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1. Microsoft Copilot Fundamentals

Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.

Action Step

Complete this before moving on.

This one's conceptual, so there's nothing to build yet. Before you move on to the setup training, make sure you can clearly explain the two pieces that actually matter: Copilot Studio (where agents get built and pushed across the org) and Power Automate (what runs them behind the scenes). If either is fuzzy, rewatch that part of the video.

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Training Guide

Microsoft is easy to write off — but it's quietly one of the best built-out AI agent systems out there, with every team connected in one place. This training breaks down how it all fits together.

Don't Sleep on Microsoft​

Microsoft Copilot is one of the most complete AI agent systems available, and the whole organization lives in one place. You're not even locked into Microsoft's models — you can run Claude, OpenAI, and Groq models inside the ecosystem. There are three surfaces to know, but really it comes down to two.

Copilot​

Copilot is the chat surface, and it looks a lot like ChatGPT. This is the part people mix up — when a customer says they want to "build an agent," they usually mean building one here, which works almost exactly like a custom GPT in OpenAI's ecosystem.

You spin up a new agent, pick from templates or skip straight to configure, and give it some basic prompts. It's AI chat grounded in the company's data, with no per-user setup — just a license and you're in.

Copilot Studio​

Copilot Studio is where the real agent design happens, and where you push an agent out across the entire organization. This is the powerhouse.

You get the power-user features here: test the agent, write its description and instructions (the main prompt), and connect it to knowledge sources, tools, triggers, sub-agents, and suggested prompts. Tools is where you wire in things like the Salesforce MCP. You can also evaluate the agent's activity across the org and pull up analytics to track exactly what it's costing you company-wide. Everything for the company gets housed here.

Power Automate​

So how do these actually run? If you go to Publish → Channels, you can deploy the agent into Microsoft Teams and other places — that's the collaborative agent you talk back and forth with.

But when you want something running behind the scenes, like n8n or Zapier, you use Power Automate — Microsoft's version of those tools, and it's genuinely powerful.

Here's the shape of it with a lead agent: when a record is modified in Salesforce and matches your criteria, Power Automate executes the agent. You select the agent (pulled in from Copilot Studio) as a node, hand it a specific prompt on top of its existing instructions, and have it update a record back in the CRM. The hardest part is the connections — making sure everything is wired correctly. With a security-sensitive customer, that meant jumping through a lot of hoops.

The Open Question on Billing​

One honest gap: how billing works on Copilot Studio. There's an analytics view that tracks cost across the org, but we weren't on that side with the customer, and the company itself wasn't sure how it worked. So if a customer asks how Copilot Studio billing works, we don't have a solid answer yet — it's something we'd have to go research.

Wrap-Up​

That's the lay of the land. The only two pieces you really need to hold onto are Copilot Studio (where agents get built and managed) and Power Automate (what runs them behind the scenes). Get those and you're rock and rolling for the next training, where we actually set them up.