AI
What the Employee Self-Service Agent Does
The Employee Self-Service Agent ships three distinct capabilities. First, it retrieves policy answers personalized by geography, role type, and hire date, scoped to the person asking rather than a flat knowledge dump. Second, employees can act on what they find: submit leave requests, open tickets, transfer to another team, all inside the same Copilot frame. Third, HR and IT admins configure everything in Copilot Studio, including official-source labels, organizational disclaimers, and sensitive-topic verbatim responses that bypass the LLM entirely and route to a live agent or HR email.
Employee and Admin Demo
The demo traces employee Aadi through parental leave, an internal transfer, a device order, and IT troubleshooting at fictional Relecloud. In the Aadi’s parental leave and transfer demo (12:51), the Agent returns dates scoped to hire date and region, ServiceNow Now Assist files the request in the same frame, and the Workday Agent drafts a peer-review from graph data. On the admin side, admin configuration in Copilot Studio (20:59) shows HR admin Mona adding SharePoint sources, filtering stale content, setting a verbatim response for sensitive topics, installing the Workday package, and publishing, all before reaching the next slide.
Microsoft’s Internal Deployment Results
Microsoft handled roughly 1M HR support tickets a year before ESS. A 2020 chatbot answered 2,000 FAQs. A 2023 Copilot pilot pulled from email alongside policy pages, which the HR team rejected on provenance grounds. ESS, grounded in 16,000 policy pages, tested better in an internal study across 50,000 employees:
“the quality of responses and the likelihood of receiving a correct response was really 25% better than that Ask HR virtual assistant” (Prerna Ajmera)
HR tickets fell 31%. IT tickets fell 36%. Policy knowledge retrieval goes live in one to two weeks.
Partner Integrations: Workday, ServiceNow, and Benifex
Chevron fields close to 100,000 HR cases a year. Dave Warren named case deflection as the primary KPI and said employees spend too much time hunting across Workday, ServiceNow, and other HR systems. Workday’s Laila Almounaier described the integration as in-frame: when ESS detects a performance-review prompt, the Workday Agent appears with its own logo, pulls goals and peer feedback from Workday, and drafts the review inside the same conversation. Workday for Microsoft Teams already has 1.5 million monthly active users across 1,200 customers, giving Workday’s team a clear read on what employees need in the flow of work.
GA Roadmap and What to Do Now
ESS reaches general availability in Copilot Studio in June 2025, starting with one vertical: HR or IT. Out of the box it connects to SharePoint, ServiceNow, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors, creates and tracks tickets, and hands off to partner agents for complex tasks. Admins get usage analytics so the configuration improves over time. Post-GA, Microsoft adds legal, finance, and facilities verticals, all accessible from the same Copilot entry point with the routing invisible to the employee.
Notable Quotes
we still kept receiving a million tickets on an average in a year Prerna Ajmera · ▶ 25:34
the quality of responses and the likelihood of receiving a correct response was really 25% better than that Ask HR virtual assistant Prerna Ajmera · ▶ 32:31
lean in, work together to help solve the problems for customers like Chevron Dave Warren · ▶ 57:46
Key Takeaways
- ESS reduced HR ticket likelihood by 31% and IT ticket likelihood by 36% in Microsoft’s internal test.
- Admins can go from zero to live knowledge retrieval in one to two weeks using Copilot Studio.
- Agent-to-agent handoff to Workday, ServiceNow Now Assist, and Benifex happens inside the same Copilot frame.