Answer Area
The marketing department at your company wants AI to summarize emails and create presentations. Answer: Use Microsoft 365 Copilot
The HR department at your company wants a conversational agent for policy questions and leave requests. Answer: Build with Microsoft Copilot Studio
The manufacturing department at your company wants AI to predict maintenance schedules. Answer: Build with Azure Machine Learning
The finance department at your company wants AI-powered access to enterprise resource planning ERP data by using familiar productivity tools. Answer: Extend with Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors
These scenarios map to four distinct solution patterns: out-of-the-box productivity assistance, low-code conversational agents, predictive ML, and enterprise data integration.
Marketing’s need to summarize emails and create presentations is a core “productivity copilot” use case. Microsoft 365 Copilot is embedded in Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Teams, so it directly supports summarization, drafting, and presentation generation without building a custom solution—making Use Microsoft 365 Copilot the best fit.
HR’s requirement is a conversational agent tailored to internal policies and workflows such as leave requests. That typically needs custom dialog, grounded knowledge sources, and possibly actions/workflows. Microsoft Copilot Studio is designed to build and manage such agents with organizational knowledge and business process integration, so Build with Microsoft Copilot Studio fits best.
Manufacturing’s predictive maintenance scheduling is classic predictive analytics: learning patterns from historical telemetry/maintenance data to forecast failures or optimal service windows. This is best addressed with Azure Machine Learning , which supports training, evaluating, and deploying custom predictive models.
Finance wants AI-powered access to ERP data “using familiar productivity tools,” which implies bringing external line-of-business data into the Microsoft 365 Copilot experience. That is precisely where Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors help—indexing and exposing enterprise data sources so Copilot can reference them in a governed way—so Extend with Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors is the best approach.
