Use guided prompts with Copilot's Researcher and Analyst agents

- [Speaker] If you have repetitive processes or tasks, you are a prime candidate to create a Copilot agent. An agent can automate processes or act as a role in a consistent manner. The agent contains custom instructions on things like style, tone and responses to perform a specific function. This is how an agent differs from a regular chat session. You won't have to provide context every time you interact with the agent, and the agent is programmed to prompt in a certain way to get you through a specific process. While you can create your own personal agents with either version of Copilot, the licensed version comes with two built-in agents ready to go, researcher and analyst. Researcher takes your work data and works with you doing a deep search to gather data and uncover research topics. I'm back on the web portal landing page and I got there via Microsoft365.com and it redirected me to the right place. If your administrator has enabled this, you'll see an agent's section under chat and two built-in agents. We'll start with researcher. I have a performance review coming up. Tell me key contributions I've made and projects I've been a part of. While a regular Copilot chat might show me the latest relevant information from Teams chats and other recent sources, researcher will investigate my work environment deeper. Instead of being told a series of facts that Copilot can get from my work environment, watch how I'm prompted for clarity to get the best use of time and results from this inquiry. And while a regular Copilot chat will show me the latest relevant information from Teams chats and other recent sources, researcher will investigate my work environment deeper, looking at PowerPoint presentation content, Excel workbooks, and much older emails. You can see the reasoning as it happens, like a deep thought process. I do want to mention that one reason I will not go ahead with the search and run it here is because it does do a deep search and that can take more than a few moments, so it's a good time to type it out and then go for a coffee break while it runs. Instead, let's take a look now at analyst, an agent that uses deep reasoning to work with you like you are a data scientist and the agent is your lab partner. Analyst will help you look over your raw data and show you what it means by reasoning to get there. I like telling analyst why I need to get this data because it will show me different insights based on who the analysis is for, say a CFO versus a marketing manager for example. Review this spreadsheet and give me a detailed summary of how our conferences are performing. This data will be shown to our marketing manager in an upcoming meeting, so I will need to know what geographic regions to focus on and what conferences have the most attendees. So I'm very clear on my request, and now I'm going to include the file. So I'll click to add content. I'll attach a cloud file. This one is stored on my OneDrive. I'll select it and let it go. Okay, it's finished. Let's take a look. Here's all my results and my deep analysis. The beauty here is that I can keep going deeper with this analysis. For example, it's even telling me recommendations from marketing focus, but if it didn't, I could ask what areas are underperforming to know where to focus my social media reach. The last thing I want to show you is that with both licensed and unlicensed Copilots, you can create your own agents to be sent through a process of prompts to guide you through your task. All the way over here on the left, I'm going to click create agent. It starts by telling me that it's going to help me build the agent, and you can start by describing what you want the agent to do. Here's the prompt box, and you have 2,000 characters that you can type in here. That's a lot of instructions that you can include. Now, I won't create the whole thing, but I'm going to read you an example I might use to help me create an agent that I might title my conference planner assistant and I have used similar agents like this to help me create my videos. This one says, guide me through planning conference topics, scheduling dates, and identifying roadblocks in choosing a venue. Ask me what websites and resources I can use to find potential speakers for each topic. Ensure deadlines are set for each task and keep me motivated and on track. At the end of the workflow, when I say I am all set, prompt me by asking if I would like a complete version of this action plan that I can copy and paste into a document, and finally, maintain an upbeat, fun, and motivating tone throughout all interactions. These are my instructions. So you can see how flexible you really can be. I'm telling it what I want it to ask me. I'm telling it to continue its list of prompts for me. I'm telling it to help create an action plan, and finally, I'm telling it what tone I want it to use for me. This is all for me, so it works for you might be completely different set of instructions. When you're done, you can send the request and it's going to walk you through creating this agent. Over here on the right is where you can test it and you can type a prompt. For example, I might say, hi, help me plan my next conference, and that's all I need to get this list of instructions started. The agent will now walk me through the conference planning process, keeping me on track and making sure I hold myself accountable.