Copilot: RAG Made Easy?

ByRicardo

Copilot Studio

In Copilot Studio you can add ‘Knowledge’ via hundreds of premade connectors to external data like hugging face and salesforce, create conversational flows through triggers with ‘Topics’ (legacy from Power Virtual Agents, which Copilot absorbed) and add ‘Actions’ — things your Copilot can do, such as summarising data or getting a row from excel. There are thousands of these pre-supported actions, though in Copilot Studio you will not be able to make your own.

It requires a licence of $200/Business/Month for developers and incurs additional usage costs, which can be a little confusing. 25000 messages costs $200, with the ability to top up as needed. A ‘message’ consists of any Copilot query, and counts as 2 when it uses Gen-AI. These costs come from the user end, so the additional license cost is only for the developers. Those using the Copilot in 365 only need a regular 365 licence.

There are thousands of pre-supported Actions, though they’re most valuable when working together. And for that you need:

Azure AI Studio

Finally, Azure AI Studio is another platform used to develop Gen-AI solutions. It’s a bit more pro-code than Copilot Studio and gives users control over model type, indexing, fine-tuning and many other features, while still providing easy interfaces for data ingestion and flows. It allows greater control over creating Copilots than Copilot Studio, but does so at a cost.

With Bot SDK Framework, Semantic Kernel and Azure AI Studio, all the infrastructure is your own problem. Costs are incurred therein and by model usage, and so only an active Azure subscription is required.

So, What is a Copilot?

If the term ‘Copilot’ is feeling murky, I understand. Microsoft hasn’t done a very good job of consolidating their services or of making it obvious where to use what. There are a million other related Microsoft products and SDKs that all interact with small parts of the Copilot ecosphere, but for your own sanity simply ignore them. Below is the best abridged summary I’ve been able to come up with:

  • I want Gen-AI in Microsoft 365: Copilot for 365
  • I want to casually extend it: Copilot Studio
  • I want task automation or custom connectors: Power Automate
  • I want control over my model: Azure AI Studio
  • I want to define custom functionality: Bot SDK Framework
  • I want a fully custom RAG solution: Semantic Kernel

Copilot: RAG Made Easy? was originally published in ML6team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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