Get a jump start on employee service delivery with Employee Self-Service Agent in M365 Copilot

As we announced today, Employee Self-Service Agent is now beginning a phased general availability rollout. Let’s dig deeper into how admins and makers in organizations can get a jump start as well as explore strategies in creating a centralized experience for employees to tackle their HR and IT needs.

Employee Self-Service Agent is a custom agent in Copilot Studio, for makers to set up, configure, and extend. While the agent provides the flexibility for extensibility and customization, it also includes a set of “accelerator packs” to help makers and admins get started more quickly than building an agent from scratch. These accelerators include prebuilt connectors and starter workflows for common HR and IT scenarios—like leave management, updating employee profiles, troubleshooting Microsoft products, and creating or tracking support tickets. The agent’s seamless integration with key HRIS, HCM, and IT partners is a game-changer for centralized enterprise support. Accelerator packs for SAP SuccessFactors, ServiceNow and Workday allow organizations to automate HR and IT processes, surface real-time data, and ensure a centralized support experience.

These accelerators significantly reduce implementation time, enabling faster deployment and time to value. With advanced features such as inline action-taking, contextual handoffs to specialized agents, support for sensitive topics with custom disclaimers, and deep personalization based on employee role, geography, and company policies, employees get a responsive and compliant support experience – all without leaving Employee Self-Service Agent, keeping the conversation and context intact.

At GA, the Employee Self-Service Agent accelerator packs consist of three main elements:

1. Connectors to your knowledge sources and to Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP SuccessFactors data via Microsoft-built Power Platform connectors
2. Preconfigured workflows with HR and IT scenarios and topics library to jumpstart your employee service delivery
3. Workflows that hand off to your existing Copilot agents, first- and third-party, installed in your organization

Connect to knowledge and existing systems of record via Microsoft-built Copilot Connectors and Power Platform Connectors

Copilot Connectors

The ServiceNow Copilot Connector built by Microsoft brings ServiceNow knowledge into Microsoft Graph, enabling semantic search and personalized responses. SharePoint integration means employees get accurate, policy-compliant answers from trusted organizational sources. Furthermore, Microsoft 365 Self-Help provides built-in diagnostics and troubleshooting for common IT issues, reducing dependency on live support.

Power Platform Connectors

The Employee Self-Service Agent includes Microsoft-built Power Platform connectors for the most common HR and IT scenarios—specifically, Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP SuccessFactors.

Of course, with Copilot Studio, you can customize even further, ensuring the agent delivers authoritative, context-aware answers, data, and actions tailored to your organization’s needs beyond the Microsoft-built connectors.

Preconfigured workflows

Employee Self-Service Agent includes preconfigured workflow starters for common HR and IT scenarios to give you a head start and immediate value - you’re not starting from scratch. With these starter workflows, you can read and write employee data, create and manage tickets, and hand off conversations to specialized agents—all with less configuration needed. For example, in Employee Self-Service Agent you can:

• Understand the caregiving policy given your role, region, and other context
• Update your personal phone number
• View your service anniversary
• Managers can update direct reports’ job titles
• Create, view, and update HR and IT support tickets
• Hand off to a live agent for issues that still need resolution
• Troubleshoot and run diagnostics on a laptop camera that doesn’t work

Agent handoff workflows

Specialized agents can also be tagged in to handle employee needs – especially for scenarios requiring more business logic. Within Employee Self-Service Agent, you can hand off to any installed Copilot agent inline, as a complementary collaboration to expand to valuable employee experience workflows. Context from your initial Employee Self-Service Agent conversation is maintained to and from the agent.

For example, Employee Self-Service Agent can hand off to Ask Workday to:

• See your leave balance
• View the service anniversaries of direct reports (for managers)

And for example, Employee Self-Service Agent can hand off to Now Virtual Agent by ServiceNow to:

• Request a new device (e.g. laptop)
• Report a lost or damaged asset

In addition to the previously announced partnerships with SAP SuccessFactors, ServiceNow, and Workday, we’re excited to also expand our collaboration with SAP SuccessFactors, including the ability for Employee Self-Service Agent to hand off to the Joule agent. This integration will enable employees to get HR and payroll insights and tasks grounded on company policies, such as helping employees understand paycheck discrepancy via Joule’s Explain Pay capability.

Strategies for a Centralized Experience for Employee Service Delivery

A key aspect of Employee Self-Service is enabling a centralized experience for HR, IT, and more for a streamlined employee service delivery. The HR-focused and IT-focused agent starters available now to configure in Copilot Studio are intended to give you the choice to begin your employee service delivery journey in one of three ways:

1. Multiple verticals in a single configured agent. If you want a centralized experience and do not need any of these more advanced capabilities:

• • Special roles for each vertical
  • Separate analytics for each vertical
  • More than 25 shared knowledge sources
  • More than 30 shared workflows

Then, you can start with a HR-focused or IT-focused agent starter and expand this one Employee Self-Service agent with shared knowledge, topics, workflows, and connectors across other verticals. The agent starter can be set up for any use - but start with the one that matches your primary focus.

2. [Preview] Multiple domain-specific child agents linked to one single front-door parent agent. This offers the most flexibility and extensibility, but can have some drawbacks – most notably, increased application lifecycle management complexity and a projected small increase in latency. This option is entering Preview in November 2025.

Note: If you do not need a centralized experience that encompasses multiple verticals for employees, you can use one or both focused agent starters (HR- or IT-focused) independently from each other.

Getting Started

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot is rolling out to general availability in phases, with access to the agent starter for makers in Copilot Studio soon. After Employee Self-Service is configured and published by IT admins, employees can access the agent in Copilot if they have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license or using Copilot Credits via Copilot Chat.

Visit the Employee Self-Service Agent Adoption page to get started, learn best practices for deployment, and connect with your Microsoft representative to bring the Employee Self-Service Agent to life in your organization.