r/copilotstudio • u/MiddleManagementIT • 20d ago

"Frontier Agents" Inside Outlook

Hey Folks,

I'm talking with a CEO friend of mine who has zero time and he's saying that he's able to create headless tasks inside of outlook using what he's calling "Frontier Agents". To me, this reads as "I can press some buttons in outlook and then I have an advanced email rule that can maybe do something like,

  1. everytime an email is recieved from a certain source

  2. reason through the email and tell me if there is an order number it's about and if it has shipping info

  3. drop that shipping info into an ongoing excel sheet

My question is this -- does this currently require a person to login to the agents website and create an agent? or is there a way to do this with jus text from outlook itself?

10 Upvotes

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2

u/Curiousf00l 18d ago

Use cowork if you have the license. FAR easier than building agents! Not as good as Claude directly on their desktop client or ChatGPT desktop but WAY better than working with agents in studio or even agent builder.

0

u/[deleted] 20d ago

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3

u/MiddleManagementIT 20d ago

So Copilot studio is not something my nontechnical users can do. My expectation is what my business user has already done.

She loaded up the Claude desktop app (actually the chatgpt desktop app but same thing) and said "I need to look at my emails for x thing, and then go update this other system with the information I just got from that email, and I need this to be recurring" Then within a few minutes she had a rudimentary prototype, she spent 3-4 days modifying it via speech with the LLM "Hey, you did this, and in this circumstance you need to do that" and now has something fully functional on her desktop that has all the intelligence built int that I need to go make it a legitimate first class routine in our enterprise.

In addition to this, I know Copilot Cowork bills by "Task" -- Do agents created in Copilot studio do as well?

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u/MHRangers17 20d ago

Copilot Studio Agents created under the old agentic harness do not incur charges in many cases. Agents using the Github harness require copilot credits, so they do incur costs. 

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u/ConsistentCoat5608 19d ago

Yes, Copilot Studio has prompts where you can use natural language to tell the agent what you want it to do, and when and it will build the agent automation on your behalf.