $30/user/month on all marketing material) and it is only available for an annual term paid up-front Edit: As of December 2024, a monthly payment option has been added but it is still an annual term. The monthly pricing is 5% higher at $31.50/user/month As with all Microsoft NCE (New Commerce Experience) licenses, annual term licenses cannot be cancelled nor can the seat count be reduced after the first 7 days (cancelling within 7 days also incurs a prorated charge) Licenses can be assigned to another user at any time This license enables Copilot BizChat (Business Chat) "Work", as well as Copilot experiences in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote Note: This SKU is not to be confused with Copilot Pro , which is the consumer version for personal and home users of Microsoft apps. This license can only be purchased directly through Microsoft and not through Microsoft Partners. Copilot Pro also does not offer Enterprise Data Protection (EDP) which is avai... ### Copilot Studio Actions: Your point-of-entry into the world of GenAI-driven Agents (or Copilots) - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/copilot-studio-actions - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: Copilot Studio - Tags: AI Agents, Copilot Studio, Generative AI - Language: en - Summary: When you're ready for your Agent to do more than answer questions, it's time to jump into Actions! - Published: 2024-11-07 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: For as long as I've been creating Copilots , I've leveraged the power of Copilot Studio Actions to launch Power Automate flows or work with the many built-in connectors inside Copilot Studio. But for a very long time, I was making one crucial mistake that kept me from getting the most out of my Copilots: I was creating my Actions inside my Topics . While fundamentally there is nothing wrong with what I was doing, what I didn't realize is that I was treating – and talking to – my Copilot like it was a 5 year old when in fact it was as smart as a PhD candidate. When you create a Copilot Studio Action (which calls a Power Automate Flow or a Connector) inside a Topic, you have to map each input to some variable collected from the conversation with the user. This requires creating one or more question nodes, determining the best Entity types to use for extraction, and then mapping outputs to another variable and using them in a message node, etc. Essentially, while it's perfectly functional, it's a very rigid process that can add more time to the Copilot creation process. What I should have done instead is create standalone Actions inside the Copilot and enabled Generative mode from the Settings menu of the Copilot (the default option is Classic). When Generative mode (which is still a Preview feature) is enabled, generative AI is used to automatically call the best Action (without needing a Topic to trigger it) based on the user's prompts. What makes this a thing of beauty is that you don't even need to extract Entities from the user's responses and map them to inputs for the Action. If you do need to manually map a value to an input, you can do so, but this is the exception and not the norm. You also don't need to map outputs to messages. It seamlessly takes information provided in a conversation and intelligently extracts and maps the right information to the right inputs. When some information is missing, it automatically prompts the user for it without you having to... ### What is Copilot BizChat? - URL: https://onlycopilotfans.com/what-is-copilot-bizchat - Author: AJ Ansari - Categories: M365 Copilot - Tags: Copilot Studio - Language: en - Summary: Meet Copilot BizChat, the secure AI chat experience designed for business users. - Published: 2024-11-05 - Updated: 2026-08-08 - Content: Just when you thought you had all the acronyms and names figured out, there's a new one to learn. This time, it's Copilot BizChat . Short for Business Chat, it's the Copilot chat experience that is available at https://microsoft365.com/copilot or from the Microsoft 365 portal when you click the Copilot icon. Copilot BizChat in web browser Copilot BizChat mobile app BizChat requires that you are signed in to your Microsoft 365 Work or School account with your Entra ID, and it offers you Enterprise Data Protection (EDP), which is indicated by the presence of a green shield icon near the top right. You can learn more about EDP here . If you have a paid M365 Copilot license, you will also see a Work and Web toggle near the top of the page. The Work experience allows Copilot to access documents from your work that are in your OneDrive, SharePoint, etc. that you have proper permissions for. The Web experience is for general conversations with Copilot (much like you'd use ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.), but your information is still secure. Users without a M365 Copilot license only get access to the Web experience of Copilot BizChat. With the Release Wave 2 of Copilot a few months ago, the Copilot BizChat experience available to business and enterprise customers forks away from the consumer (or personal) version of Copilot which can be accessed without a user account or with your personal Microsoft account (e.g., Hotmail or Outlook.com login). A few differences between Copilot BizChat and the consumer version of Copilot are: The consumer version of Copilot does not offer EDP, although Microsoft still follows its Responsible AI principles in both experiences. The consumer version of Copilot provides a more vibrant and engaging UI, and is capable of human-like voice conversational interactions with the user. Note: On January 15, Microsoft announced a major rebranding update sunsetting the Copilot BizChat name and replacing it with Copilot Chat. Along with rebrand, Microsoft also ann...