Introducing the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK

When examining experiences of our customers, it is without a doubt that generative AI has made it much easier, quicker and simpler the way they interact in conversational experiences to get better overall results. With generative AI our customers are enhancing the ability to provide personalized and accurate responses, improving user satisfaction and fostering stronger relationships with both employees and customers. Organizations can apply this technology to their enterprise in several ways, including by using Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio. By using these technologies and services, customers can have a single pane of glass for their employees to having multiple agents across the enterprise supporting employees and users across applications.

Despite the significant advancements in AI technology, developers often face numerous challenges when building conversational agents. These challenges range from integrating diverse AI services and ensuring seamless orchestration between various components, to maintaining scalability and reliability across multiple channels. Additionally, developers must address issues related to user experience, such as natural language understanding and context management, to create responsive and intuitive agents. The complexity of these tasks requires robust tools and frameworks that can simplify the development process while providing the flexibility and customization needed to meet specific business needs.

Announcing the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK

Developers can now build enterprise-grade, scalable, multi-channel agents with code using the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK. Initially launching with C# support and coming soon with Node.JS & Python, developers can build agents that use AI Services of their choice, such as Azure AI Foundry, connect an orchestration layer such as Semantic Kernel, and deploy to a variety of channels, whether that is web, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, +10 other third party channels, or even custom clients.

By bringing together the choice of core agent components, it allows developers to build the agent that suits their needs depending on their scenario for user experience, orchestration, and agent intelligence. Additionally, developers can craft scenarios that leverage multiple agents built using different technologies, such as Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft Copilot Studio or 3^rd Parties, to work together to support answering questions, helping organizations and developers build their agent, their way.

Extend or integrate with Microsoft Copilot Studio agents

The Microsoft 365 Agents SDK provides interoperability with Copilot Studio in two ways. Developers can add functionality and extend an existing agent built using Copilot Studio using skills, allowing a maker to delegate work to other agent functionality. Secondly, a developer can connect to a Copilot Studio agent from code, providing the developers with all the functionality within the Copilot Studio ecosystem, including over 1000 connectors. This allows other teams within an organization to build and maintain agents through Copilot Studio and bring the functionality together in one surface area.

Publishing to Multiple Channels with Microsoft 365 Agents SDK

One of the key capabilities of this SDK is its ability to publish agents across a variety of platforms and channels, ensuring broad accessibility and user engagement.

Supported Channels

Microsoft 365 Agents SDK supports publishing to multiple channels, including but not limited to:

Microsoft Teams
Microsoft 365 Copilot*
Web
Email (inc. Outlook)
SMS (Twilio)
More than 10 additional message channels

This extensive range of supported channels ensures that agents can reach users across different platforms and devices, providing a consistent and seamless user experience.

*coming soon

The evolution of the Microsoft Bot Framework

The Microsoft 365 Agents SDK is the evolution of the Bot Framework. The Bot Framework was previously how developers could build bots where the primary focus in Conversational AI was around topics, dialogs and messages. The industry has evolved to be driven by Generative AI functionality, grounding on knowledge that is located across the enterprise, and there is the need for companies to be able to orchestrate actions, in addition to answer questions, from within a conversational experience. The Agents SDK provides capabilities for modern agent development, bringing together the creation of conversational agents with conversation management, orchestration, connecting to numerous AI Services and clients, including agents created with third party software or technology.

The future

Going forward, with the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK, we aim to help offer and enable developers streamlined routes to integrate engine agents with Copilot Studio agents bi-directionally, provide enhancements to the Copilot developer/maker experience by bridging code and low code and further enable code-first extensions with Copilot Studio.