Agentic AI with Copilot: A New Era of Intelligent Assistance

As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, a new paradigm is emerging—Agentic AI. Unlike traditional AI systems that respond to user prompts using knowledge gained from some mysterious LLM, agentic AI is designed to act with autonomy, initiative, and contextual awareness that is based on information unique to your organization.  It doesn't just answer questions—it can plan, reason, and execute tasks across multiple steps, often proactively.

What Is Agentic AI?

Agentic AI refers to systems that behave like intelligent agents. These agents can:

• Understand goals and break them into actionable steps.
• Use tools and resources to complete tasks.
• Adapt based on feedback or changing conditions.
• Collaborate with users or other agents to achieve outcomes.
• Access knowledge within the organization.

In platforms like Copilot, agentic AI is not just a chatbot—it’s a digital partner capable of orchestrating complex workflows, integrating with content repositories, databases and other enterprise systems, while delivering tailored solutions.

The Power Trio: Knowledge, Tools, and Topics

Agentic AI in Copilot is structured around three foundational pillars:

1. Knowledge

Knowledge is information beyond what a traditional LLM would supply.  While the LLM provides general reasoning capabilities, the Agent prioritizes Knowledge sources to ensure relevance and accuracy.  This Knowledge can include:

• Enterprise data - M-Files, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, CRM systems.
• Public web content - Corporate websites and documentation.  While available to the LLM, specifying them as Knowledge ensures they are prioritized and the most up to date version is used.
• Internal documentation - connections to document repositories or even individual documents.
  
• User-specific context, such as preferences, roles, and past interactions.

Knowledge enables the Agent to provide accurate, personalized, and context-aware responses. For example, it can summarize a document stored in M-Files or draft a report using company templates.

2. Tools

Tools are capabilities the agent can invoke to perform actions. The actions available vary based on specific connectors.  Some examples include:

• Search engines for real-time information.
• Code execution environments for data analysis or automation.
• Connectors to external systems like M-Files, or Outlook to create files and draft messages.
• Document generation, summarization, translation, and more.

Tools allow the agent to go beyond conversation—executing tasks, generating content, and interacting with systems on your behalf.

3. Topics

Topics define the scope and domain of the agent’s expertise and are the key to understanding how Agents work on your behalf. Think of a Topic as a modular workflow that defines how and Agent should behave in a specific scenario.  Copilot looks at the context of a conversation to determine a relevant Topic and then uses the "workflow" in the Topic to guide the user through a process.  Topics can help organize capabilities around business functions such as:

• HR onboarding
• IT support
• Sales enablement
• Legal document review

Topics ensure that the agent behaves appropriately within a given context, using the right tone, terminology, and workflows.  Importantly, one Topic can lead to another providing for an infinitely complex series of steps that are all orchestrated by the Agent.

Capabilities in Action

With these components working together, Copilot agents can:

• Summarize complex documents and extract key insights.
• Draft personalized emails or reports using enterprise templates.
• Automate workflows, such as client onboarding or compliance checks.
• Answer domain-specific questions with contextual accuracy.
• Proactively suggest actions, like saving a generated document or scheduling a meeting.

Cautions and Considerations

While agentic AI offers transformative potential, it’s important to proceed thoughtfully:

• Data privacy and governance must be prioritized.  Agents should only access what they’re authorized to.  Thankfully, the connector from M-Files integrates with Entra permissions to insure that is the case, however with database access and other connections, thought must always be given to insure the Agent will only provide information that is authorized.
• Bias and accuracy must be monitored, especially in decision-making contexts.  AI can still hallucinate, and the human element is still critical.

Looking Ahead

Agentic AI is poised to redefine how we interact with technology. As Copilot continues to evolve, expect agents that:

• Learn from user behavior to improve over time.
• Collaborate across departments and systems.
• Handle increasingly complex tasks with minimal input.

The future is not just about smarter tools—it’s about intelligent teammates that help us work faster, better, and more creatively.  Agentic AI is here today to give your organization a strategic advantage over the competition.

Agentic AI Helps Avoid the AI Trap

This brings us to a critical point: how Agentic AI helps organizations avoid common pitfalls in AI adoption.  You may have heard that a number of high-profile AI projects are "failing" and that should be cause for concern.  Agentic AI offers a safeguard against the types of failures some in the industry are reporting.  Rather than trying to deliver a world changing gigantic AI solution, Agentic AI provides the opportunity to make one improvement here and another improvement there.  By focusing on small high value "things" Agentic AI implementations can help an organization realize faster ROI while bringing the organization up to speed on the Agentic AI concepts.  As the organization gets better at Agentic AI, the effects will rapidly snowball into many "things" being quickly improved.  

If your organization is exploring Agentic AI, TeamIM can help you design, implement, and scale a strategy that delivers measurable results.