Recently I began setting up an internal chat assistant bot for my company. I work for a large global retailer (2,000+ employees) that leverages the Microsoft 365 Suite. Sitting in the IT department, I needed a way to encourage users to become more self-reliant when it comes to receiving support.
The problem: Thousands of employees are trying to receive technology support and advice from a small team of 100. This meant a constant stream of tickets, Teams messages and calls from users trying to reach us.
Enter: ChatGPT
In 2022/2023, AI really went mainstream. The public launch of ChatGPT shook up the space and kicked off a flurry of activity across virtually all tech companies. One of the companies at the forefront was Microsoft. As an investor in OpenAI and the dominant player in the realm of business productivity software, Microsoft started teasing Copilot, an AI-powered assistant that promised incredible capabilities.
Back to my original problem – I needed a way to scale up my department’s ability to support users. In late 2023, I discovered Microsoft’s Copilot Studio. This tool could be used to create a MS Teams based chatbot, and I could feed it pertinent information within the confines of our Microsoft tenant.
If you don’t know what Copilot is, give it a search on Youtube. It’s Microsoft’s AI assistant technology that they’ve baked right into Windows and the Office Suite.
A chatbot looked to be the ideal solution to my problem. The company already leveraged MS Teams as its internal communications tool. Our organization was already embedded in the Microsoft 365 Suite from Outlook to Active Directory to Sharepoint.
As I set up my first chatbot, I realized just how powerful this tool could be. You could set up various bots with different specialties and set them up as standalone bots, or have them amalgamated into the main Copilot built into Microsoft 365.
Along the way, I found that there weren’t many resources out there other than Microsoft’s official documentation. I don’t know about you, but documentation doesn’t work well for me when trying to start out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for looking up references when you face a confusing screen or functionality. However there seems to be a lack of content out there covering simple use-cases that are… ordinary?
This blog is intended to serve as a place to learn about Microsoft Copilot Studio from a lower-tech perspective. I know how to code, but it’s not my day job and I needed a quick and easy way to set up a user-facing chatbot.
Where to, Commander?
Your next step should be The Guide page. It’ll lay out the instructions for creating your chatbot in a matter of minutes.