Use AI on Your SharePoint Sites with Copilot Agents
Copilot AI is all the rage across Microsoft 365 applications. Microsoft continues to release new features, making it easier for the citizen developer to create AI models. With Copilot Studio, you can create Copilot agents that utilize your SharePoint sites as knowledge sources. So, how can this help your construction projects? Check out this article to find out more.
There are many opportunities where AI could come in handy on construction projects that use SharePoint to manage their project documents. For example, AI could list all the deliverables required for an RFP, determine if liquidated damages were part of a construction contract, scan resumes for employees with a particular skill set, and so on.
With Copilot agents, you can create custom AI agents to scan your SharePoint documents and provide conversational responses to your queries.
Copilot Agent Overview
Let’s say you want to create a training FAQ Copilot agent from all the training documents in a SharePoint site.
You use Microsoft Copilot Studio to create a Copilot agent and then include the SharePoint site as the knowledge source. You can then share that agent with other team members who have permissions to the SharePoint site.
In Action: Create a Copilot Agent
Go into Copilot Studio, click Create, and name your agent. As you can see in the image below, I’ve already created an agent using a SharePoint site where we deployed Construction Viz as the knowledge source.
Once you create your agent and assign a SharePoint site as the knowledge source, you must determine which channel to use for the agent. A channel is a location where the agent can be shared. By default, it’s Microsoft Teams, but other options, such as a custom website or even Slack, are possible but will require additional authentication setup. If you use Teams, the authentication is built in. Next, you will want to identify who in your organization can access the agent from the settings.
When you are ready for the rest of the team to take it for a spin, publish the agent and share the link to the agent with your team members.
Share Your Agent
If you use Microsoft Teams for your channel, you can add your agent as an app and send the link to your team members to interact with the SharePoint site you used as a knowledge source.
How Does a Copilot Agent Function?
I created a simple agent called Construction Viz Demo that scans training information from a PDF document stored in the underlying SharePoint site of a Construction Viz deployment. As you can see below, I can ask the agent questions, and it will return results based on the PDF file. Pretty slick!
Considerations
- Copilot supports a wide range of file types such as Word (doc and docx), Excel (xlsx), PowerPoint (ppt and pptx), Loop, and Adobe (PDFs). Copilot agents will not scan SharePoint lists out of the box. To include SharePoint lists, you must build custom actions, which we will discuss in a future article.
- Ensure permissions and sensitivity labels are in place to restrict access to confidential and sensitive information.
- Test your agent before deploying it to get the desired results.
AI technology is progressing at a breakneck speed. If you want to stay on top of all the features in Microsoft 365 and leverage Copilot AI for your construction projects, you can contact Lydon Solutions for a free one-hour consultation.
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