I am thrilled to announce the general availability of agent flows in Microsoft Copilot Studio—an exciting new capability that transforms how businesses automate workflows with powerful, integrated AI actions. Agent flows empower users to automate tasks with structure and consistency, all while weaving in AI-driven intelligence to efficiently handle the complexity of today’s enterprise scenarios. Read on to discover how agent flows can transform end-to-end business processes.
Agents and agent flows: Better together
Agents are intelligent entities designed to independently perform tasks and make decisions based on predefined goals, working alongside or on behalf of an individual, team or organization. Agent flows are built to automate deterministic workflows and are enhanced with powerful AI actions. By coupling agents with agent flows in Copilot Studio, customers not only unlock unparalleled efficiency and agility but also experience these benefits within a single, unified platform, simplifying automation from design to deployment.
Agents can dynamically handle complex scenarios—like tax audits—by using generative AI to make real-time decisions. For example, an agent determines when an audit should be triggered based on anomalies in financial data. However, every organization has unique and indispensable processes with some fixed components. Now with agent flows, those fixed components are easily automated. Once triggered, an agent passes the context to its pre-built agent flow, which executes a structured, predefined audit procedure. This procedure systematically collects required documents, performs intelligent summarization, and secures the necessary, organization-specific, human-in-the-loop approvals.
Copilot Studio’s intuitive integrated maker interface supports quick iteration, allowing agents and intelligent workflows to evolve seamlessly alongside business needs. Agent flows can also be reused across multiple autonomous agents, ensuring consistency, optimizing tasks universally, and simplifying process management.
Agent flows: Intelligent, deterministic workflow automation
Unlike purely dynamic autonomous orchestration in agents today, deterministic workflows leverage predefined action sequences. This ensures that tasks always run consistently and rapidly. Key benefits include control and monitoring, providing transparency and accountability as well as enabling swift identification and resolution of workflow issues. Ideal for highly repetitive steps, agent flows can significantly accelerate workflow execution.
For example, standard finance operations like invoice processing, which are critical yet often costly to operate, can greatly benefit from agent flows. When an invoice arrives, the agent flow can automatically perform intelligent document processing to extract relevant data, validate entries against existing records, and route invoices for approval with impressive accuracy and speed.
The intelligence behind agent flows
Copilot-assisted natural language authoring experience
Just like building agents in Copilot Studio, makers can effortlessly create agent flows by simply describing their intent in natural language. Powered by the latest language models, Copilot intelligently interprets this input—understanding user context, intent, and logical structure—and generates the appropriate workflow steps automatically. This dramatically simplifies the authoring experience, enabling users to go from idea to automation faster, without needing deep technical expertise.
Enterprise-grade workflow building blocks
Agent flows offer the following rich set of workflow action types that empower makers to build intelligent, scalable, and flexible automations tailored for enterprise needs:
- AI actions: Use intelligent document and image processing to handle complex documents and visual data efficiently, intelligent summarization to quickly synthesize information from structured and unstructured data, and intelligent reasoning to enhance workflows by enabling AI-driven recommendations and decisions.
- Generative actions: Dynamically plan and execute automation steps, ensuring real-time adaptability and ongoing improvement through generative AI.
- Integration actions: Connect seamlessly with enterprise business applications and external services, enhancing interaction with systems-of-record internally and externally.
- Human-in-the-loop actions: Embed human judgment through advanced approval mechanisms and collaboration tools. In addition to notifications via Outlook, Gmail, Teams, and Slack, standard and advanced multi-stage approvals incorporate human decisions effortlessly into automation processes. Advanced approvals include customizable reminders, delegation features for unavailable approvers, and advanced, multi-stage approval mechanisms. This ensures critical business decisions are timely, efficient, and adaptable to complex scenarios.
Copilot Studio: Your agent platform for enterprise-grade agentic automation
By combining outcome-driven autonomous agents with deterministic agent flows, Copilot Studio stands as the premier AI-first agent platform for transforming business processes at scale. This unified approach empowers organizations to achieve unprecedented efficiency, agility, and innovation, setting a new standard for intelligent automation in the enterprise.
To get started, simply click the Flows tab in the left-hand pane of Copilot Studio. For more details, check out our comprehensive documentation and licensing guide so you can get started on this exciting journey. We look forward to seeing how you use agent flows to power the automation behind your business process transformation.
