How Copilot Agents Are Shaping the Next Phase of Work
It seems like yesterday, Artificial Intelligence rapidly came onto the scene and into our workflows, helping users draft emails, summarize meetings, and find information.
Now, AI is ushering in a new phase of work. Continue reading this blog or watch the video to learn where workflow-specific agents can coordinate tasks, interact across systems, automate workflows, and help users across various teams operate at a new level of speed and efficiency.
Microsoft Copilot is at the Forefront
Across the suite of solutions, Microsoft is making significant investments to evolve Copilot agents from simple assistants into intelligent, action-oriented collaborators that can execute multi-step processes, manage approvals, monitor systems, and surface meaningful insights. If you are already investing in Microsoft solutions such as Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform, this shift presents a major opportunity to streamline processes and work smarter.
At Stoneridge Software, we are seeing firsthand how businesses are adopting AI agents to solve operational challenges, streamline repetitive processes, and enable employees to focus on higher-value work. In this blog and video, we’ll explore how Microsoft Copilot agents are driving the next phase of work, highlight some real-world use cases, and show you why it’s important to prepare now for increasingly autonomous workflows.
Why Productivity Demands Drive New Approaches
Source: 2025 Work Trends Index[/caption]
Business leaders across industries face the same challenge: productivity expectations continue to rise while teams are already stretched thin. While workforces often plateau, the expectations for organizations to move faster, manage more complexity, and respond to customers faster continue to grow.
Instead of hiring more staff or putting more pressure on your already stretched employees, businesses are starting to use AI agents to augment workflows, eliminate repetitive, time-consuming workflows, and increase operational capacity.
Frontier Firms – Companies at the Forefront of Agentic AI
This shift is creating what Microsoft refers to as “frontier firms”. These organizations are redesigning business processes around AI-enabled workflows and agents. They are going beyond using AI for general assistance; they are embedding AI agents directly into operational processes, streamlining information gathering, task coordination, approvals, and decision-making abilities, all happening automatically behind the scenes.
This approach fundamentally changes the way your users interact with the system entirely. Instead of manually searching for data in siloed, isolated applications, agents will retrieve that information, coordinate tasks, and give users actionable insights where and when they need them. Essentially, the agents work through the whole flow and then present the results to the user. This is a significant time-saver and gives your team the freedom to focus on their most important tasks.
Microsoft Copilot: From Assistance to AI-Driven Workflows
At the center of this evolution is Microsoft Copilot Studio. Copilot Studio enables organizations to create custom AI agents tailored to specific business processes, systems, and operational needs. These agents can interact with applications like Dynamics 365, Power Automate, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and other Microsoft services.
Note: If you want to truly keep up with the rapid pace of AI innovations, you need people on your team who understand Copilot Studio.
At Stoneridge, we can work with you and your team at your own pace to ensure that you are ready to implement AI and provide you with the training necessary to use agents.
AI Maturity Phases
This creates a progression of AI maturity that many organizations are beginning to follow:
Phase 1: Humans with an AI Assistant
Employees use Copilot for chat, summarization, data retrieval, and productivity support. This is still extremely useful but represents the ground level of what AI can do.
Tools in this phase include Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat.
Phase 2: Human-Led Agents
AI agents begin handling structured tasks like quote generation, approvals, or data validation. Agents handle more processes and workflows with natural language instructions. Very valuable, but requires human configuration and upkeep.
On top of the tools in Phase 1, in this stage, you have probably added some pre-built or custom agents that handle simple workflows.
Phase 3: Human-led, agent-operated workflows
Employees set direction while agents coordinate and execute multi-step processes autonomously. This is the most up-to-date level of AI usage, where the agents essentially become employees and run with little to no human oversight.
In the most advanced phase, you now have Agents running complex workflows in Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM tools, Power Platform solutions, and more on top of the tools in Phases one and two.
Chances are, your organization is somewhere between phases one and two, depending on your current level of investment in AI. However, momentum is quickly picking up towards more advanced automations, so continuing that maturation is something that should be on your radar. Whether you have simple agents or more advanced agents, thinking ahead is always better when it comes to a rapidly evolving technology like AI.
Real-World and Emerging Use Cases
One of the most exciting aspects of Copilot agents is the breadth of scenarios they can support. Organizations are already using AI agents across departments and operational functions to improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.
Some emerging use cases include:
Sales Support Agents
Sales agents can monitor shared inboxes, respond to customer requests, generate quotes, and even create orders directly within ERP systems. You can maintain human approvals as part of the processes, ensuring appropriate oversight while still reducing repetitive administrative work. This agent uses Outlook to interact with the end-user and connect to the ERP system.
HR Knowledge Agents
Organizations are building HR-focused agents that answer questions related to company policies, onboarding procedures, benefits, or compliance requirements. Instead of searching through documentation manually, employees can interact conversationally with an AI-powered knowledge source.
Financial and Reconciliation Agents
Finance teams are beginning to experiment with agents that support period-end close activities, reconcile ledgers, and identify discrepancies between systems. These capabilities help reduce time spent on repetitive validation and review tasks.
Data Entry Agents
These agents can move data from one system to another, gather data to drive user decisions, verify data conditions and make suggestions on how to clean data sets.
Inventory and Supply Chain Monitoring
Manufacturers and distributors are leveraging agents to monitor inventory shortages, notify purchasing teams proactively, and recommend purchasing actions before shortages impact production or fulfillment timelines.
Purchasing Agents
This agent scans documents sent via email to generate invoices, which can then be sent to customers, approved, and then sent back to you. They can also automate 3-way matching and send out exception details for an end-user to interact with from within Outlook.
Demo: How Cowork Holistically Streamlines Your Workday
Let’s look at these advanced ways of using AI, particularly inside of Cowork.
Once inside Cowork, I want to check my daily email digest, which is a summary of emails relevant to my role that I might have missed either outside of work hours or during a vacation.
Within Cowork, you can also:
- Set up daily, automated tasks scheduled at the same time
- Organize your email inbox so that the agents can sift through your inbox, recommend next steps and put that information up for review.
- Prepare for meetings by asking Copilot to summarize notes that are contained within SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, and more.
- Research potential clients or customers
Real World Example: Commodity Contract Agent
Let’s look at an example of an agent that is available for you to use right now, if it applies to your environment. If it’s not, this will still give you a solid idea as to how you can use other agents that are more relevant to your business.
In this scenario, we will use this agent to move and validate data between a CRM system, such as Dynamics 365 Sales, and an ERP system, such as Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management. Traditionally, this type of bridge between systems would require significant and costly customizations, integrations, and potentially programming. It would also result in a tremendous amount of manual data entry, validation, and follow-up communications, which could lead to human error.
With our commodity contract agent, we can build multi-agent orchestration workflows that can:
- Detecting when a contract was ready for processing
- Retrieving required contract information
- Opening and navigating ERP records
- Performing updates and validations
- Executing pricing logic
- Tracking execution steps
- Sending success or failure notifications automatically
Additionally, you can create “child agents” that handle different but related tasks further down the workflow, all defined and customized by you and your team based on your needs.
This workflow relies heavily on natural language instructions and prompts rather than traditional custom code development, which can be costly and time-consuming.
What makes this particularly impressive is that the workflow relied heavily on natural-language instructions and prompts rather than traditional custom code development.
This demonstrates a major shift in enterprise automation. Organizations are increasingly moving away from purely code-driven workflows and toward configurable AI-driven orchestration that can adapt more rapidly to changing business needs. The result is an email that lets you know that the processing has been successful.
Moving Toward More Autonomous, Multi-Step Workflows
Modern AI agents are evolving beyond isolated tasks into orchestrated systems capable of handling complex, multi-step workflows asynchronously. Microsoft’s new Cowork capabilities are a strong example of this evolution. With that said, governance and oversight remain critical.
Organizations implementing AI agents must ensure that proper security, governance, monitoring, and human approval processes remain in place. The most successful implementations are not fully autonomous systems operating without oversight. Instead, they are carefully designed workflows where humans remain involved in exceptions, approvals, and strategic decisions.
At the end of the day, you want to augment your employees and their abilities, not replace them.
Work With Stoneridge to Effectively Harness Agentic AI!
AI agents are rapidly becoming a foundational part of modern business operations, and organizations that invest early will be better positioned to improve efficiency, scalability, and employee productivity.
At Stoneridge Software, we help organizations move beyond experimentation and build practical, scalable AI strategies using Microsoft technologies. From Copilot readiness assessments and user training to agent design, implementation, governance, and optimization, our team helps clients unlock the full potential of Microsoft AI.
Get in touch with our team today to build a roadmap for agentic AI and start using it to drive efficiency and streamline workflows.
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