Will Copilot agents increase the adoption of Microsoft Copilot?

At ESPC 2024 in Stockholm, we asked Microsoft MVPs if they thought Copilot agents would help increase the adoption of Microsoft Copilot. We put their answers together into a short video, but they had more to say so we decided to combine all their answers together in this blog post to share their amazing insights. Also, check out our Copilot agents webinar: Deep Dive into Copilot agents for SharePoint.

We’ve seen Copilot agents increase adoption – Richard Harbridge

So Copilot agents don’t just increase adoption, but we’ve seen it increase adoption. So in preview, we’ve seen it’s very accessible. Business users can create them, it makes sense. It adds a way to extract more value from the content you’ve already created. So it’s very natural to understand how you would use it, at least the getting started ones.

And then because it acts as a way to start actioning other things from there. I think we’re only at the beginning of how it’s going to affect adoption right now. You’ll see sprawl of these as it drives value, but you also see really clever ways in which people say, “I want it to also do this, not just answer these questions, but take this action.” And then that’s going to be a really nice collaboration between IT and business users as we hopefully build an entirely new agent system and experience within the organization.

So it has huge impacts on improving security, because now we have focus where people are calibrating and finding the answers to targeted questions and content. We also have the business users who are more empowered. It fits this team-based adoption model, which is critical.

You know, the whole idea for adoption is you do it by teams. And when you combine that with agents, all of a sudden you have team agents that are answering problems that that team historically has answered. But now they can expand to anyone who needs to interface with the collective intelligence of that team represented in their own agent experience. They can spin up and also get extended from IT support. So yeah, really impactful.

Copilot agents are going to be really helpful – Emily Mancini

I think Copilot agents are going to be really helpful because we’re giving end users use cases of AI in the business world. We’re not asking them to understand the technology and bridge the gap of where they can apply it in their business processes.

Instead, we’re offering up these ideas so they can try them out, and it’ll hopefully inspire some other innovation of different ways they want to use AI in their organization as well.

It really depends on the maturity of the organization – Marc D Anderson

I think it’s very definitely early times with Copilot agent technology. I think it really depends on the maturity of the organization. As you know, I work with the maturity model for Microsoft 365. You have to have a certain level of sophistication, a certain level of maturity to be able to think of, well, “What could agents do for me?” And is our data estate clean enough and organized enough? And is our information architecture strong enough so that we can trust that these agents aren’t going to ferret out information that we don’t need.

So I guess that’s a bit of a cynical answer, but I do believe that with Copilot in general and with agents in particular, the more mature your organization is and the more crystallized your ideas are around what would be a custom solution for us that would actually make us better at those special things that we’re good at, the more likely that technology is going to come into flight for you sooner.

Everybody’s going to want to create Copilot agents – Knut Relbe-Moe

Yes, I think Copilot agents will increase adoption. I’m a little bit scared about it in a sense as well. So, from the governance perspective again, everybody can create an agent. It’s kind of scary because it’s going to be a mess.

But I do think that Copilot agents are going to help with the adoption of Copilot, because everybody’s going to want to create an agent that performs their specific task.

Copilot agents are more specialized in a business process – Vlad Catrinescu

Yeah, I actually definitely think so. I think Copilot right now is a bit very generic. Everybody can choose the way to use it. Copilot agents are more specialized in a business process. So the organization will say you want to achieve this process. This is the Copilot for you to use.

It’s customized to the company. So it’s something that you do as part of a line of business application. So it’s customized to your company, made for you, and you’re probably going to have to follow that process to get things done. So I think you’ll increase adoption.

Copilot agents will improve business use cases – Martin Rovekamp

I’m not sure about the adoption, but for me, the Copilot agents are the real thing. It’s interesting to have Copilot in the SharePoint text editor, but the Copilot agents will improve their business, support their processes, and enhance the business use cases.

Copilot agents will definitely increase adoption – Thomas Vochten

Yes, I think Copilot agents will definitely increase adoption. It gives a little bit more power to the users to connect to various other data sources, but also scope what they are using Copilot for to certain documents or a SharePoint site, for example. That makes it very interesting.

But also from a governance perspective, I can see some IT admins panicking a little bit because everyone can create these. So it’s going to be a challenge, but also an opportunity to sit down and think about what you actually want as a company.

Would you like to hear more?

It was great hearing what MVPs had to say about Copilot agents increasing the adoption of Copilot. You can also check out another MVP video about the most transformative Microsoft 365 feature in 2025. Thank you to all the Microsoft MVPs for their insights!