The Scary Good Way to Automate Outlook with a Copilot Agent

In a previous video, we got serious. We built  Pooch Pal, a fully autonomous customer service   agent for a dog grooming business using  Microsoft Copilot Studio. It was powerful,   but let's be honest, it took a little bit of  work to set up. Today, I want to show you the   fast lane. We're going to build a new agent that  reads and responds to emails in about 3 minutes. Let's say you have a restaurant. You also take the  time to help people with cooking ideas. So, we're   going to build an AI sue chef. The goal? You email  random ingredients sitting in your fridge and it   searches allre recipes. com to email back a perfect  fivestar dinner recipe instantly. We're going to   be using the new Microsoft C-Pilot workflow agent  to do it. No coding, no complex nodes. Let's get   cooking. Hi everyone, I'm Jamie and welcome to  Teachers Tech. If you watched the Pooch Pal video,

you saw me using Copilot Studio. This is the  heavyduty tool for enterprise bots. Today we're   using workflows agents. Think of this as the light  version. It's right inside your standard co-pilot   chat and it's designed to automate your personal  task. Whether that be answering business emails   or in this case figuring out what's for dinner. To  get to Microsoft 365 Copilot, all you need to do   is go to office. com and log into your account. You  can see where you can sign up for a free version   as well. So, go ahead, get signed in and we'll  go from there. Once you're logged in, you'll be   on the new chat page. If you've never logged  into Microsoft 365 Copilot like this before,   I have a whole video explaining what all this is.   But for this video, where we're going to go to is   agents. And I want to go to all agents. And this  is where if I scroll down a bit, I have workflows

agent right here. If you don't see this, you  can do a search. Just type in workflows and it   should pop up. So, I'm just going to go ahead and  click on this. And then we just need to go ahead   and click add. After a few seconds, it pops up  right here. Quick heads up before we build. You   might see the tag frontier. In Microsoft terms,  this just means early access. To follow today,   you need two things. A commercial Microsoft 365  copilot license. Your IT must have preview or   Frontier features enabled. The most important  part of any AI agent is telling it where to

get its information. I don't want my sous chef  to hallucinate a recipe that tastes terrible.    I want it to use a trusted source. So, in our  prompt, we're going to explicitly tell it to   go to allre recipes. com. You could pick another.   We're not dragging and dropping notes today. We're   just typing instructions in plain English.   I need to set up three things. The trigger,   a specific subject line, so it doesn't  reply to all my work emails. The action,   search all recipes for a highly rated dish, and  the response, email me instructions immediately.    Now, I'm just going to walk through this. So,  here's the first part. when a new email comes   into my inbox and the subject line reads chef help  or remember I don't want it to answer all my email   so just when the subject line has this in it read  the ingredients or requests listed in the email   research a highly rated recipe and I'm telling it  to go to allre recipes. com reply using an email   directly to the sender make sure the email is  formatted in HTML respond in a friendly helpful   chef's manner and write as if you were replying to  the sender's email so this is important part the   formatting on how um the uh the email looks and  everything. So, I'll talk a little bit more. We'll   add some uh changes as we go along to it, how to  edit it. For each section of the recipe, start a   new paragraph and write a detailed response. The  more verbose, the factual the better. Sign off   with bonapetit your AI sue chef. So, let's go  ahead and send this. So, now I can see that it   has started with a trigger. So, the new chef help  email. So, that's the first part. And we can kind   of follow along the workflow over here. It looks  like it's going to be four steps. It's going to   uh go extract the ingredients or request. So, and  then it's going to go to research the recipes on   all recipes. And then it's going to go reply with  a recipe email. So, what I'm going to do now,   and this is important step, we're going to go to  save. Now, notice there is a test, but what I'm

going to do is jump over to an email and we'll  go ahead and send this. Okay. So, here's the   email I'm going to send. This is one of my demo  accounts here, but this is what uh this is where   my Microsoft 365 co-pilot is hooked to. Uh we have  in the subject, chef help. Remember that was the   important part here. Hi there. I'm uh staring my  fridge. We have no idea what to make for dinner.    I have the follow ingredients. Can you find me a  highly rated recipe? Okay, so you get the point.    I'm going to go ahead and send this. Now, let's  check a few things out. Now, I have activity. If I   check on it, I can see that it ran for 42 seconds  here and it succeeded. I'm going to go if I click   on this, it will show kind of the step by step  what happened. We'll check it in my real email   in a moment. So, we saw the email aro arrive. You  saw the boneless chicken um using the ingredients,   recipes, they extracted the ingredients and they  replied to it. So, let's see how everything looks   here. I'm going to go over to my Outlook. Here's  the email right here. I can already see that it   was replied to. I haven't opened this yet. So,  I'm just going to click on it. And here was the   original email. I'm just going to go click  up here. So, thank you for reaching out. So,   dear chef and training, thank you for reaching out  as uh your helpful AI sue chef. You can go through   the recipe name. Creamy chicken with spinach  ingredients. Kind of a nice format here to   uh instructions. I'll go just jump over to my  email that I sent it from so we can look at it   from there. And here we go. So this one is reply  to a Gmail address. And we can see everything is   in there the same. So that is a very easy setup to  get an email response that was searched for. But   I'm going to show you how you can modify this as  well. Okay. So here I am back in my workflows here

in the same place. I'm going to give it a message  to make a change to it. The one thing I want to   mention, the formatting came out not bad on this  one, but I've been working with the formatting so   that it was in before I asked it to do a numbered  list. It did it automatically this time. So,   it was remembering what I've asked it to do in  previous test of it, but I actually had to go   through and almost give it other instructions  sometimes to uh make sure you use numbered list   where appropriate uh the HTML formatting. So all  these things if your formatting is not uh getting   corrected uh just kind of play around with it  and giving it specific instructions. So this   time I'm going to say add a link to the recipe  you selected. And I'm just going to send this   off. So just to show you how we can modify this.   Okay. You can see it's red here. It looks like   it made changes. When it makes the changes you  need to make sure you go save it. Now this is an   error that I came up with when using links. And  I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to go resend   the email and then we'll just jump back over to  the email. So, I just sent the exact same email.    You can see under activity now we have two. I'm  just going to go over to the email and this was   the response. So, it was the exact same question  and at the bottom here we have this creamy garlic   chicken with spinach. So, a link but when I click  on this you can see oops this isn't it. uh it's at   the right site, all recipes, but um it doesn't go  anywhere. And I've done this a few different times   with a few different links, and I still get broken  links. Um and I try to get it to do YouTube videos   and different things. Um I had it work for a  channel, but not specific videos. So, I don't know   if I'm prompting this wrong. If you have an idea  with this how maybe in the prompt that it could   get fixed, uh makes me a little worried with uh  some of the information, too. So, remember I told   you about some issues. Uh, this is something  I wouldn't just set up to run automatically   without checking responses because um I'm not  a 100% sure if it's pulling all from the right   place even though it says it is. Now, you can  keep adapting just by having that conversation   with it. It will update any of the workflow and  then you just have to save it again. If I go back,   I'm going to open up the panel and let's say I'll  click on researcher here and then I'm going to   click back on workflows. and you'd think it's  gone, but these different workflows get saved   right here. Uh the thing is if you have multiple  workflows, and this is probably this is why the   subject heading would matter. Uh I could have  multiple emails uh replying to emails multiple   times. If I had multiple workflows because you can  have more of these than uh just the one. And if   you go over here, you'll notice that you can turn  it off or delete it. If you want to go back in it,   we can just click on it and it's going to go ahead  and open back up again where you can make some   edits to this. Now, I want to be 100% transparent  with you about this tool. In my previous pooch

pal video using Copilot Studio, connecting to  my internal one drive or uploading documents   like price list and FAQs work flawlessly. However,  while testing this new workflow agent, I couldn't   really get it to read internal documents to form a  knowledge base. That's why for this demo, I chose   to use a public website like allre recipes. com  because the agent can do that searching. If you   build an agent for your business and it can't find  the file you linked, it might uh try to be helpful   by guessing an answer. Uh you don't want an AI  guessing your prices or making up a cancellation   policy for your client. So, here's my best advice.   Even though I showed you how to send auto replies   today, don't start there. In your prompt, instead  of going reply directly, I would say create a   draft email. This puts the email in your drafts  first. Allows you to spend 5 seconds reviewing it   to make sure the information is accurate and the  tone is right. You still have the you still save   the time of writing it, but you keep the human  in the loop until you're 100% confident that   the agent is reading your files correctly. This is  the safest way to automate. I hope this video gave   you a little bit of insights on what's coming with  agents and how they're going to help you automate   to save you a lot of time. But remembering to  make sure you check things over first. Thanks   for watching this time on Teacher Tech. I'll see  you next week with more tech tips and tutorials.