Copilot Opal: Your New AI Tool

Robert Thomas (00:00)
Hi everyone. Today I want to show you Microsoft Copilot Opal.

So one of the newest capabilities available through Microsoft’s Frontier program. So most AI assistants today help us work by you know answering questions, generating content and you know summarising information or getting recommendations or sort of general brainstorming or recording meetings, for example.

so Opal hopefully represents the next evolution. So instead of simply helping us complete tasks, Opal can actually go ahead and perform those tasks on our behalf. so Microsoft calls this a compute use agent rather than just telling me how to do something, Opal can actually, you know, open applications, navigate to websites, interact with systems, and then complete sort of multi-step business processes.

you know, whilst I sort of supervise what it’s doing and how it’s working. And I guess this is sort of AI really moving from helping people do work to actually doing work alongside people. So, you know, back to what I just mentioned in terms of co pilot has always been this assistant. AI is now, you know, moving towards agents and solutions that can actually do the work on you know on our behalf.

Microsoft actually recently introduced the Frontier program as a way of customers to, you know, access the latest AI and innovations early. So one of the most excit exciting developments, you know, recent is the rise of AI agents. you know, think of the progression. We’ve got things like search engines to find information and then now, you know, a lot of people in today’s

will tend to kind of you you know it’s copilot AI helping us find that information as well. And now we’re you know moving to the next step where agents are now taking actions on that information. so Opal is one of Microsoft’s first enterprise grade examples of this shift. you know and I I guess things that you would potentially be asking Opal could be, you know, adding users to security groups.

if you’re an IT administrator or you know gather evidence for a specific audit, updating IT tickets, which I’ll touch on a little bit later on, or even things like you know producing financial reports if you’re in financial services. You know, so rather than generating instructions on how do I update IT ticket or how shall I update this report, Opal’s gonna go ahead and actually, you know, carry out those activities for us.

One of the first questions people tend to ask is, you know, how can AI safely perform actions, you know, inside my environment? you know, there’s always a risk with having AI running on your local machine and having access to all the systems and resources that you, you know, you as the end user does. And Microsoft’s answer to this is to run Opal or this agent inside a secure Windows three six five cloud PC.

so for those that are 100% familiar, the Windows three six five Cloud PC is just a virtual PC that runs in the cloud that you can connect to and access securely. It’s a bit like a a remote desktop. this is like the perfect platform because you know Windows 365 it it takes all of the security and governance from the existing Microsoft managed environment. So Microsoft are really good at plugging these AI tools into their existing

security and governance stacks. So, you know, it’s all going to be managed by enter ID. The Windows three six five cloud PCs, you know, they’ll be able to be fully in tune managed. it’ll be isolated from the end users endpoint so we can really sort of scale down what tools and services and websites the agent has access to. and admins will have greater control over this as well. So we can clearly separate

the access between an agent and a a human user, for example. so the main, I guess the main point really is the you know the AI won’t have to directly operate on the user’s laptop. We can give it its own workspace, exactly like you know a user would, but within this controlled enterprise environment. What I’ll do now is I’ll just go on to the I’ll start on the admin site, so how we can actually set up

copilot Opal from the beginning. So let me just go ahead and share my screen.

There we go. So if you go into the admin center within Microsoft 365, you’ve got the copilot blade here and then the settings option. And you can see here Opal Frontier. Now it’s also worth mentioning that to access anything on the Frontier program, your organization needs to be exclusively enrolled into this program from the Go Head. So it’s just important to make sure that you sign up for here and you allocate the users that can access the Frontier program.

So things like co-pilot co-work, they came through this program where Microsoft gave all of the users early access where they could test it. And now you can see co-pilot co work has now obviously gone into GA. So we’ve got it here as a standard solution. Going back up to Opal Frontier, so if you click on here, we can specify who can actually access the the Opal Frontier Cloud PC agents.

We can choose specific groups here as well. And then there’s a a specific admin portal as well for Opal. So there’s a few things that we have to do when we first activate this product. I’ll just go to this page here.

So the first thing is the cloud PC setup. Now this basically gives you instructions of the Windows 11 PC. It’s going to be enrolled into your tenancy and your environment. And there’s a few options here. So you can see which region the cloud PC is going to be enrolled in. So obviously, if you’re in the US, you’ll have that as your default region. I imagine when this does come into general availability, there’ll be more options and more.

settings that you can define here. So you probably be able to choose other regions. You will probably have the option to scale up or scale down different resources based on the demand of this product. And then below that here, this is actually specifying the access on what the agent can do and what it can access. So Opal by default is allowed to visit sort of any website.

you can use this option to block which websites Opal should be accessing. If you’re running this for like very specific job roles or scenarios, then you know you can lock it down to like maybe even in internal sites only and that you’re not getting any data from external that you have got no control over. So again you can give it some admin controls based on here. Next we have to do some tenant configuration. So the first thing that you can do is provide some instructions to the Opal agent

as a default so you can give it some sort of context of your business or your organization. You can see here in our demo, I’ve sp I’ve popped in some instructions. I’ve said that we’re a Microsoft Solutions partner and specialist called Valto. Our main specialities are tenant migrations, mergers and acquisitions as well as Azure and infrastructure. And then the other half of our business is business applications across the power platform and Dynamics three six five.

Nice little pitch there. And then if we scroll down here, we’ve got some sort of options where we can actually specify some sort of default prompts for the user to actually click on and get started a bit quicker. Again, really handy if you’re going to use this agent for specific tasks within your business. And then next we’ve got some optional tasks, but I highly recommend that you set this up. You might need an IT administrator to help with this.

The first thing you’ve got is configure single sign-on. As I mentioned before, when you run this product, Copilot Opal spins up a a Windows 365 Cloud PC for you. and it runs under the context of the user. So for me, it would be running as Robert Thomas. you have to configure single sign on if you want the agent to just be able to sign in quickly. Otherwise you’ve got to just take control and sign the agent in. It’s only a short step, but it just removes that time.

And then the next you’ve got some ESP profiles. So with Windows 365, you can create autopilot profiles. So these agents they’re spinning up the these cloud PCs, they can be enrolled into a specific enrolment profile. So you can apply exclusive security settings and governance for these agents. You might have it different to how a a human-based or a laptop is enrolled into autopilot. You might reduce the scope of applications.

you might have more stricter controls on websites and things and have it just a bit more ring fenced. This gives you the option to create that custom profile for your Windows 365 Opal device pool. And that’s pretty much it. So once you’ve set up the the administrator perspective, you can actually then go into using Opal. So I’ll just go into a quick demo that I had here before. So in this demo here,

you can see how with all like with all sort of AI tools, there is a prompt box here where you can give the instructions to the agent. You can actually upload files from cloud or p or actually local storage as well. They’ll be uploaded to your OneDrive. And on the left hand side, we’ve got like the plan that the agent executes. And then here is a view here of the Windows 365 Cloud PC. So you can actually see the agent working in real time.

If I just go to the top here, you can sort of see the instructions that I’ve started off in this demo. So I’ve told the agent to go and access our lessons learned database and draft up some recommendations for migrations and put these into a branded PowerPoint which we can present back to the technical project manager. I’ve given the link to the database. So the agent should know how to go and navigate to that site, access the database and start to collate the information.

So you can see here it started to draft up a plan. You can actually see here when I sort of took control of the cloud PC. You can go in and if I just do a quick example here, you can take control of the PC. You can make alterations and then you can actually tell the agent the different. I just scroll to the top.

You can tell the agent like some of the things that you’ve done. So you can let Opal know what you changed it to so it can pick back up right from the place that you’ve left off. It’s optional, so it can you can sort of if you need to make adjustments if the agent gets stuck or it’s maybe going somewhere else. that’s a handy tool to kind of put it back on track. Or if you decide to make a change your you know your decision on something, you can tell the agent here what’s happened and then you can simply return to control.

Interesting here we can actually see the database that it’s it’s accessed when it first fired up. So we can see it’s got the information that it needed. There’s a preview there of a SharePoint list of the lessons learned items, and now it’s gone ahead and taken the PowerPoint branded deck that I provided and it’s managed to build all those out and add those to an exclusive pack. So we can go back to control.

And then here, after we’ve sort of taken control, it can then carry on doing based on you know the additional instructions that you gave it. so this is a really powerful tool.

We’ve because it’s in the frontier model, there is no additional cost for this. It’s actually included within your Microsoft 365 licenses. So I encourage you to go and try this tool, sign up for the Frontier program, and start working with Opal. We’ve already started using this.

to start looking at s you know triaging our help desk tickets on our ITPSA platform. you know, we’re sort of seeing how well it can review tickets and you know categorize those tickets and also escalate to humans if based on priority and also recommended, you know, some different replies or different actions.

so you know, we’re doing a lot of testing with this within the background. there’s gonna be lots of different scenarios within your organization where you can certainly go and provide some tasks for Opal and see how well it gets on. with this sort of being the next exciting phase of AI, we’re actually starting to get some super add value of you know, it’s actually going and doing tasks. This is gonna probably be in the keynote of Microsoft Ignite when that

When that event starts in November. so this will be probably at the forefront of some of their announcements. So we’re really excited to see what sort of things people are starting to do with this tool between now and then. And then also we’ll, you know, report back on some of the different things that we’ve been using this tool and this agent and putting it through its paces. So I’ll be excited to host another video going through in a bit more detail. Of course, if you need any help or anything.

Yeah, you can contact hello at valdo.co.uk if you’ve got any queries or requirements for AI related tasks or agents. And then obviously you’ve got our website valto got valto.co dot uk and then also our YouTube channel which has fresh content on all of the time. so yeah, thank you very much for watching. Looking forward to what’s next.