What Copilot Studio is
Copilot Studio is the low-code environment for building Copilot agents — chat-based, AI-grounded agents that can be deployed inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, websites or mobile apps. Agents can ground in SharePoint sites, OneDrive content, public web pages, knowledge bases and connected enterprise systems. It's the successor to Power Virtual Agents and the natural extension of the Power Platform.
How it differs from Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot is the per-user Office productivity tool. Copilot Studio is for building custom agents. They're complementary: an organisation might have M365 Copilot for productivity plus Copilot Studio for an internal IT helpdesk agent and a customer-facing FAQ bot. Copilot Studio agents can be surfaced inside Microsoft 365 Copilot's chat interface as 'declarative agents', which is the integration most AU buyers actually want.
What AU organisations actually build
The five most common Copilot Studio agents Frontrow sees in Australian midmarket are: IT helpdesk agent (deflects password resets, ticket routing, common how-to), HR self-service agent (leave balance, policy lookup, onboarding), finance Q&A agent (expense policy, AP/AR queries, contractor classification), sales coordinator agent (account research, RFP responses, internal escalation), and customer-facing FAQ agent (typically embedded in a website).