Build a Copilot Studio knowledge agent
A Copilot Studio agent answers repetitive questions from your own approved content — policies, procedures, product information — instead of a colleague stopping work to answer them again.
What is the operational problem?
Knowledge lives in SharePoint, PDFs and people's heads. The same questions get asked constantly, experts get interrupted, and answers vary depending on who you ask. New starters take longer to get productive because the knowledge is hard to find.
The same questions, repeatedly
Experts get pulled off their work to answer questions the documents already cover.
Knowledge is hard to find
Information is scattered across sites and files; people give up and ask a human.
Inconsistent, unsourced answers
Answers vary by person, with no link back to the approved source of truth.
What does the manual process cost?
A clear, conservative worked example — adjust the inputs to your own numbers.
Worked example: a team fielding repetitive internal questions
| Repeat questions per day | 15 |
| Colleague time per answer | 6 minutes |
| Hours per year (×230 working days) | ≈ 345 hours |
| Blended hourly cost | £22 |
| Direct cost of interruption per year | ≈ £7,590 |
This is lost expert time only. It excludes the slower ramp-up of new starters and the cost of inconsistent answers reaching customers.
Want the number for your business first?
The free Quick Win Identifier ranks your manual processes and estimates the annual saving in about 5 minutes.
How would the Microsoft 365 solution work?
Built on tools you already own — Power Automate, SharePoint, Teams and the wider Microsoft 365 stack.
Teams / web chat
Copilot agentfrom approved SharePoint
human-in-the-loop
- Copilot Studio builds an agent grounded in your chosen, approved sources (SharePoint sites, documents, selected URLs).
- Staff or customers ask in natural language via Teams or a web chat embedded on your site.
- The agent answers from your content with citations, so people can check the source.
- Where it cannot answer confidently, it hands off to a person or logs the gap — human-in-the-loop by design.
What licences might be required?
We confirm exact licensing at scoping — and design to avoid premium licences where we sensibly can.
Copilot Studio capacity
Standalone agents run on Copilot Credits — a prepaid pack (around £160/month for 25,000 credits) or pay-as-you-go, billed at the tenant level, not per seat. Microsoft prices Copilot Studio in US dollars ($200/month or $0.01/credit), so the sterling cost moves with the exchange rate.
from ~£160/mo (prepaid) or pay-as-you-go
Credit use varies a lot by agent design — we size it to your expected volume.
Microsoft 365 Copilot (alternative path)
Users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence can use internal agents without extra credit cost — a different commercial model worth comparing.
~£24.70 per user (list)
Best when you also want Copilot across Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams.
Indicative UK list prices, per user per month, ex-VAT, mid-2026. Microsoft is changing some Microsoft 365 and Copilot prices from 1 July 2026 — exact licensing is confirmed at scoping, never assumed.
What risks or governance checks are needed?
Automation without governance is a liability. This is the BCS-disciplined checklist we work through.
- Ground the agent only in approved, current sources — no stale or unvetted content
- Keep human-in-the-loop for anything sensitive or decision-making
- Require citations so every answer is traceable to a source
- Set clear scope and guardrails for what the agent will and will not answer
- Control access and respect existing SharePoint permissions (no data leakage)
- Monitor conversations, review gaps and retrain; log against UK GDPR and AI-use policy
What result should the business expect?
Routine questions get instant, consistent, sourced answers, freeing your experts and helping new starters get productive faster — with governance and human oversight built in from the start.
Ready to see what this is worth for your team?
Book a free 30-minute automation review and we will turn your version of this process into a costed plan — the seventh question, answered for your business.