In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses are constantly seeking innovative solutions to enhance productivity, streamline operations, and engage customers effectively. Microsoft is at the forefront of empowering customers with cutting-edge tools designed to harness the power of generative AI and copilots. Our commitment to innovation continues in our latest investment in industry-specific solutions that enable businesses to adopt and integrate AI technologies swiftly and efficiently.

Accelerating business transformation with industry AI and copilots

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At the heart of this initiative are industry prompts in Copilot Lab and industry templates in Microsoft Copilot Studio—two platforms tailored to meet the unique demands of various businesses. These platforms are not just about providing tools; they’re about delivering a seamless experience that aligns with our customers’ operational workflows, enhancing productivity and fostering creativity.

Copilot Lab serves as a portal for innovation, offering diverse industry prompts that cater to the specific needs of job functions and industries. Getting up to speed on AI prompts can be challenging from both a technical and practical standpoint. If AI prompts are vague or lack necessary details, AI models can produce off-target responses. Copilot Lab provides a repository of prompts that resonate with industry professionals, enabling them to generate meaningful outcomes with Microsoft Copilot’s assistance.

Copilot Studio includes industry copilot templates that can simplify the adoption process for businesses. These templates incorporate industry-specific business logic and custom prompts that streamline operations and decision-making processes. These templates, available in the Copilot Studio Gallery, represent fully working copilots that often only require configuration or integration for an organization to adopt them.

As we continue to build and co-create, our vision is to not only enhance the capabilities of Microsoft Industry Clouds but also to help redefine the way industries operate. By providing accelerators that drive mainstream adoption and co-building with industry partners, we’re setting a new standard for industry solutions.

Copilot Lab

Powerful prompts, a click away

Industry AI prompts in Copilot Lab

In our continuous pursuit of empowering organizations across various industries, Microsoft has introduced a suite of industry-specific prompts within Copilot Lab. These prompts are a culmination of our efforts to provide a more context-aware AI experience that leverages users’ domain expertise to drive better outcomes. Our new industry prompts help customers quickly get started using Copilot for sector, job, and role-specific scenarios and can be customized with domain-specific details, best practices, and industry context to reduce trial and error and ensure high-quality output. These prompts can create an interactive experience for sector-, job-, and role-specific users, which can enhance prompts and deliver tailored responses, continually improving based on user interactions.

The genesis of these prompts was a collaborative effort, drawing on insights from industry professionals to ensure quality and relevance. The initiative begins with the financial services, retail, and manufacturing industries, introducing 24 industry-specific prompts within Copilot Lab, marking the start of a broader vision to integrate industry-specific intelligence into business operations.

These prompts are readily accessible in Copilot Lab, where users can select prompts that resonate with their professional needs. They are designed to help users ask relevant and specific questions, enabling Copilot to generate insights from data that are finely tuned to their industry’s nuances.

The introduction of these prompts is part of our broader vision to bring industry-specific intelligence to the forefront of business operations. By providing these tailored tools, we aim to enhance productivity and foster innovation within the Microsoft 365 environment.

Accessing these prompts is simple. Within Copilot Lab, a collection of pre-built prompts categorized by industry. Users can select the one that fits their role, and let Copilot do the rest. Users can further customize the prompts with domain-specific details and best practices.

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Figure 1: User selects the retail prompt category and picks the outlet visit preparation prompt.
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Figure 2: The prompt is copy/pasted into Word and a document is generated for editing and use.

Industry copilot templates in Copilot Studio

Industry copilot templates in Copilot Studio help users streamline the adoption of AI solutions across various sectors, providing pre-built dialogs, intents, entities, prompts, and actions that can be easily customized and extended according to the user’s needs using a low-code/no-code experience.

The templates offer a quick and efficient way to get started with AI, with configurations and rollout typically taking only a few hours. They include publicly accessible and customizable data sources, allowing customers to change the default data source with their own to get the copilot ready for business. This feature is particularly beneficial for industries that require rapid deployment and flexibility, such as retail and sustainability.

For instance, the sustainability insights template in Microsoft Copilot Studio empowers users with easy access to data and insights regarding a company’s sustainability goals and progress, while the copilot template for store operations is designed to enhance the efficiency of retail frontline workers by providing easy access to store procedures and policies. These templates were part of the Microsoft Copilot template gallery unveiled at Microsoft Build 2024 and represent Microsoft’s commitment to empowering users with AI tools that are both powerful and adaptable to their specific industry needs.

Figure 3: Sustainability insights template in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Copilot Studio is available worldwide, across 22 datacenters, and supports multi-lingual experiences, making it a versatile tool for global enterprises. The studio’s capabilities are continually expanding, with support for 23 languages and growing, helping to ensure that users can build solutions and respond in their preferred language.

For more detailed information on how to utilize these new features and to stay updated on future releases, users can refer to the resources provided by Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Learn more about industry-specific AI tools

Microsoft remains dedicated to empowering customers through innovation. Our latest offerings in Copilot Lab and Copilot Studio reflect our commitment to providing industry-specific AI tools that are not only powerful but also intuitive and accessible. By continually investing in these technologies, we aim to help ensure that organizations, regardless of size or sector, can harness the full potential of AI to drive efficiency, creativity, and growth.

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Copilot learning hub

Learn how to use Microsoft Copilot based on your role

Get started by exploring detailed guides and information on our industry prompts and templates at Copilot Lab and Copilot Studio. Learn more and stay informed about Microsoft’s advancements in AI by exploring Copilot for Microsoft 365 Tech Community Blog and the Microsoft Industry Blog for insightful articles, or discover more at Copilot learning hub. Together, let’s shape the future of industry innovation with AI.