It occurs to me that hard-working HR teams must deal with a lot of repeat business, with questions like: Where do I find my P60? How much can I claim for a bike in the cycle-to-work scheme? What’s my annual leave balance? Why do I need to submit this form for parental leave? And given that HR is a cost centre, not a profit centre, it’s harder to justify additional costs.

There’s now a much easier way to help colleagues to help themselves, without the need for additional people to handle the routine noise. I’m talking about AI and specifically, Copilot Studio.

First things first

Before I could get started with this, I needed some content to “feed” the chatbot. Rather than use any genuine policies, I drafted a simple example, based on UK statute, with the help of Bing:

A sample maternity policy for a UK employer

Make it so!1

Now it was time to setup the chatbot, so I navigated to Copilot Studio, formerly known as Power Virtual Agents, hence the URL: https://web.powerva.microsoft.com/

A wizard guides you through the initial process – just choose a name that describes what your chatbot will do (see steps 1-3 below).

Once this is complete, you can begin to add data for the tool to utilise. In our example, we’re using a file, so I clicked ‘Add files’ and uploaded out sample (see steps 4-7 below).

Next you need to configure your AI tools, plugins and content type. When dealing with specific information, it’s best to discourage creativity, so opt for a content moderation type of “High” (see steps 8-9).

Now you can test and publish your new chatbot, with a great option being Teams, in its role as your employee experience platform (see steps 11-15).

In this case, I used the simple question, “How much maternity leave am I entitled to?”. The sample policy does not use the words “entitle” or “entitlement”, but Copilot infers the meaning of the question and provides an accurate break down for the employee asking the question.

But why on a D365 F&O blog?!

Although we haven’t specifically talked about D365 F&O in this post, I’ve previously extolled the virtues of using the wider Microsoft stack to maximise D365 HR – and this is a great example of doing exactly that.

And… there’s nothing to stop you embedding to your new Copilot from within D365 F&O, such as on your employee self-service dashboard – see steps i-iii for how I did this!

Step-by-Step Gallery

Here is a series of screenshots of all the steps followed to create, upload and publish the chatbot:


Note: The featured image on this post, depicting a team undergoing training on a Damage Repair Instruction Unit (DRIU), is Crown copyright. Crown copyright images can be re-used with attribution for non-commercial purposes only, under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

  1. A phrase made popular by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek, “Make it so” has its origins in the British Royal Navy, as an order to proceed as planned. Indeed, it is still used to this day! ↩︎

Published by Mike Pearsall

Mike is a founding editor of AX7 - The D365 F&O Blog. He is a business and solution architect with experience of successfully implementing D365 F&O on both client and partner side, as well as strong knowledge of the wider D365 suite and Power Platform.

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