Microsoft uses Copilot Studio to reshape customer experience and drive higher engagement

Every day, millions of people visit Microsoft’s website for information on products, pricing, and services. Spanning thousands of pages, the site now includes an AI-driven web agent that helps customers find information faster and get help with the products and services. 

Previously, customers would often struggle to find the information they needed. They frequently turned to a chatbot for live chats with sales representatives, asking for help with pricing, product details, and technical support. “People would reach out to the sales reps about everything, including non-sales questions, which is not the best use of the sales reps’ time,” says Chris Haklitch, Principal PM Lead at Microsoft. 

The marketing team knew that adding an AI-driven web agent could help better manage routine questions from customers on the site. The question was: Could this agent perform well enough to provide the right information customers needed—consistently, efficiently, and at scale? The team wanted to go even further, moving beyond just information retrieval to having the agent actively help customers with product evaluation, technical support, even key business outcomes like product signups. 

Rapid deployment with Copilot Studio 

To begin testing their agentic vision, the team turned to Copilot Studio. “We wanted to get an agent out to support customers as quickly as possible and Copilot Studio turned out to be the ideal solution for the job,” says Haklitch.  

The agent—a web assistant called Ask Microsoft—was originally prototyped on Copilot Studio by the team responsible for the Azure product site on Microsoft.com. Leveraging the easy-to-use tools within Copilot Studio, the team was able to rapidly test and refine their web assistant and go live in just a few weeks.

Results compiled through Copilot Studio looked promising. Solid customer satisfaction scores indicated that customers were not only getting the answers they needed, but, when engaged with Ask Microsoft, they were also significantly more engaged with the Microsoft site itself, visiting more pages per session. 

Building on this momentum, the team expanded Ask Microsoft to cover ten additional product sites at a pace of two per week. “Working with Copilot Studio made it easy to scale a low-code solution across Microsoft properties without technical overhead or custom development,” says Selva Sankaran, Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft.

Harnessing the power of multiple sub-agents 

The Ask Microsoft web agent had quickly become a highly effective sales and marketing tool for Microsoft. But this success started to create a new challenge. Customers were beginning to notice longer wait times for responses back from the web agent. “Increasing site traffic and rapidly expanding knowledge sources were beginning to put a strain on the original architecture of the agent,” says Haklitch.

It was time for an upgrade. Rather than start from scratch, the team was able to use the latest capabilities in Copilot Studio to dramatically improve the original architecture and generate better responses. The web agent evolved from rigid topic flows to a more modern architecture that uses generative orchestration for dynamic, LLM-based responses. This allows the agent to better understand user intent, supporting more natural, multi-turn conversations. 

To provide customers with faster, more relevant responses, the web agent was redesigned using another powerful capability in Copilot Studio: multi-agent orchestration. Instead of one agent crawling the entire Microsoft web site, the team created multiple “child” agents or sub-agents, each grounded on specific parts of the site. For example, there are now sub-agents for Azure and Microsoft 365 product sites as well as pricing and trial pages. 

“What’s great is that, with Copilot Studio, we can now go from creating simple knowledge base queries to complex, multi-agent workflows—all using the same low code tools,” says Selva Sankaran, Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft. 

The Ask Microsoft web agent uses generative orchestration to determine the right agent to handle that question. It can also co-ordinate responses using multiple sub-agents. In this way, the agent can better handle a common customer scenario: questions involving not just one but multiple products and services. For example, when responding to a question about Microsoft 365 products and pricing, the agent knows to consult both the Microsoft 365 product and pricing sub-agents and combine information from these agents into a cohesive, natural language response. 

The updated version of Ask Microsoft was also designed to be more context aware, enabling it to provide more specific answers based on knowledge of where a customer is on the site. If a customer asks a question while they’re visiting a general product page for example, Ask Microsoft will provide a broad answer with links to multiple pages, such as product information, pricing, and trials. If customers are on a sign-up page for a product trial, Ask Microsoft will provide responses that are more streamlined and optimized for the signup journey, covering topics like billing and payment. 

“Building a more advanced assistant with Copilot Studio has meaningfully raised the bar for our customer experience and enabled us to scale faster across products to deliver real business impact,” says Alyse Muttera, Director, eCommerce Programs at Microsoft.

Scaling efficiently on a flexible platform 

Along with the main web agent and supporting sub-agents, Copilot Studio was flexible enough to allow for integration with other types of agents and channels. For example, if a customer wants to speak directly to a live Microsoft customer service agent, the Ask Microsoft web agent can transfer the customer to a live chat service. At any time, the customer has the option to return to the conversation with the agent and explore other products and services. 

The web agent also connects to agents built on Microsoft Foundry. These agents are capable of handling even larger volumes of information. For example, many of the pricing pages are extremely long and go beyond the capacity of Copilot Studio to effectively index and use a knowledge source. To accommodate this scenario, the Foundry sub-agent is able to use advanced capabilities in Microsoft Bing to more efficiently index large pages and pass this information on to the Copilot Studio web agent. 

All of these new agents and capabilities leverage much of the same architecture as the original web agent, including the same knowledge source connections, authentication system, and UI. This was key to an efficient rollout. Additionally, a comprehensive dashboard works across agents to monitor latency, errors, usage, and feedback in real time. This enables faster debugging and data-driven tuning of the agent’s behavior. 

What’s more, because the original and upgraded agents were built in the same environment, the team was able to develop flag controls to toggle between legacy and modern agent in production. This enabled A/B testing and gradual rollout of the new system with the ability to fall back if issues arose.

Generating even better business results 

As expected, the updated Ask Microsoft web agent has performed dramatically better than the original. 

Tests on the Microsoft 365 site showed the new agent delivered faster response with 61% lower latency while steering customers to the right SKUs, leading to higher lifetime value subscriptions. Similar tests on the Azure product site have shown equally strong results, with the new agent driving 16% more initiations of product trials.  

Since introducing the Ask Microsoft web agent, total human-handled chat volume has been reduced by up to 70%, demonstrating the agent’s ability to autonomously resolve customer inquiries.

All of this adds up to a more productive customer experience. “Customers who engage with the Ask Microsoft agent are ten times more likely to move forward with signing up for our services, says Muttera. “Providing timely, contextual answers directly within Ask Microsoft helps reduce friction and increase customer confidence. With our Ask Microsoft web agent, our customers are finding the right information, choosing the right product, and completing their purchase when they’re ready.” 

Planning for the future 

With the growing success of the new web agent, it’s no surprise that the marketing team is planning to add even more sub-agents to the architecture—all orchestrated through Copilot Studio. This will enable the Ask Microsoft web agent to maintain a high degree of accuracy and performance as traffic and knowledge sources continue to grow. The team also wants to use Copilot Studio to add context-aware prompts and persistent conversation history for even more natural dialogue with customers.   

The team is building additional agents on Copilot Studio to perform other marketing-related tasks. For example, there is now an agent that’s able to follow up with customers who visit product trial pages. If the customer leaves a trial request without completing the process, the agent will follow up over email to offer support. 

The whole initiative underscores Microsoft’s commitment to solving real-world problems and supporting critical business processes with Copilot Studio. As Muttera, says, “When you put AI-powered tools in front of customers, it’s particularly important that you get the experience right. With our Ask Microsoft web agent, Copilot Studio is definitely helping us get it right.” 

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