these are 19 tips to help you build co-pilot agents like a pro whether you are building an agent to help your HR manager or assist your customer services team we are going to cover various use cases in this step-by-step tutorial hey my name's Amy let's nerd out a quick note before we get started there is this disclaimer you are responsible for the design the development and the implementation of your agent and you are also solely responsible for personal injury or death that may occur as a result of your agent I'm not trying to scare you but when we create agents they can be a very powerful tool so we just need to do so in a safe manner to ensure that we are not harming anybody so with that out of the way let's get to it there are a few ways that we can create co-pilot agents so I wanted to take a moment to explain the differences we can create an agent directly Within a SharePoint document library and I have done another tutorial on how we created this agent and how it can help our team gather insights from this SharePoint site we can also create an agent directly within the co-pilot app and this would be a declarative agent that is an extension of the Microsoft 365 co-pilot chat we can also create a co-pilot agent within the co-pilot studio app and this allows for some more advanced customiz ations but can be a little bit more difficult to adopt to early on my Pro tip here is to start easy and to start small and build on it and the quickest and easiest way that we can get started with agents is to build a declarative agent within the Microsoft 365 chat experience and that is exactly what we are going to cover in this tutorial next is who can create agents so we will see in my co-pilot chat on the right hand side that I have the option to create an agent whereas Mike only has the get agents so your organization has full control over who in your organization can create an agent to use co-pilot agents you need to have a co-pilot Studio license if you have a Microsoft 365 license that stand alone then that includes those capabilities just note that I am in US Dollars and not Canadian right now alternatively you can use a pay as youo model if we go to the explore pricing which I have open here then that is going to be 1 cent per message or you can buy this Microsoft co-pilot Studio license which is $200 per month and gives you 25,000 messages I've done another video discussing the pricing in more detail and we will also unravel it throughout this tutorial but my Pro tip here is just try it out for free and get started now we are ready to create an agent we can use regular language to chat here and build our agent so for example create an agent named customer care Camille to help our customer service team to reduce call times and increase customer satisfaction prompts will be refund policies centralized FAQs support tickets help and resolutions so we can see that we have actually made some really quick progress here with this agent Builder but I do not recommend creating your agent through this chat experience here I had an experience where I was nearly finished fine-tuning my agent and then within one prompt or chat message it rewrote everything and I wasn't able to find a way to go back so my Pro tip here is to have a chat with the co-pilot chat experience this will give you a chat history so you can easily go back into your chat pull out the information that provided the Builder and then we have a record of it in the event anything like that happens to you we will come back to the chat experience in a little bit but for now let's toggle to this configure Tab and see what information we need to create an agent at the top here we have details which includes an icon if we go change icon then we can select an icon you can also update the background color I'm quite happy with this so let's save we can see that that the icon has updated we also have the name and the description of our agent so when your team opens up this agent this is going to be the screen that they can see so my Pro tip here is to have an icon that's easily identifiable so that they can recognize where they are as well as a descriptive name and an appropriate description that lets them know exactly how this agent can assist them next we have the instructions and this is where we Define the behavior and skill set of our agent so here if you put garbage instructions then it will give you garbage responses there are three main components that you want to include in your instructions and we will also discuss some other items as well number one is the purpose which is to clearly outline the role and expertise of your agent emphasizing its primary function in our example this might look like you are a customer service special dedicated to assisting our team in reducing call times and enhancing customer satisfaction next are the guidelines and this is where we Define how the agent should communicate the communication style can be concise detailed interactive or suggestive additionally we also want to include any specific restrictions that should be applied to our agent so in our example it might be to maintain a professional and courteous tone throughout interactions clear and concise information and ensuring that responses are empathetic and solution focused something that we might want to avoid is solutions that are beyond our regular policies and procedures we will take a look at skills when we dive into the prompts component but in the meantime these are some other items that you might want to include in your instructions such as how should your agent handle errors how should it handle feedback any non-standard terms so if your organization typically uses acronyms then you might want to include those there and then as well up followup and closing remarks of your agent when you are having conversations with it I have included some examples of these items here and I will also include a link to download a copy of this PDF in the description of this video moving along we have knowledge and here we can add a to 20 knowledge sources can be anything from a simple word document to an entire SharePoint site now it's important to note here that when your team interacts with an agent that agent inherits the permissions that that person has so for your agent to work optimally they are going to want to have access to all of the sources that are included here if for example you wanted to build an agent to assist your sales team then you might want to include an entire SharePoint site that includes product information sales processes so in our case that would be the Dog apparel site so I will just go and select but then you might also want to include something about your company including its Mission its vision and its values and in that case we can add a separate document from a different SharePoint site here and in our case it's going to be this about us Word document so this is how we can assign different documents to ground our agent on that data my Pro tip here is that when we ground an agent on work data in its knowledge sources then that's when our agents get into that metered billing if users that are using the agent don't have that Standalone 365 co-pilot license so what you could do depending on the complexity of your agent is balance some of the instructions to include certain items such as your mission your vision and your values of course if you are still grounding it on that SharePoint site then that is going to be meter billing but if you are just creating a simple agent to help you with marketing content and you want to create consistent tone and branding then you could just include that within the instructions next next we have the ability to ground our agent on web content simply by toggling this on or off so when we leave this toggled on then the agent can access publicly available information on the internet so for example if you are a development company then you could toggle this on and you could train your agent to reference building codes within Vancouver British Columbia Canada however my Pro tip here is to air on the side of caution with web content we aren't able to specify a specific website so you are broadening the scope here and if it is something critical like building code then it might actually be better for you to locate PDFs of those building codes incorporate them into a SharePoint site and then ground your agent on that data instead if you leave this toggled on then when your agent responds and references websites then it should include little citations so that you can check where the information came from next we have actions this will allow your agent to autonomously complete tasks that are scheduled it's pretty cool I will be doing another tutorial on that but my Pro tip here is that if you do want to use actions then you can check it out in the co-pilot Studio web app as a side note here when actions become available even if you have that 365 co-pilot Standalone license actions are going to be on that metered billing next we have capabilities which unlock Advanced features for your co-pilot agents for example when code interpreter is toggled on then your agent will use Python to solve complex problems or if you have image generation toggled on your agent will be able to generate images so for example here I have another agent that I created that's called image imagine and if we want to generate a marketing image then the prompt defaults to purple with light purple tones on a beige background so if we ask it to generate an image of an email icon then it will use these style and tones that are built into it now if we scroll up into the instructions of this agent then we're going to see that it's instructions are to create simple icon images for PowerPoint presentations that will maintain a consistent themee of Simplicity and colors based on specific departments and color schemes so here we can see those purple icons so this is a great way to generate consistent images next we have starter prompts and we can Define up to six prompts here and these will enable you to quickly engage with your agent now for creating these starter prompts I like to think about one frequently asked questions so if you have an agent that's going to be helping your HR manager then some common questions might be how do I schedule vacation or what happens when I have a sick day my Pro tip with these starter prompts is to tie them into the skills component of your instructions so when we Define our instructions you want to provide it with precise examples of what the skill goal might be you'll also want to include step-by-step instructions that will show your agent exactly how it should handle this type of question as well as interaction examples so providing examples of how you want your agent to respond or providing an example of your desired output are great ways to provide clear instructions to your agent on how to handle prompts let's for example take a look at this newsletter assistant which assists our marketing team in writing consistent email newsletters each week and one of the prompts here is to have the agent generate 10 unique and engaging email subjects and corresponding preview text for the weekly newsletters so in the instructions here we have the task so this is the skill which is to brainstorm email subjects and preview text the goal of this task is to generate 10 unique and engaging email subjects and corresponding preview text for our Weekly Newsletter and then it breaks it down into clear steps so it's identify themes create subjects write the preview text and then review it check for clarity relevance and engagement and correct any spelling or grammatical errors so that really corresponds all of those skills into one and it even provides examples of spammy words that should be avoided within the subject so this is a great example how we want to include specific skills with step-by-step instructions as well as clear examples in the instructions and have those directly relate to the starter prompts we have touched on billing throughout this tutorial and before we dive into actually creating and deploying our agent and sharing it with our team I wanted to share this slide here which provides a really nice summary of how agents are buil so here we are within agents and when agents are grounded on web data the chatting is included so that means that we are not having metered billing you can chat with those co-pilots for free when your agents are grounded in work data such as adding SharePoint sites or specific documents if somebody has that Standalone $30 per month co-pilot license then that is included for them but if you just have a basic business license then you are going to be on that metered billing and messages will be built accordingly then when we get down to actions so use agents that act independently using autonomous actions that feature was not yet available within the Builder that we used it is currently available within the co-pilot Studio web app and so in both of these cases that is going to be metered billing my Pro tip here is that if you are still unsure about the differences between the $30 Standalone license versus this free version then I will include a link to another video comparing the two so that you can understand them better we have also discussed various use cases throughout this tutorial and this slide here just brings it all together showing you the different examples and ways that your organization can start to create agents today my Pro tip here is to start with the loow hanging fruit creating an agent that is grounded on your HR policies can be a great way to alleviate some of those frequently asked questions that you're HR manager gets surrounding policies such as time off or vacation as your organization starts to adopt agents then you can start to expand and start to enhance your customer service team your sales team and everywhere else now we are ready to create our agent and again I recommend using this co-pilot chat experience because it allows us to access our history so then we can copy the information that we generate here and put it into that configure tab so I have a starter prompt here we will ask co-pilot to ask us a series of questions to build that customer care Camille agent I will include a template version of this prompt in my downloadable PDF my Pro tip here is to chat with co-pilot and you can even guide it to specific areas of that configure tab to fine-tune your agent further once you have configured your agent then we can use this preview pane on the right hand side to test it I would recommend testing your agent a fair bit and pushing its boundaries just to ensure that it's going to respond the way that you want it to and my Pro tip here is to be patient and if you are having issues with troubleshooting your agent then I have done another tutorial on Advanced tips for configuring and troubleshooting your agent that video is done within a SharePoint agent but it's a very similar experience now we are ready to create our agent my Pro tip here is to go to your agent and we will test it in this main window first and then we can share it later my next Pro tip is to pin your agent to this top menu for easy access next we want to be able to collaborate with our agent so we can easily access the agent from our pinned menu and then we can prompt it and start to collaborate with it here but my Pro tip is when you are in a different chat experience with co-pilot you can press the at sign to tag your agent and ask it a question on the fly to edit your agent we go create an agent then from this drop down up here we go view all agents then you can select your agent from this list and my Pro tip here is to not edit your agent using this describe tab I'll go back to your previous chat history within this co-pilot experience and have a chat with it let it know what you want to update and ask it to help you define the verbage then you can update the specific information under this configure Tab and when you're finished you can update your agent to share your agent you can simply go share and from here we can see that by default it's only shared with you if your organization uses security groups you could toggle this option here or you could go anyone within your organization once you save those changes then we can copy the link and share the agent in a teams chat or a channel post my Pro tip is to share your agent somewhere that is super accessible to your team such as your team's homepage you can share it under quick links and we can see that agent here to download my PDF for tips on creating your custom co-pilot agent then you can check out this link here or you can check out this video to understand the differences between the Microsoft 365 coop OT chat or the Microsoft 365 co-pilot Standalone license