The Ad Council helps navigate nuanced conversations about youth firearm injury prevention using Copilot Studio and Microsoft Azure

Firearm injuries are the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1-17 in the United States—and they have been for four consecutive years. From parents, gun owners, non-gun owners, gun violence survivors, health care professionals and more, we can all agree that gun injuries shouldn’t be the leading cause of death for children and teens. 

While we agree that kids should be safe from the impact of gun violence, many people believe that conversations about guns might be divisive or uncomfortable, and they worry about causing conflict, being misunderstood, or simply saying the wrong thing. Parents especially feel unprepared to have these discussions. However, research shows that many people want to talk about firearm injury prevention—they just aren’t sure where to begin.                     

To help address this gap, the Ad Council launched its Youth Firearm Injury Prevention campaign, “Agree to Agree” in February 2025 in partnership with a coalition of health care, foundation, and brand partners. The Ad Council is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that uses the power of communications to build social impact campaigns that address many of America’s most pressing issues at scale. 

Grounded in the common ground we share, the “Agree to Agree” campaign shifts the idea that conversations about guns will become arguments and shows how having productive conversations about gun violence can help protect children and teens. How many times have we heard the phrase “agree to disagree”? It ends a conversation. “Agree to Agree” starts one. 

That is where the AgreeToAgree.org website comes in. The website features resources for various audiences, such as conversation guides based on real situations, such as ‘how to talk to other parents about guns in the home’ and ‘share how you secure your firearms’. The site also provides additional resources for both gun owners and non-gunowners, and includes guides, strategies, and tips from trusted experts for reducing gun injuries and deaths.

To reduce barriers, increase confidence, and empower users, the Ad Council worked with its technology partners, Microsoft, DEPT®, and RSM US LLP to create an AI-powered chat experience. The goal was to meet people in the moments they’re seeking guidance, allowing them to ask questions in their own words and engage with trusted resources in a way that feels natural, approachable, and relevant to their situation. The AI experience sets up parents and other concerned adults to have productive dialogues that are the first step to preventing firearm-related injuries and deaths. “With the growing use of conversational AI online, particularly among parents, we saw an opportunity to meet people at the moment they’re trying to navigate a hard or sensitive question around firearms,” says Laurie Keith, Senior Vice President, Emerging Media and Technology at the Ad Council.

Copilot Studio for a carefully controlled conversational experience

The AI experience was built using Microsoft Copilot Studio as the central conversational layer. The agent manages the interaction, orchestrates the conversational workflow, and delivers responses grounded in approved campaign materials. 

This last point around grounded content was particularly important. The experience needed to address highly sensitive topics while operating within strict legal, ethical, and safety boundaries. “Responsible AI was paramount for this campaign, and we had absolute trust in Copilot Studio and its ability to help us deliver on that requirement,” says Bridget Fahrland, VP, Applied AI at DEPT. 

Using custom topics and workflows in Copilot Studio, the team was able to build an agent that was intentionally designed to redirect users away from political debate, inflammatory content, or harmful prompts. It was also configured to detect triggers words that indicated signs of crisis or threats of violence and provide appropriate support resources or very specific responses. 

Tone also played a central role in the project. The organization wanted the AI experience to feel neutral, professional, and solution-oriented without appearing overly emotional or pretending to be human.

“We had a very clear idea as to how we wanted our agent to interact with users,” says Cat Boyce, Director of Digital Product Management at Ad Council. “Copilot Studio enabled us to shape the agent to our specific objectives and provide the right information in the right way.” 

Azure AI Search for more effective performance 

While Copilot Studio provided the agentic experience, Azure AI Search provided the retrieval foundation. This gave the team more control over which resources were used by the agent versus simply pointing it at the campaign website and letting the agent’s large language model (LLM) decide. Instead, the solution uses a curated knowledge base of vetted campaign pages, conversation guides, fact sheets, and other resources.

The knowledge ingestion process starts with a spreadsheet that Ad Council staff populate with approved resources and related URLs from the website. This configuration file is uploaded into Azure Blob Storage. An Azure Function App pulls content from those specified resources, breaks it into controlled chunks, and loads this data into the vector database used by AI Search. 

Agent flows through Power Automate connect Copilot Studio topics to backend automation and data retrieval. When the agent flow in Copilot Studio is called, vector embedding is generated for the cleaned user prompt, using Azure OpenAI. Embedding is semantically matched against the Azure AI Search index to fetch the top relevant excerpts. The response includes a set of relevant knowledge base excerpts from the website, approved resources, and accompanying metadata. 

The system is designed for flexibility as this architecture gives the Ad Council direct control over which pages become agent knowledge and how updates are tracked. When a new resource is published, the team can add the URL and description to the configuration file, test it in staging, and make it available without rebuilding.

 “We like the low-code orchestration you get from Copilot Studio, but we also like the increased control over content that we get with Azure AI Search,” says Carter Hall, Data & Digital Services Consulting Sr. Associate - Data Science and AI at RSM. “The tight integration between the two made it easy to fine tune performance and offer users an even better experience.” 

Faster access, better engagement

Early metrics provided through Copilot Studio conversation transcripts suggest that visitors who engage with the agent are averaging about three interactions per session. Users are asking follow-up questions and spending time in the conversation. When prompted, many people also have opted to provide their identity type, such as parent, caregiver, or concerned adult, so the agent can deliver a more personalized experience.

Transcript analysis has surfaced consistent user needs and themes. Visitors frequently ask for conversation guidance, including tips, guides, and resources for talking with children, teens, and other adults about firearms in the home and safety precautions. Secure storage is another major theme, with users asking how to store firearms securely, how to raise questions about storage with others, and how to keep children safe. Users also ask for facts and statistics related to youth gun injuries, reinforcing the importance of connecting people to clear, vetted information they can understand and share. 

Copilot Studio also made it easy to implement a “feedback” feature for users to let the team know if they found the tool helpful. All of this telemetry is being used to further refine both the content and agent.

Looking ahead, the Ad Council sees this work as a reusable playbook for future social impact campaigns. The organization views the platform as a flexible foundation to explore as needs emerge. The same approach could support additional workflows, audience-facing resources, or internal processes where AI helps simplify access to trusted information, reduce friction for teams, and better support partners and communities.

“With Copilot Studio and Microsoft Azure, we’ve developed an AI agent that not only makes it easier for people to search for campaign content but become more engaged with it,” says Keith. “Greater engagement leads to better conversations—and that’s helping to create safer homes and communities for children and teens.”