Continuing on with my series about building a HR Copilot with Copilot Studio. Previously I’ve been advocating of making a multiple choice option with prefilled options to steer the answer in the right directions. But with the rise of Generative AI we can look different at how we program our apps. We can now do things significantly different. In my last post we changed our manually authored topic to an action. We lost the ability to steer the user in the right direction by presenting a multiple choice option set. And instead of trying to fix this, I want to show you a different way. Let Generat ..read more

We’ve been building our Copilot Studio topics manually in my example of the HR Copilot. But in this world of generative AI there is a another (better?) way. You can utilize plugin actions to create wrappers around connectors, Cloud Flows and skills. The AI will recognize the intent of the user and will pick the right action to fulfill that intent. If there are input parameters that needs to be filled in, the AI will query the user about this. In this blog we go through the steps in making our first action where a user can submit a leave request. This post is part of a series of blogpost about ..read more

When building out topics manually for Power Virtual Agents we have all the control in the world. This means we can also present information in a way that makes sense and is appealing. In this blogpost I will continue on with my example topic of requesting days off. We will start by talking about how to make the request to our external system. After I’ll will utilize the ability to add rich media to our response to wish someone a happy holiday. This post is part of a series of blogpost about Copilot Studio in which I create a HR Copilot and show various options available within Copilot Studio ..read more

Continuing on with my series about Copilot Studio I want to show you something cool. In questions the Copilot asks the user we can presents a option set for the user to choose from. However this list is usually static, such as in my request a day off example. What if we HR adds a leave type option in our HR system? They will probably forget that they have to update the Copilot as well! Let me show you how we can add Dynamic Options to our Copilot. This post is part of a series of blogpost about Copilot Studio in which I create a HR Copilot and show various options available within Copilot Stud ..read more

Another year, another release wave! This year I once again dive into what I think are the most interesting features. Reading these features will give us some insights on where the product team is investing in. Obviously the bigger and most game changing features will be reserved for a larger stage, nonetheless we can find some cool stuff coming our way! Now I have to be honest, I am getting less excited about the release waves. Thinking of why I am less excited, I have 2 thoughts that might cause this. One is good and for the other the jury is still out. The good thing is that the Power Platfo ..read more

Continuing on with the creation of my HR Copilot series. In this blogpost I will show you how to set up generative AI capabilities on your own data in Copilot Studio. I want our chatbot to answer questions found in our HR documentation. This will be the starting point of our Copilot and instantly make it useful! To reiterate we are building a HR Copilot to use inside Microsoft Teams. We want to solve the following problem statements with our Copilot: As an employee I want an easy process to call in sick. As a (project) manager I want to be notified when a team member is sick. As an employee I ..read more

Microsoft and their Generative AI and Copilot push. That is what 2023 is about. And this time at Ignite it is no different. In fact Copilot is mentioned in the Ignite book of news a staggering 281 times. I wanted to count the times Satya said it during the keynote. But I guess I better wait for Copilot to transcribe it, so I can ask it the question directly. In this blogpost I will write down my overreactions and ramblings about Copilot, the Power Platform but mostly about Microsoft Copilot Studio. While writing this, I recognize I am not good in overreactions, so my nuance will follow after m ..read more

With European release news just around the corner I want to share my new series with you. Create your own Human Resource Copilot for your employees. Unburden your HR staff but also important, let employees engage in a manner of their choosing! In this series I want to also share with you all the cool things you can do with both Generative AI technology included in Power Virtual Agent. Both for building your chatbot with a prompt as well as consuming it. And I also share all the neat new features that are now possible with the new authoring experience. Take day off To start of this series I wan ..read more

It’s that time of the year again, the second release wave of the year. We again get insights in the direction the product teams are taking in their continuous improvement efforts. In this post I will highlight a couple that caught my eye. I will tell you why and hopefully this is useful for your own digestion of all news coming your way! Before we start I want to speculate if this is one of the last Release Waves as we know it. Recently Microsoft announced they will move to a monthly update cadence for Model-Driven Apps. This will move the product towards a modern cloud application with faster ..read more

Sometimes you have a step in a process which is so complex you want to guide the user. You can guide the user by giving him steps of Tasks to do. But what Tasks do you present to your user? What if those steps of Tasks depends on variables that require human interpretation? We can create a Custom Page Dialog to Guide the user what Tasks to generate! That concept is exactly what I want to show you in this blogpost. We will extend a process I have written extensively about. The Case of the Broken Screen. In one of the steps we sometimes have to coordinate repair work. And sometimes we have to co ..read more