Regal Rexnord goes all in with Microsoft Copilot Studio to streamline operational efficiency and support customers

Regal Rexnord is a global manufacturer of airflow, motion control, power transmission, and sustainable power generation solutions. With over 30,000 employees, the company makes products that impact our lives everyday – from the fans in our HVAC systems to the conveyor systems that keep e-commerce flowing.

As a leader in innovative engineering solutions, it’s not surprising that Regal was quick to recognize the potential of AI. With its purchase of Copilot Studio licenses two years ago, citizen developers at Regal jumped at the opportunity to start building their own, agentic solutions. “When I showed our business users how they could build AI-driven agents in under 30 minutes, they were absolutely amazed,” says Shivanand Khot, IT Director at Regal Rexnord.

Today, there are over 500 agents supporting operations at the company. Use cases range from basic agent uses to better search and manage content on SharePoint team sites to specialized applications for business units. A procurement team developed an agent to analyze spending patterns more efficiently.

Last year, the company went even further, building agents on Copilot Studio that can be used enterprise wide. “We’ve seen what our business users can do with Copilot Studio at the personal and teams level,” says Timothy Dickson, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Regal Rexnord. “Now, we’re moving full speed ahead with agents that can be used across the company. We’ve gone all in with Copilot Studio.” 

Connecting agents to multiple knowledge sources and systems

The first enterprise-wide agent at Regal Rexnord was built to provide employees with faster answers to corporate policy questions without having to dig through multiple sites. Initially, an agent developed on another platform delivered mixed results. With limited integration to available knowledge sources, the agent was only able to answer 40% of employees’ questions.

The agent was migrated to Copilot Studio and the problem was quickly solved. With direct integration into SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 knowledge sources, the agent – called RRX GPT - gained reliable access to policy documents and other corporate intranet content. Improvements in document handling also meant Word files and PDFs were processed more accurately than before. The agent was deployed in just one month and made available in Microsoft Teams and also as a custom agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Adoption soared. Soon, the RRX GPT agent was handling more than 2,000 inquiries per month, saving employees an estimated 2,400 hours a year. 

Redefining the customer experience with conversational AI

Along with agents for employees, Regal Rexnord has created an agent in Copilot Studio to handle external questions from customers. The agent - called RRXy (or Rexy) - is embedded in the company’s web site with connections to both web and internal knowledge sources, including product specifications, documentation and videos. RRXy is also connected to the company’s Salesforce system, enabling it to provide order status updates.

RRXy serves more than 1,000 weekly users with consistently high customer satisfaction ratings above 80 percent - often reaching 90 percent. For questions that require human support, the agent uses the agent handoff capability in Copilot Studio to transfer conversations seamlessly and contextually to a live chat with customer service representatives.

These representatives are supported with their own, AI-driven agent. Used by more than 500 representatives, the agent allows service reps to instantly retrieve product and process information while on calls or chats. This has significantly reduced the need to research an issue and follow up later with customers – a benefit that has resulted in an estimated 12 percent productivity improvement.

The agent also serves as an excellent example of how developers have leveraged the extensibility of Copilot Studio to manage complex data scenarios. For example, customer service agents often work with multi-tab Excel files that can be difficult for AI agents to read. The team built an extraction processes to convert spreadsheets into structured CSV files, store them in Azure Blob Storage, and used Azure AI Search to vectorize the content for more effective use by the agent in Copilot Studio.

As Khot explains, “The data we use as knowledge sources for our agent is not always clean and well structured. With Copilot Studio and the advanced capabilities in Microsoft Foundry, we’ve been able to address these data challenges and deliver more responsive agents.” 

Governance and the road ahead

As Regal Rexnord continues to expand its use of Copilot Studio, a solid AI governance strategy helps pave the way for future AI growth. Along with an AI policy led by the company’s information security lead, regular oversight is managed by an AI governance committee including audit, legal, and business stakeholders. Use cases for enterprise-wide agents are prioritized based on weighted business value scoring, ensuring that AI initiatives align with measurable outcomes.

Security and governance tools embedded within Copilot Studio and Power Platform help provide guardrails and telemetry. Sensitive domains such as HR, legal, and finance operate in separate Dataverse environments to preserve data isolation and compliance. Looking ahead, the team is evaluating Agent 365 for centralized lifecycle management and Microsoft Foundry for cross-agent observability and guardrails. The goal is to have a unified view into all agents—whether built in Copilot Studio or other platforms.

“With solid governance and security in place for AI development, the possibilities are endless,” says Dickson. He shares an exciting list of projects that his team is envisioning on Copilot Studio and Foundry: deeper e-commerce integration, expanded product order intelligence, the use of pre-built connectors such as the Confluence connector for more efficiently employee onboarding and troubleshooting agents.

As another IT leader at Regal Rexnord describes it, “Our employees have so many exciting ideas for leveraging AI and make a real impact. With Copilot Studio, we’re able to turn those ideas into solutions so quickly – and scale them with confidence, says Christine Hartman, Senior Manager, Enterprise IT. “We’ve always been an AI-forward company and Copilot Studio is helping to keep us that way.” 

Find out more about Regal Rexnord on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.