Recently, we conducted a live webinar on Copilot Studio that garnered a lot of interest from our audience. During the well-attended webinar, our expert speaker Idlir Islamaj - Senior Power Platform Consultant at Skaylink and an experienced IT professional – spoke at length about Copilot Studio and gave an in-depth demo of the tool.
During the webinar, we received a lot of questions around Copilot Studio – licensing, usage and a lot more. In this blog post, we have collected all the audience questions that came in during the webinar. If you wish to watch the recording of the webinar instead, you can access it here.
Q: The Copilot Studio licensing model is a bit confusing. Can we have some clarity on that?
Copilot Studio is different from M365 Copilot. Therefore, you must buy a separate license for 200 dollars. This license is tenant wide, which means you buy just one license for your entire tenant. The 200 dollars gives you 25k messages which means that you will have the possibility to interact with the bot 25k times and as soon as one hits that limit, you need to buy additional packs which again cost 200 dollars.
Here, you have three kinds of users. You have the technical developer, business user (power user) and the end users who are going to use the bot. For the developers and power users you need to assign a license in admin center. This way, they will be able to build bots. Then you can create bots and share them with a group of people. Those people (end users) do not need a license; they can use the bot right away. However, it’s important to remember that anyone can start a free trial with your work account. It depends on how tight your administration rules are configured as to whether you will be asked to go through your administrator first.
There is, however, a catch. At the end of the month, if you don't use up the 25k messages, then it does not get transferred to the next month, but rather starts from scratch.
Q: What are some of the limitations that bot creators should consider?
At the time of speaking, we have a few limitations for Copilot Studio. One limitation is the file scanning size from SharePoint. For the moment, 3 megabytes is the size of the file. There were speculations that the file size would increase but so far, it's not available to everyone. It would be great if the file size was increased to 10 megabytes, but this is yet to be seen.
Another considered limitation is that not all tabular data is considered when you use knowledge only. For example, you’re connecting to “knowledge SharePoint” and have an Excel file there, which is not being indexed. You need to find a way to do that. You can build some actions where you define how to consider those Excel files or lists. PDF, PowerPoint, Word and modern SharePoint sites and pages will be considered. However, old SharePoint sites and pages will not be considered.
Q: My chatbot's knowledge base pulls from a SharePoint directory. When I integrate it with Teams and talk with the chatbot in Teams, it's not using the knowledge base from Sharepoint. Do I need to Authenticate manually for it to work?
There have been some issues with the communication between the bot in Teams connected to SharePoint. Even though you choose authentication as Microsoft Teams, it's still not able to communicate. It was working a month ago, but somehow, it's not anymore. You can always create an app with manual authentication, which never fails. Build an app in Azure and add a single sign on if you don't want to sign in all the time.
Q: The Copilot Studio license says that there is a quota of 25k messages. Is one message from copilot and one from the user considered as one message. Or are they treated as 2 separate messages and reduced from the quota.
According to the documentation, a message is considered as an interaction with the bot. You ask the bot something, you get a response – that's a message. You ask another question and receive a response, which becomes the second message. That's the logic here.
Q: How can we keep track of the message count and does Copilot give a warning that it is near the limit, or can we define custom warning message when approaching the message limit? Can we group it by user that which user markes how many requests...
So far, there’s no warning. When you reach the limit, the bot will not answer you anymore. It will say it's not possible to achieve it, since you have hit the limit.
Q: Can we integrate .Net coding in Microsoft Copilot studio? If yes, can you please give a brief idea how to do so?
There is a bot framework which helps you build additional skills for the bot, where you do it through a studio subscription. There is a possibility of doing it that way.
Q: How far do you have to predefine all actions/requests beforehand? (e.g. in the demo, did list tickets only work because this was a predefined action?)
Idlir Islamaj says:
In the demo, it was a predefined topic. I created a topic where if a question is asked in a certain way, the bot knows how to respond. You can include actions, which are advanced topics with AI incorporated. This means you just add an action to the bot and define how the data fits into it. For example, if you say, "list my tickets," the action dynamically includes this request, so you don't need to create an entire topic and logic. Because the action is AI-driven, it understands your request and dynamically processes the data to give you the desired result. This is possible. However, actions are powerful but still in preview, so I wouldn't use them in production until the preview is removed.
Q: What means of management and control does Microsoft provide around Copilot and Copilot studio?
Copilot Studio follows the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). The SDL is a set of strict practices that support security assurance and compliance requirements. If interested, you can read more about it here.
With a third-party M365 governance tool such as Rencore Governance, you can govern your custom Copilots and prevent information oversharing. From showing you a complete overview of all the custom bots created in the tenant to keeping your tenant tidy after connecting to hundreds of custom bots and flagging security violations, you can also utilize the automation capabilities to efficiently control and manage Copilot Studio. Copilot studio is currently in closed preview, and you can read more about it here.
