Microsoft Teams gets Copilot AI agents to automate workflows
What's the story
Microsoft is supercharging its Teams platform with a slew of new artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The tech giant has announced that these "Copilot assistants" will be integrated into every channel, meeting, and community on the platform. The move is part of a wider rollout for Microsoft 365 Copilot users and also extends to SharePoint and Viva Engage.
Meeting enhancement
AI agents will streamline meeting processes
The new AI agents, dubbed "facilitator agents," will be present in Teams meetings to streamline the process. They will create agendas, take notes, and answer questions during the meeting. The agents can also suggest time allotments for different topics of discussion and create documents and tasks. A mobile version of these agents can be activated with a single tap to ensure no spontaneous discussions are missed.
Communication boost
Channel and community agents
The AI agents also include "channel agents" and "community agents." Channel agents answer questions based on previous conversations and meetings in a channel, while they can also generate project status reports. Community agents work in Viva Engage, Microsoft's version of company-wide social networks. They primarily support community admins by answering questions from other users.
File management
Knowledge agents in SharePoint
Another new addition is the "knowledge agents," which work behind the scenes in SharePoint. Their main job is to organize, tag, and summarize files. All these AI agents are currently available but some features like document creation and task assignment are still in public preview. Along with these new agents, Microsoft has also launched a revamped Workflows tool for creating AI automations of tasks.