Skilling up for the future of work at Microsoft with Agent Launchpad

As AI continues to evolve and its applications across business workflows expand, it can be difficult for employees to stay on top of the latest developments. One of the most exciting shifts underway is our move toward AI agents, which are systems capable of taking autonomous action to accomplish tasks and achieve goals using models, tools, and multistep reasoning.

With agent usage growing rapidly, our team here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, has invested in events and learning sessions to help employees adopt agentic approaches and get more value from Microsoft 365 Copilot.

One example was Camp Copilot, a peer‑led virtual training event dedicated to building employee Copilot skills. We also offered a Copilot Expo, which delivered a more formal, large‑scale learning program focused on role‑specific skills and deeper daily usage.

Now, we’ve consolidated learnings from those programs into Agent Launchpad, an accessible, multifaceted six‑module curriculum. Our instructional program is designed to develop our employees’ agentic AI skills, empowering them to take advantage of existing agents in their day-to-day work and build their knowledge and confidence to create new agents.

Why we built Agent Launchpad

Companies that fail to grasp the growing role of AI and agents in the workplace risk falling behind teams and organizations that are already redesigning their work around hybrid human-agent teams. We created Agent Launchpad to acknowledge this shift, demonstrate the power of agents, and show how they can be integrated into everyone’s daily work.

Unlike basic assistants that only respond to direct prompts, agents can plan, carry out actions, monitor progress, and iterate until they meet a goal. They can perform tasks like drafting content, analyzing data, automating workflows, scheduling meetings, triggering processes, and coordinating across multiple apps and services.

“Think of an agent as like hiring a really intelligent, enthusiastic university graduate. They may not have deep business experience yet, but they bring a high level of intelligence, energy, and scalability to the tasks you give them.”

Kevin Wooldridge, senior director of business programs, Microsoft Digital

At a higher level, agents can act as proactive collaborators, taking on routine tasks so human workers can focus on higher‑value thinking. Employees who aren’t engineers can create agentic tools, which becomes a cultural differentiator.

“Think of an agent as like hiring a really intelligent, enthusiastic university graduate,” says Kevin Wooldridge, a senior director of business programs in Microsoft Digital. “They may not have deep business experience yet, but they bring a high level of intelligence, energy, and scalability to the tasks you give them.”

Understanding how agents work is the new baseline for staying competitive. It’s the defining trait of the emerging Frontier Firm: A human‑led, agent‑operated organization designed for the AI era. Workers become agent bosses who define outcomes, while autonomous agents plan, reason, and run the workflows to deliver them.

How Agent Launchpad enables agent adoption

Integrating agents into existing workflows and processes can feel overwhelming. Our Agent Launchpad curriculum can help our employees get the most out of the technology.

“Our employees told us they didn’t want someone lecturing over slides. They wanted peer‑to‑peer learning, storytelling, showcases, and hands‑on experiences.”

Tom Heath, senior business program manager, Microsoft Digital

To build our curriculum, our team incorporated input from a variety of stakeholders across Microsoft representing a range of backgrounds and technical expertise. They also included feedback from the Copilot Champs Community.

“Our employees told us they didn’t want someone lecturing over slides,” says Tom Heath, a senior business program manager in Microsoft Digital. “They wanted peer‑to‑peer learning, storytelling, showcases, and hands‑on experiences.”

Baked into our Agent Launchpad program are:

• Detailed, approachable explanations of the existing agents available in the Copilot ecosystem
• Practical guidance for how to use the agents
• Step-by-step, hands-on labs for building new agents—regardless of the employee’s level of technical expertise

“People were being bombarded with information about agents, many of which were already live,” says Stephan Kerametlian, a senior director of business program management in Microsoft Digital. “Launchpad became a way to bring clarity and help them discover what already exists.”

Our curriculum explains how to get the most out of available agents, like our Employee Self-Service Agent. It also supports employees who want to build their own agents, whether by using Agent Builder for no‑code development or utilizing Copilot Studio for light coding (otherwise known as pro‑coding).

“Launchpad covers that full end‑to‑end journey at a time when information feels scattered and overwhelming,” Kerametlian says. “It gives people a structured, guided, modular path from the fundamentals all the way to developing agents, if that aligns with their skills and needs.”

Built for flexibility: Our Agent Launchpad curriculum

Given the broad range of skills and goals that our employees bring to the learning process, our six-module curriculum format was designed around two different tracks: The Explorer path and the Builder path.

“We talk about ‘buffet‑style learning’ a lot at Microsoft, and that applies here—but with AI and agents, many people don’t even know what they need. That’s why we built two learning paths.”

Cadie Kneip, senior business program manager, Microsoft Digital

Participants can sign up for live sessions or, if they prefer a self-guided approach, they can move through our modules on their own schedule. Learners have the option to earn participation badges by finishing modules, completing paths, or achieving other milestones within the curriculum.

“We talk about ‘buffet‑style learning’ a lot at Microsoft, and that applies here—but with AI and agents, many people don’t even know what they need,” says Cadie Kneip, a senior business program manager in Microsoft Digital. “That’s why we built two learning paths. We don’t believe everyone needs to be a builder, but everyone benefits from using agents to do their best work. Our goal is high‑quality agents and great usage experiences.”

Each path aligns with specific parts of our curriculum:

• Explorer path, Modules 1-3: Offering both context-setting information as well as examples and usage guidance for existing Copilot agents, our first three modules are for those who want to understand broader agentic context and enhance their day‑to‑day work with available agentic options.
• Builder path, Modules 1-6: For those who want to build their own agents, our full curriculum includes not only the first three modules but also no‑code agent development in Agent Builder (Module 4), agents that involve pro-coding via Copilot Studio (Module 5), and a showcase for new agents with recorded demos and use cases (Module 6).

As an enterprise-level company, Microsoft employs people with a wide variety of skills and backgrounds. That’s part of why Agent Launchpad works: People can choose their own agentic adventure.

“Launchpad provides a centralized starting point, with clear signposting to other assets and a sense of community. It lets us scale across the company and meet people where they are,” Wooldridge says. “If someone is deeply technical, there’s a path for them. If someone isn’t technical but wants to understand the hype and experiment, there’s a path for them too.”

The Frontier Firm mindset: A new way to think about work

While our Agent Launchpad curriculum includes detailed technical guidance for using and building agents, it’s also vital to emphasize the Frontier Firm mindset that employees need as we collectively approach a new era of AI-based work.

“When our core team was designing what Agent Launchpad would look like, we wanted to make sure we weren’t just tackling the technology, but also the mindset and behavioral changes that come with it.”

Alexandra Jones, director of business programs, Microsoft Digital

In the near future, a human‑led, agent‑operated organization built for the AI era—one in which humans define the outcomes they want, but agents decide how to achieve them—will become the new norm. The first module in our curriculum is designed to make sure that concept lands with learners, and it could be the most important part of the training.

“When our core team was designing what Agent Launchpad would look like, we wanted to make sure we weren’t just tackling the technology, but also the mindset and behavioral changes that come with it,” says Alexandra Jones, a director of business programs in Microsoft Digital. “That’s why we decided to cover the concept of the Frontier Firm—why people’s mindsets need to shift, and how we can address common concerns about AI.”

Agentic AI: A shifting landscape

Given the pace of innovation in the AI landscape, our Agent Launchpad program needed to be resilient, flexible, and minimally dependent on product documentation that might soon be outdated.

“It’s challenging to anticipate people’s needs in such a fast‑moving environment,” Wooldridge says. “We’re only slightly ahead of our employees on this journey ourselves, so we’re learning what’s valuable at the same time they are. That means we’re constantly recreating or updating content—it’s a hamster wheel of creation, delivery, revision, and more delivery.”

The pace of change is an ongoing challenge.

“All of this is part of our evolution. Our first immersive learning experience was Camp Copilot. We learned from that and evolved it into Copilot Expo. Now we’ve iterated again and built Agent Launchpad. It’s essentially version 3.0—the best of what we learned from the earlier programs, retooled around agents.”

Stephan Kerametlian, senior director of business program management, Microsoft Digital

New agents ship constantly. The tools evolve every day, and the technology moves at lightning speed. Keeping Agent Launchpad current remains a priority, and our curriculum is continuously adapting.

“All of this is part of our evolution,” Kerametlian says. “Our first immersive learning experience was Camp Copilot. We learned from that and evolved it into Copilot Expo. Now we’ve iterated again and built Agent Launchpad. It’s essentially version 3.0—the best of what we learned from the earlier programs, retooled around agents.”

Driving interest: Enthusiastic responses to Agent Launchpad

Employees are seeing the value of our curriculum, as strong usage data indicates broad interest in the program. In addition to online engagement with our coursework, thousands of our employees have attended in-person sessions. It’s a level of participation that helps drive the goals of both agentic adoption and the Frontier Firm mindset at Microsoft.

Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with employees reporting high satisfaction along with a demonstrable uplift in weekly active agent usage across Microsoft. Many thoughtful recommendations have been captured and turned into insights that will inform our next phase of Agent Launchpad.

“Launchpad unexpectedly became extremely popular—it was supposed to be our pilot, and we didn’t promote it heavily,” Kneip says. “Because of that huge engagement, we want to find more ways to lean into rewards and celebrate people who submit their work, so people feel recognized and come back to learn with us again.”