Copilot · 16 September 2026 · 9 min read
Four people in IT, ninety tickets a week, a third of them the same eleven questions; HR onboarding by Word checklist and email. Six weeks later: an IT agent that resets, unlocks, locks lost devices and opens tickets with the diagnosis done, and an onboarding workflow that chases everyone five days early. The numbers, and the cost.
A distribution company with 260 people, three warehouses and one IT department of four. The four answered about ninety tickets a week, and by their own count a third of those were the same eleven questions. HR onboarded four to six people a month through a checklist in a Word document and a chain of emails, and every month something was missed — a laptop not ordered in time, a Teams channel not joined, a security briefing not signed. This is what they built in Copilot Studio over six weeks, what it cost, and what the numbers looked like three months later. Details are changed where the client asked; the shape and the numbers are as they were.
The tenant was on Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Intune managing all laptops, which matters: the agent would later be allowed to look devices up and act on them. IT had a knowledge base in SharePoint that was two years old in places. HR had the onboarding checklist, an offboarding one, and the handbook — also in SharePoint, also partly stale. Nobody had a Copilot licence. The first two weeks were not spent in Copilot Studio at all; they were spent bringing the twenty documents that would become the agents’ sources up to date, and running a permissions review so that neither agent could surface something a warehouse operative should not see. That review found an HR folder shared with “Everyone” since 2021. It always finds something.
The job, in one sentence: answer how-to questions from the knowledge base, resolve the five most common requests itself, and open a ticket with the diagnosis filled in for everything else.
Sources. The refreshed IT knowledge base on SharePoint; the software catalogue with who is entitled to what; the security policy; the Intune device list through a connector, read-only.
Actions. Five, each a Power Automate flow with its own approval logic: password reset (the agent triggers a self-service reset that requires the user’s MFA, it never sees the password); unlock an account; request software from the catalogue (auto-approved if the user’s role is entitled, routed to a manager if not); report a lost or stolen device (which triggers an Intune remote lock immediately and a wipe after a human confirms); and open a ticket in the helpdesk with category, device and the conversation attached.
What it says no to. Anything not in its sources. The instruction is explicit: “If the question is not covered by the knowledge base, say so, open a ticket, and do not guess.” The first week it said no a lot; the transcripts of those refusals became the list of articles IT wrote in week three.
Published in Teams as a chat, pinned for everyone, and as an agent inside Microsoft 365 Copilot for the thirty people who had Copilot licences by then.
Three months later. Ticket volume fell from about ninety a week to fifty-five. The eleven repeat questions dropped to near zero as tickets; they became conversations with the agent. Password resets and unlocks, which had been a third of Monday morning, disappeared from the queue. The lost-device flow was used twice, both times a laptop locked within a minute of the report instead of after the next IT shift. IT’s own view: the agent did not replace anyone; it gave the four people back roughly a day and a half a week each, which they spent on the Intune compliance work that had been postponed for a year.
This one is less a chatbot than a workflow with a conversational front, and that is the more common shape for HR.
The job: from the moment a hiring manager says “we have a start date”, drive every step of onboarding to completion, chase whoever is late, and be the new person’s first point of contact for the first month.
The workflow. The hiring manager tells the agent, in Teams, the name, role, start date, manager and location. The agent creates the record in a SharePoint list and starts a Power Automate flow that: opens the IT request for a laptop and accounts with the role’s entitlements pre-filled, so the software agent above handles the catalogue part; books the security briefing and the induction; creates the personal folder and adds the person to the Teams channels for their role and site; sends the manager a checklist of what only they can do — the first-week plan, the buddy; and, five working days before the start, checks every step and chases by Teams message anyone whose step is still open. On day one the new employee gets a welcome message from the agent with their first-week plan, and for thirty days the agent is where they ask “how do I claim expenses” and “when do I get paid” — answered from the handbook, with the section cited.
Sources. The handbook, the benefits guide, the onboarding checklist, the office guides per site. Actions. Create the list item; start the flow; send the chasers; open the IT request; add to Teams. Nothing that touches pay or contracts — those stay with people, by policy.
What changed. The month before, a new warehouse supervisor had started without a laptop and spent two days on a shared PC. In the three months after, twelve people started and every laptop was on the desk on day one, because the chaser fired on day minus five and the IT request had been open for two weeks. The HR manager stopped being the person who remembered; the list did. Time HR spent per hire went from about six hours to under two, mostly the parts that should be human: the call before the start date, the first-week check-in.
Thirty Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licences at €18.20 per user per month for IT, HR, the managers who onboard and the people who ask the most questions: €546 a month. Both agents ran on the included Copilot Studio capacity of those licences for the first six weeks. When the IT agent was pinned for all 260 people, most of whom have no Copilot licence, its messages were no longer covered, and one Copilot Studio message pack was added — €173.30 a month for 25,000 messages, of which the company used about nine thousand a month across both agents. Total run cost: about €720 a month. Build: six weeks, of which two were the documents and the permissions review, three were the agents and flows built together with an IT Partner engineer, and one was the pilot with the warehouse managers before it went company-wide.
Fix the documents first. An agent on a stale knowledge base is confidently wrong. The two weeks of housekeeping are the project; the agent is the reward.
Give it actions with guardrails, or it is a search box. The password reset and the device lock are what made IT’s agent worth pinning. Each action is a flow with defined inputs and, where it matters, a human approval; the agent never has a free hand.
Start with the refusals. The transcripts of what the agent could not answer are the best backlog the IT team ever had.
Buy Copilot for the builders, a message pack for the audience. Thirty licences plus one pack was the right shape for 260 people; buying Copilot for everyone to run a helpdesk bot would have cost six times as much.
The same two agents, with the same six-week shape, are what we build first for most companies of this size. The starting point is the permissions review and the document refresh, which is a fixed-price piece of work on the custom development page; the licensing is on the Business Premium page and in the Copilot comparison.
Related: Copilot ROI calculator and business case · Copilot Studio: agents inside your tenant, the six steps · Copilot at work: five companies, five departments.
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