Copilot in Microsoft 365 provides simple ways to improve how you communicate internally. An AI agent for news post creation gives you a powerful tool that you can model and adapt based on your requirements, helping you automate the creation of an initial draft for a news post.

If you already have a Copilot license, you have what it takes to create your own agent for internal communications that can help you communicate better and more clearly. The creation of an AI agent might sound like a technical task at first, but in this blog post you will see how simple and quick it is to use Copilot to create an agent that improves your internal communication.

Create a news post creation agent with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Agents are pre-instructed AIs that can help you with all sorts of tasks, from content generation to tone or accessibility validation, research and more. If you haven’t set up your digital assistants yet, you should give this a try.

Agents can help generate the first draft of a new piece of content that aligns with the company’s tone of voice, reflects your writing style, and includes useful building blocks around the content itself.

How to create an agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

  • Open the Microsoft 365 Copilot app or navigate to m365.cloud.microsoft.com
  • In the left navigation, under Agents, click New Agent
  • You can follow the prompts to create your agent, but I prefer to go straight to the configuration panel and set it up there. This gives you a clear view of the configuration options available for your agent. In this case, click Configure in the chat panel.
  • Give your agent a:
    • Name, such as “News post agent”
    • Description, such as “A news post agent that creates blog posts respecting our company requirements.”

For more information on how to create an agent in Copilot, see Microsoft 365 Copilot agent creation guide.

You can now leave all other fields as-is, with the exception of Instructions, which we can configure for our content creation agent.

You can consider the following instructions, which define how the Copilot agent should work, as an example that you can refine based on your real needs.

You’re a professional content writer. Your purpose is to create news posts that:
  • do not contain em dashes
  • use a friendly, jargon-free tone of voice that is professional but not too polished
  • use American English
  • reflect our company values: ownership and accountability
This is an example of previous blog posts I wrote. Use the formatting and styling for future posts. [INCLUDE ONE OR TWO EXAMPLES]

Especially in the SharePoint context, I recommend extending the instructions to include the creation of relevant meta information that improves the findability of your news article in SharePoint search:

  • Page description: Generate a page description of up to 255 characters.
    • I see page descriptions in SharePoint as similar to meta descriptions on webpages, which help improve content discoverability in search.
  • Metadata: Suggest metadata if you are leveraging metadata in SharePoint. In this case, list the available metadata and ask your agent to suggest suitable values.
  • Title: And of course, a title. If you have specific requirements for titles, provide those as instructions as well, such as “use sentence casing.”

You can also provide your agent with a glossary of words and their meanings that it can use when creating content, or a list of words that the agent should not use.

Try your agent a few times and iterate on the instructions to adapt them to your needs. A good practice is to revise and adapt the copy after the AI generates the first draft. You can iterate further with AI to adjust your content or edit it the traditional way, when all we had was our brain and the keyboard, or a pen and paper.

Your agent will create the entire content along with surrounding elements such as metadata suggestions, page descriptions, and more. This approach helps you stay consistent with your company’s tone of voice and other requirements.

What if you don’t have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license?

Copilot is my preferred option in a business context because it comes with Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise data protection, and Microsoft ensures that they do not use your data to train their AI models; however, if you don’t have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you can also create AI agents using GPTs in ChatGPT or agents in Gemini.

Using Copilot agents to improve internal communication – Closing thoughts

An AI agent in Copilot is a great assistant for internal communication. You can use it to get started with content creation or even to create the end-to-end post.

Agents are so simple to create that you can consider having multiple agents for different types of content you publish regularly, such as a news post agent for monthly company updates or another tailored to a specific campaign.

Thanks for reading,
Jarbas