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Copilot Studio


🎯 Difficulty Level: Easy
⏱️ Reading Time: 5 minutes
👤 Author: Rob Vettor
📅 Last updated on: April 7, 2025

What is Copilot Studio?

How it Works

Starting with Topics

Topics define how the customers interact with an agent. They represent common issues, questions, or tasks that for which customers need assistance. For example, a topic that instructs a customer on how to return an item.

Topics consist of two primary components:

  • Trigger phrases: Phrases, keywords, or questions input by the users that activate the topic. They are questions or utterances that teach the agent when to respond with this dialog. For example, "How do I return an item?" or "What is your return policy?".

  • Conversation nodes: Defines the flow of the conversation. It includes the following components:

  • Prompt: The message that is sent to the customer. It can be a question, statement, or instruction.
  • Response: The message that is sent back to the customer in response to their input.
  • Follow-up: Additional questions or prompts that are sent to the customer after the initial response.

  • Condition: A condition that must be met for the follow-up to be sent. For example, if the customer responds with "yes" or "no".

  • Conveniently, you can leverage customized templates from Copilot Studio to create your topics.

Your agent can up to 1,000 topics!

Predefined Topics

Copilot Studio provides a set of predefined topics that can be used as templates for creating new topics. These templates cover common scenarios and can be customized to fit specific needs. Topics can be of type types:

  • Custom: Built-in topics that include common tasks such as greetings, farewells, and ability to start over.
  • System: Pre-populated topics for scenarios customers are likely to encounter while interacting with your agent. These scenarios might include a topic that maps out what to do when multiple topics are matched or ending a conversation or escalating a conversation to a live agent. System topics have a basic structure already in place, based on what the scenario is. For example, the fallback topic represents the topic that is presented to a user in the event that the agent is unable to identify a topic that answers their question. System topics can be modified based on your needs.****
  • common tasks such as greetings, farewells, and ability to start over.

Topics define how the customers interact with an agent. They represent common issues, questions, or tasks that for which customers need assistance. For example, a topic that instructs a customer on how to return an item.

Topics consist of two primary components:

  • Trigger phrases: Phrases, keywords, or questions input by the users that activate the topic. For example, "How do I return an item?" or "What is your return policy?".
  • Conversation nodes: Defines the flow of the conversation. It includes the following components:
  • Prompt: The message that is sent to the customer. It can be a question, statement, or instruction.
  • Response: The message that is sent back to the customer in response to their input.
  • Follow-up: Additional questions or prompts that are sent to the customer after the initial response.

  • Condition: A condition that must be met for the follow-up to be sent. For example, if the customer responds with "yes" or "no".

  • Conveniently, you can leverage customized templates from Copilot Studio to create your topics.

Your agent can up to 1,000 topics!

  • Intent: The goal or purpose of the topic. It describes what the customer is trying to achieve.
Trigger Phrases

Each topic that you define should include some trigger phrases. Trigger phrases are examples of text such as questions or utterances that teach the agent when to respond with this dialog. For example, the following image contains a topic called Store Hours, which is used to provide customers with store location hours based on different scenarios

Conversation Nodes

Conversation nodes define the flow of the conversation. Each node contains a prompt, response, follow-up, and condition. The prompt is the message that is sent to the customer. It can be a question, statement, or instruction. The response is the message that is sent back to the customer in response to their input. The follow-up is an additional question or prompt that is sent to the customer after the initial response. The condition is a condition that must be met for the follow-up to be sent. For example, if the customer responds with "yes" or "no".

Platform Strength

Blah, blah, blah

Limitations

2,ooo Character Limit

At the time of this writing, Copilot Studio imposes a 2000-character limit on its input sequence (that is, the entire prompt composed and sent to the model).

Consider what's included:

  • System prompt – Core instructions that guide behavior and tone.
  • User prompt – The latest message from the user.
  • External data – External knowledge (retrieved from an API, Web site, or data sources).
  • Chat history – Prior conversation turns retained to provide context.
  • Variables and memory state – Dynamically injected session or values.
  • Tool/Plugin/action/descriptions – Descriptions of available actions or plugins.

For lightweight use cases—such as departmental Q&A bots or simple task automation, this limitation may be acceptable. However, for mission-critical enterprise applications, this limitation is a severe constraint. It prevents the inclusion of rich context, detailed history, retrieved data, and reasoning scaffolding (such as Chain of Thought or ReACT)—all of which are essential for producing accurate, reliable, and context-aware responses