Microsoft atthis weeksIgnite conferenceunveiled new Copilot Studio features aimed at both expanding the functionality of AI agents createdwiththe application and improving the accuracy of outputs.Copilot Studio wasunveiled at last years eventas a way to customize Microsofts generative AI(genAI)copilot assistants for different business use cases. Since then,the companyhas stepped up its messaging aroundAI agents that can perform a wider variety of taskson behalf of workers.Among thelatestupdates to Copilot Studio is the ability to connect agents to third-party applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.The goal is toprovide access to real-time knowledge that helps answer complex questions, Microsoft said. Thatfeature is now in preview.[ Related: Microsoft Ignite 2024 news and insights ]In addition, Copilot Studio now integrates with the newAzure AI Foundryto enable access to a wider range of data within an organization, Omar Aftab, vice president ofconversational AI at Microsoft,saidin ablog post. By connecting all their data sources, organizations can see that agents are more grounded in their business data and provide specific, high-quality responses, he said.There are also new multimodal AI enhancements to Copilot Studio agents.Users canembed an agent built in Copilot Studio into an interactive voice system (used in automated voice calls for customer service, for example) to create speech enabled agents, said Aftab.These can also be embedded in various applications, standalone kiosks, concierge systems, and more, he said. And Copilot Studio agents can now analyze images, allowing users to upload files and ask questions aboutthem.Microsoft has also opened accessin a public previewto autonomous agent builder tools in Copilot Studio, asannounced last month. Makers can now build agents that work on their behalf, without having to prompt the agent, saving human hours and increasing efficiency, said Aftab. They can create these agents from scratch or configure agents that are prebuilt in Copilot Studio.Theres an agent library to help users get started,too, (also in public preview), with pre-built agents tailored to common work processes such as leave management, sales orders and deal acceleration, Microsoft said.Among the other announcements Tuesday is the ability to build customized agents with a streamlined Copilot Studio experience thats now embedded in the BizChat interface of Microsoft 365 Copilot. These agents are created using natural language directions, and can be given access to enterprise data held in apps such as Dynamics 365 and SharePoint. There are also pre-built agents,includingan Employee Self-Service agent.Copilot Studio can address some of the shortcomings of a horizontal tool such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, which often requires a lot of guidance to access the right data, and may produce hallucinations,said J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.The Copilot Studio tools help to fill this gap by allowing organizations to create more finely tuned solutions that nevertheless are a lot easier and cheaper than training a model from scratch, he said.Improved tuning and sourcing in Copilot Studio allows more retrieval augmented generation(RAG)-based approaches, said Gownder, which specifies data more precisely, reducing the likelihood of both vague outputs and hallucinations. The ability to use custom Azure AI Search indexes as a knowledge sourceforcustom RAG scenariosanother of the Copilot Studio updates at Igniteallows for more specific, contextual, and accurate outcomes, he said.Being able to then take these Copilot Studio agents and plug them into Microsoft 365 Copilot could democratize some of these innovations, allowing employees to tap into them right in their flow of work, said Gownder.This heightened context, accuracy, and specificity could solve some of the problems that enterprise leaders have cited as downsides to M365 Copilot.Microsoft has rolled out a lot of Copilot solutions with sunny story lines that enterprises arent always able to replicate in their own environments, said Gownder. So, while the Copilot Studio announcements sound promising, we must wait and see if they truly work as advertised to create value.