Enabling Full Copilot Capabilities: A Guide for Your IT Administrator
Following up on our AI-Augmented Workflow workshop, and as promised during our session, here is a consolidated list of the platform settings and permissions we recommend enabling within your Microsoft 365 environment.
During the workshop, we identified several points of friction where the team’s experience in Copilot differed from the full capabilities demonstrated. The settings below are intended to resolve these discrepancies and empower your team to fully leverage the agent-building and data-analysis features we reviewed.
1. Licensing & Core Features
Feature/Permission: Microsoft Copilot Studio Licensing
Observed Limitation: Team members could not see advanced features like “Notebooks” or “Projects” and, most importantly, lack the native ability to chain multiple agents together into a single, automated workflow.
Required Action: For team members who will be designing, building, and managing AI agents (like Simon and Bhumika), please ensure they have a Microsoft Copilot Studio license assigned. Standard Copilot for M365 licenses are for using copilots, whereas Copilot Studio is the environment for building and chaining them.
2. Agent Creation & Knowledge Management
Feature/Permission: File Uploads as Agent Knowledge
Observed Limitation: When attempting to create an agent, Simon noted he had no option to upload files as a knowledge source; the interface only permitted adding a URL.
Required Action: Within the Copilot Studio admin settings, please enable the ability for designated users or groups to upload files as knowledge sources for agents. This is essential for grounding agents in specific procedural documents, templates, and instructions.
3. File Handling & Data Analysis
Feature/Permission: Permitted File Type Policies
Observed Limitation: Bhumika received an error when attempting to upload a .json file, a critical format for defining agent instructions and data structures. We had to use a .txt workaround.
Required Action: Please review and adjust the file type extension policies for Copilot uploads. Specifically, we recommend allowing common data and instruction formats like .json (for data contracts) and .md (Markdown, for instructions) to be uploaded.
Feature/Permission: File Count and Size Limits
Observed Limitation: Simon encountered a hard limit of uploading only three files at a time in a prompt. This makes it impossible to analyze a complete RFQ package, which often contains numerous documents.
Required Action: Please increase the maximum number of files that can be uploaded in a single prompt (we recommend at least 20) and review the total file limit for a single conversation session to ensure it can support complex analysis tasks.
Feature/Permission: Code Interpreter
Observed Limitation: While not an explicit error, the inability to perform robust data analysis or handle certain file types is often linked to this setting.
Required Action: Please ensure that the Code Interpreter capability is enabled for licensed Copilot users. This is critical for allowing the AI to analyze data within files (e.g., spreadsheets, structured text), perform computations, and reliably read and process the contents of uploaded documents.
Implementing these changes will empower your team to move from theory to practice, allowing them to replicate, test, and extend the AI-augmented workflows we designed together.
We are available to provide any further clarification your IT team may need during this process.