Microsoft is widening access to autonomous Copilot agents, positioning them as tools that can take on routine business work across teams and departments. Starting next month, the agents introduced in May will be available in public preview for smaller businesses through Copilot Studio, while Dynamics 365 will gain ten new autonomous agents.
What Microsoft is opening up
The main change is broader access. Autonomous agents that were previously limited are now moving into public preview for smaller businesses through Copilot Studio.
Copilot Studio is the place where companies can create and manage their own AI agents. Those agents can use information stored in the Microsoft 365 Graph, then act on behalf of employees, teams, or full departments.
Microsoft describes these agents as a way to automate routine tasks. The important distinction is that they are not only answering questions. They can use business context and generative AI to carry out a sequence of actions.
One example is email handling. A Copilot can respond to an incoming email, find details about the sender, review earlier communications, and then trigger a suitable chain of actions in the reply.
Where the agents could be used
Microsoft points to several business scenarios where autonomous agents could reduce manual work. These are mostly areas where employees repeatedly gather information, make a judgment, and move a process forward.
- An IT helpdesk agent can autonomously handle tickets.
- An onboarding agent can support new employees.
- A personal concierge for sales and service can remember guest preferences and proactively suggest upselling opportunities.
The common thread is process automation inside existing business workflows. Instead of asking an employee to switch between systems, look up history, and decide the next step every time, the agent can be designed to perform part of that workflow directly.
For smaller businesses, the public preview matters because Copilot Studio becomes the central interface for building and interacting with these agents. That gives companies a single place to develop agents that reflect how their teams already work.
Dynamics 365 gets ten pre-built agents
Microsoft is also integrating ten new autonomous agents into Dynamics 365, its business software suite. These are aimed at sales, customer service, finance, and supply chain teams.
The pre-built agents include an agent for evaluating sales opportunities, an agent for communicating with suppliers, and agents for identifying customer needs and managing customer knowledge.
This approach gives Microsoft two paths into the same market. Copilot Studio lets companies build their own agents around internal needs. Dynamics 365 gives business teams ready-made agents for common functions.
That split is significant for adoption. Some companies will want custom agents tied closely to their own processes. Others may prefer a built-in option that already maps to a known business role, especially in sales, service, finance, or supply chain work.
Adoption is already broad among large companies
According to Jared Spataro, Microsoft's marketing chief for AI in enterprises, 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies are already using the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI solution. He wrote that Lumen Technologies, Honeywell, and Finastra report productivity gains and cost savings.
Several organizations are also using Copilot Studio to create their own agents. The list includes Clifford Chance, McKinsey, Pets at Home, and Thomson Reuters.
Pets at Home has deployed an agent to detect potential fraud cases more quickly. That example shows how Microsoft is framing agents as more than generic office assistants. They can be pointed at specific business risks or operational bottlenecks when the right data and process are available.
Microsoft also says it uses Copilot and agents internally. According to Spataro, a sales team increased its revenue per employee by 9.4 percent, and a customer service team is handling inquiries almost 12 percent faster.
Security, pricing, and the bigger Copilot push
Microsoft emphasizes that agents follow company policies for security, privacy, and responsible AI use. The data sources used by agents are managed with strict security measures in Copilot Studio.
That point is central to how these tools will be evaluated. Autonomous agents need access to business information to be useful, but that also makes governance and permissions part of the product rather than an afterthought.
The broader Copilot platform launched in March 2023. Microsoft has been using OpenAI language models to add AI functions into its Office suite and other applications, with the stated goal of changing everyday use for private users and businesses.
Microsoft 365 Copilot, including Copilot Studio, is available starting at €28.10 per user per month. For companies that want to create custom agents available across multiple channels for employees and customers, Microsoft requires a subscription costing €187.20 per month, which includes 25,000 messages.
The latest move makes clear where Microsoft wants Copilot to go next. The product is shifting from AI assistance inside apps toward agents that can work across business processes, using company data, predefined policies, and task-specific automation.