11th MVP Award Rewarded

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I am actually on vacation, but as I sit here under the summer sun, toes in the pool and a cold drink within reach, I have been waiting for that email confirming that I’ve been awarded my 11th Microsoft MVP Award! As last year, I am being awarded in both the Teams and Copilot category. To say I’m humbled would be an understatement. Being part of the global Microsoft MVP community for over a decade now has been an incredible journey, filled with learning, sharing, speaking, and connecting with passionate technologists from every corner of the world. What is the Microsoft MVP Award? The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award is given to technology experts who share their knowledge and real-world expertise with communities. With fewer than 4,000 MVPs worldwide, it’s an honor to be part of such a vibrant and dedicated group. MVPs contribute through speaking engagements, writing, open-source contributions, and helping others online and offline. You can learn more about the progra...

Custom Engine Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot

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Agents in BizChat has been available for some time already, but now there is an upcoming update to Agents. The introduction of “custom engine agents” in Microsoft 365 Copilot! These specialized agents can be built on any large language model (LLM), toolchain, or orchestration tool, tailored specifically for your domain or tenant workflows. Initially supported in Microsoft Teams, this feature will soon be available in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat (BizChat).  

The introduction of Custom engine agents enables your organization to create customized experiences using your own AI systems and orchestrators. You can design unique prompts, connect to any LLM, and integrate these custom agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot. After the rollout, users will be able to access these agents, provided they are enabled and deployed in the Microsoft 365 admin center under the Copilot tab.  You can read more about the feature on this page.

Eligible users can create agents using Microsoft Copilot Studio for low-code tools or the Microsoft Teams Toolkit in Visual Studio for pro-code solutions. Access to Copilot Studio requires enabling the Microsoft Power Automate free license.  

Users can deploy agents for individual tasks and share them with internal teams, but organization-wide sharing requires admin approval. 

This feature is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 474439 and will hopefully be in preview during February. The current target for GA is a finished roll-out by end of April.