WonderLaura @iwmentor – Laura Rogers

🤖 If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, there are some seriously useful things sitting right inside your Copilot interface — and I want to make sure you know about all of them. Over the past couple of Power Hours, we covered two built-in Microsoft 365 Copilot agents plus the agent builder templates, which let you create your own custom agents from scratch. Today we’re walking through all of it, along with the step-by-step video tutorials at the bottom of this post.

• The SharePoint List Agent
• The Workflows (Frontier) Agent, and then
• The Build your own agent templates you can use to create your own. Let me walk you through all of them.

🗂️ The SharePoint List Agent

Here’s a scenario that I know is incredibly common, and Microsoft 365 Copilot agents can help with. A customer hands you a PDF — maybe it’s a project request form, an intake form, an incident report — and they say, “Can you digitize this and build a business process?” And so you spend the next hour in SharePoint clicking Add Column over and over again, manually creating every single field in a new list.

That’s done now. The SharePoint List Agent can do this for you in minutes.

Here’s how it works:

1. Go to your list of Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot (the “Agent Store”)

2. Click the SharePoint List Agent

3. Click the + (plus icon) to upload your PDF form. I used the prompt “Create a project request list based on this form”.

4. Then it will ask you, and you tell it what site to create the list on, and it builds the entire SharePoint list structure for you — columns, column types, and all.

When I tested this live on Power Hour, I uploaded a project request form PDF and asked it to create the list on my demo site. Here’s what it came back with:

• It read the form and mapped every field to an appropriate SharePoint column type.
• It assigned column types intelligently — choice fields for things like “Preferred Contact Method” and “Project Type,” multiple lines of text for summaries and descriptions, and standard single-line text for names and IDs.
• It created the list on the SharePoint site I specified.

Was it perfect? Pretty close. The one thing it didn’t do correctly was the person fields — I expected it to make the sponsor, project manager, and stakeholder fields Person fields, but it created them as text fields instead. That’s a quick manual fix. The point is, it did probably 90% of the work for me.

🌟 The Feature That Makes This Magical

To me, the most powerful thing about the SharePoint List Agent isn’t necessarily the templates it offers (though those are handy — customer support tracking, employee onboarding, project milestones, event planner, recruitment tracker, and more). The real magic in my opinion is the file upload capability.

You can drop in a PDF or Word doc that someone handed you and have it create the entire list structure in seconds. I literally had a customer send me a PDF like this the day before I demoed this on Power Hour. This is real-world stuff, and it’s a massive time saver.

💡 A Few Tips When Using the SharePoint List Agent

• Do all your prompting before you tell it to create the list. Once the list is created, you’ll be doing your prompting over in SharePoint itself — not in the agent chat.
• You can ask it to add sample/fake data after list creation. I told it to create 20 fake projects, and they just appeared before my eyes. Great for demos and training. You can see in the video where I did this using Copilot in the list.
• The agent sometimes suggests that it can do things it actually can’t — like creating a Power Automate approval flow or a Power Apps form. It can give you step-by-step instructions for those, but it can’t actually build them from inside the agent. That’s okay — it still did a ton of heavy lifting.

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⚡ The Workflows Agent: Vibe-Code a Flow

The Workflows Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot agents is basically prompt-driven Power Automate. You describe what you want a workflow to do, and it builds the flow for you — right inside the Copilot interface.

Now, this is not the same as going to make.powerautomate.com in the Power Platform web interface. When you use the Workflows Agent, you stay inside the Copilot experience the whole time. You describe your workflow, it builds it, and it shows up under your Workflows section. You edit it solely through prompts, not by manually dragging and dropping actions.

That makes it more accessible to non-technical users.

🔑 The Available Triggers (Know These Before You Start)

The Workflows Agent doesn’t support every trigger that Power Automate does. Right now, according to Copilot, this is what it told me it can use as triggers:

• Manual trigger — you kick it off with a click
• Scheduled/recurrence trigger — run every morning, every Monday at 8am, etc.
• Office 365 Outlook triggers — when a new email arrives, or when calendar items change

That’s it for now. If you ask it to do a “when a new item is created in SharePoint” trigger, it’ll tell you it can’t. But Microsoft is actively building this out, and I expect more triggers to land over time.

🛠️ What I Built Live on Power Hour

The example I demoed was something I think a lot of you will want to try: auto-classifying incoming emails and logging them to a SharePoint list.

Here’s how the prompt went:

“When a new email arrives, auto classify the email topic and log it to a SharePoint list. Use the subject in the Subject column, summarize the email to the Summary column, and categorize it with a Topic.”

It asked me for my SharePoint site URL and list name, I created the list ahead of time and gave it those, and within a few minutes I had a working flow. When I sent myself a test email about “Project ABC,” the workflow kicked off, read the email, generated a topic (“Project Management Status Update”), wrote a summary of what the email was about, and logged it to the SharePoint list.

That is a genuinely useful automation — and it took about five minutes to build.

💡 More Ideas to Try With the Workflows Agent

The agent also surfaces template prompts to help spark ideas. As you can see in the screenshot above, there are some suggested (and very detailed) prompts ready for you try, right in the interface.

One thing I noticed: the built-in template prompts for this agent are also a fantastic way to learn how to write better prompts yourself. They’re very detailed, very specific — and that specificity is exactly what gets you great results.

A quick reminder: don’t forget to save your workflow before navigating away. Learned that the hard way live on air. 😄

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🛠️ Build Your Own Agent: Using the Copilot Agent Builder Templates

Here’s where things get really fun. If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you can go into the agent store, click New Agent, and build your own custom agent — no code, no IT required.

When you go to create an agent, you can start from scratch with a prompt, or you can start from one of the built-in templates. These templates aren’t agents you just turn on — they’re starting points that you customize and then create as your own agent. They’re incredible both as a shortcut and as a learning tool. Let me walk you through the key ones.

How to Get There

In Microsoft 365 Copilot, go to your agents screen and click the New Agent button (it may be in a dropdown depending on when Microsoft last updated the interface — they love to move buttons around). You’ll see the option to start from scratch with a prompt, or start from one of the templates. Choose a template, customize it to your liking, then click Create — and now you have your own agent built from that template.

📅 Plan My Day Agent

This one compiles a morning briefing using your Microsoft 365 data — calendar, Outlook, Teams messages, SharePoint, and OneDrive activity. When I tried it live, it pulled my calendar for the day, flagged pending meeting polls, and gave me a summary of what my week looked like.

What’s really cool is when you go into the Configure tab before you create the agent, you can see the full “skill file” — essentially a detailed markdown document that tells the agent exactly what to do, what data to look at, and what format to produce the output in. This is a perfect learning tool for understanding how to write detailed, structured prompts for AI.

📋 Status Update Agent

Does your boss require a weekly status email? This one is your answer. The Status Update Agent looks at your meetings, emails sent and received, and Teams activity for the week — and writes your entire status update for you.

This is one of those things where I’m like, yes, that’s exactly how status updates work in real life anyway. You open your sent items, scroll through your week, and try to piece together what you’ve been doing. Why not have Copilot do that for you?

📰 Personal News Digest Agent

This is your sanity-saver if you’re on multiple Teams and buried in announcements. The Personal News Digest Agent scans your email, Teams, and SharePoint for leadership announcements, HR updates, and organizational news — and serves it all up in one place.

If you’re the kind of person who misses important company announcements because they landed in a Teams channel you forgot to check, this one’s for you.

🔍 SME Finder Agent

Need to find the internal subject matter expert on a specific topic? The SME Finder is built for that. I’ll be honest — when I first tried it, it was returning external contacts (customers I’d been emailing). Not ideal.

Here’s what I did: I told the agent what went wrong, asked it to help me fix it, and it walked me through exactly what to add to the skill file to restrict results to internal users only. That’s a great example of how these Microsoft 365 Copilot agents are editable and refineable — you’re not stuck with what the template gives you out of the box.

📊 Project Delta Digest Agent

This one tracks changes on a specific project — reviewing your files, notes, and recent Copilot conversations related to that project and generating a digest of what’s changed. I tested it against my Power BI course project, and it surfaced files, conversations, and activity I’d forgotten about.

🎓 AI Learning Advisor Agent

This is a fun one, especially for someone like me who creates training content. You give it a topic, and it builds you a full learning plan — phases, resources, structure, and all. I used “Copilot Studio” as my topic, and it generated a phase-by-phase learning path with Microsoft Learn references.

It also helped me think about course content gaps and sequencing for my own courses, which is a nice bonus.

🏢 Company Policy Agent

This one connects to your company’s SharePoint intranet or policy center and answers HR and policy questions on behalf of employees. Point it at your policies library, and it becomes an internal chatbot that knows your company’s paid holidays, leave policies, expense guidelines — whatever you’ve got documented.

We’ve demoed creating a policy agent from SharePoint directly in a previous Power Hour, but this template approach makes it accessible from a totally different starting point.

✉️ Executive Briefing Agent

For executives or executive assistants, this one generates structured briefing documents to prepare for leadership meetings, public events, or media interactions. Useful in a different context from most of what we cover, but worth knowing it exists.

Here’s the agent configuration screen:

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🎁 Tips for Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents

Before you try these, a few things to keep in mind:

Give more information upfront. The more detail you put in your initial prompt, the less back-and-forth you’ll have. If you know you want your workflow to log to a specific SharePoint list, say so in the first message.

Use the “Try It” button before you create. Every agent template lets you try it out before you officially create it. Use this to test prompts, refine the skill file, and make sure it’s doing what you actually want.

Edit the skill file. Don’t be afraid to go into the Configure tab and read — or change — the instructions the agent is working from. That text is editable, and adjusting it is how you make the agent truly yours.
More about working with skill files in SharePoint.

Share your agents. Once you’ve built an agent, you can share it with specific people or copy a link to it. If you build a really useful one for your team, share it.

You’ll need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license for all of this — the list agent, the workflows agent, and the agent builder templates.

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📚 Want to Learn More?

If any of this has you curious about what else you can build in Microsoft 365 without writing a single line of code, that’s exactly what we do every Wednesday at 11am Central on IW Mentor Power Hour. Here are both videos I’ve been referencing:

Resources

Here’s Microsoft’s official documentation:

• Get started with Workflows in Microsoft 365 Copilot
• FAQ for Workflows Agent
• Open the Workflows agent in your environment
• Open the SharePoint List agent in your environment
• SharePoint agents are listed in here – SharePoint Showcase: Announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2025