Introduced AI Agents into Copilot Notebooks to boost productivity

TIMELINE

2 months

TEAM

2 Designers

1 Product Manager

TOOLS

Figma, Figjam

ROLE

UX Design

AI Interaction Design

OVERVIEW

TL;DR

CHALLENGE

3rd-party companies need ways to interact with AI Agents within existing workflows to improve productivity.

AI Agent conversations are disconnected from Notebooks, making them difficult to discover, access, and carry context across workflows. This creates unnecessary context switching and limits continuity between Notebook work and Agent interactions.

SOLUTION

Incorporated AI Agent interactions directly via Notebooks to help users transition between agents and agent conversations.

As AI Agents become part of everyday workflows, we brought their capabilities closer to where work already happens. Integrating Agent access within Notebooks made relevant AI assistance easier to discover and enabled people to build on their existing work without disrupting their workflow.

IMPACT

15+ interviews

in 4 weeks, synthesizing insights into actionable ideas

5 explorations

and prototyped it for further feedback

100% positive

feedback and approval from leadership

CONTEXT

Understanding The Ecosystem

Copilot

An AI assistant built into Microsoft 365 that helps users create, analyze, summarize, and complete tasks using natural language.

Notebooks

A focused workspace in Copilot where users bring together relevant files, notes, and sources to organize information and work with AI on a specific topic or project.

Create a new notebook.

Add files, Copilot pages, and other types of references.

Get focused answers based only on the references added to notebook.

Ask Copilot questions about the content in your notebook.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Notebooks are limited to Copilot chats and do not extend to agents.

Microsoft's partner companies, including Cohere, S&P Global, LSEG, and others, have their own agents integrated into Copilot, which is built on Microsoft 365 foundational models. However, these companies experience challenges with the Copilot agent due to limitations in interacting with agents within Notebooks.

Preventing users from bringing agent interactions into their projects and creating gaps in cross-surface continuity, making it impossible to save, reference, or build on past agent interactions alongside their project context.

London Stock Exchange

S&P Global

Autodesk

LexisNexis

Cohere

RESEARCH

Discovering User Insights

1:1 WITH CUSTOMERS

15 Stakeholder Interviews

With any project, I start with questions.

Where do customers see the biggest gaps in the current experience?

What would make them want to bring an agent chat into a Notebook?

What is the difference between Copilot chats and agent chats from a user perspective?

We needed explorations and ideas quick. We had to move fast. I got creative with a limited research budget - let's interview the partner company PMs from next door about their B2B needs?

Internal research > No research.

PAIN POINTS

Limited Access

Relevant work from other agents can’t be brought into the project.

Context Loss

Work gets interrupted when moving between different agents due to context loss

Manual Effort

Connecting work across agents requires unnecessary copying, switching, and repetition.

HOW MIGHT WE

…enable easy knowledge continuity through a richer, more connected workspace in M365 Copilot Notebooks.?

TECHNICAL CONSTRAINT

Copilot Notebooks are technically implemented as agents, preventing agent nesting.

Agent within agent (Notebook) nesting

Access agents from within a Notebook

Design Decision

Instead of embedding agents within a Notebook, we approached agent linking model where users could add and access specialized agents from the Notebook.

Why? Because this preserved the user's mental model of "my Notebook has the agents I need" while avoiding architectural changes required for agent-to-agent nesting.

Interaction Pattern

The Notebook became the workspace for discovering and navigating between agents, rather than the container that owned those agents.

FEATURE COMPARISON

I also looked at our competitors. They all offer a similar experience to Notebooks, called Projects or Spaces. Across the board, these tools allow users to add files and chats into a project, which is consistent with what we see in Copilot Notebooks.