Artificial intelligence agents (AI agents) are chatbots that are connected to powerful LLMs (large language models) that are fully capable of interacting with human beings by using natural language, thereby providing answers to questions about a specific data domain.
Artificial intelligence, which is now ubiquitous in practically every aspect of our personal and business daily lives, has become a great tool to help improve our efficiency at work by leveraging the great power of computer analytics systems to do the “hard” work of digesting big amounts of data and returning historical and predictive data in response to questions about key performance indicators we want to analyze.
However, confidentiality and privacy concerns prevent AI agents from having built-in connection capabilities to private data sources like corporate systems or databases, which makes it challenging to access the information these systems store. The ability to create private connectors as plugins has now overcome this limitation, allowing companies to connect to AI agents like Microsoft Copilot and access private corporate data.
A private connector is a piece of custom-developed software that exposes a set of functions that return data to help the AI agents respond to questions about the data they are connected to.
For example, you may want to implement sales trend analysis by inspecting the data that is stored in your ERP solution in the cloud. AI agents, machine learning, and deep learning mechanisms can be highly beneficial in identifying patterns and trends in your sales data. You can achieve this by creating a private connector to your ERP, which exposes functions to return sales per product, per client, per region, etc. You can then plug this connector into Microsoft Copilot to respond to your questions about this data, such as “Please tell me about the most consumed products per region per render during the last 3 years.”
By following a similar approach, you can connect Microsoft Copilot to any other SAAS application or data warehouse in the cloud like Hubspot, SalesForce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle Netsuite, and get Microsoft Copilot to respond to your questions about demand forecasting, inventory turnover, production efficiency, customer acquisition costs, churn rate, revenue per customer, recurring revenue, employee performance, team efficiency, and rework recurrence, among many others.
