Table of Contents

Altus Copilot

Note
  • This is a preview feature.
  • Preview features aren’t meant for production use and might have restricted functionality. These features are subject to change, and are available before an official release so that customers can get early access and provide feedback.
  • Licensing requirements may change before General Availability

Altus Copilot is a tailored AI assistant embedded within the Altus platform, designed to enhance productivity, provide contextual help, and streamline key tasks across the solution. Positioned in the right-hand panel of the application, Altus Copilot offers an experience that goes beyond the standard Microsoft Copilot, with features specifically built for Altus customers.

With AI now an integral part of Microsoft’s ecosystem, Altus Copilot leverages the power of Copilot Studio and Power Platform agents to deliver a context-aware, secure, and scalable solution. It helps users engage with their data, complete actions more efficiently, and access embedded knowledge throughout the Altus experience.

Technical Architecture & Capabilities

Altus Copilot is built with flexibility, governance, and extensibility in mind. Key aspects include:

  1. Built on Microsoft Copilot Studio & Power Platform

    • Altus Copilot is created using Microsoft Copilot Studio, supporting multiple topics and user interactions.
    • A dedicated Copilot Agent is included as part of the Altus solution, ensuring consistency across environments.

  2. Embedded Directly in Altus

    • Copilot appears in the right-hand side panel of the Altus app and is accessible via two entry points.
    • Currently, only one agent slot is available in this panel, but this does not limit future extensibility.

  3. Security & Compliance

    • All data interactions remain within your Microsoft 365 tenancy, adhering to your organisational policies.
    • No data is sent externally—the agent operates within the Power Platform environment, inheriting safety features such as eDiscovery, sharing restrictions, and data loss prevention policies.

  4. Agent Expansion & Customisation

    • Altus Copilot includes a new Agents tab, allowing sub-agents to be added.
    • Users can extend Copilot with additional agents created in Copilot Studio.
    • In future releases, organisations will be able to integrate external Azure AI Foundry agents, such as OpenAI or other advanced models hosted in Azure, enabling more sophisticated task distribution and capabilities.

Altus Copilot blends smart automation with enterprise-grade security to deliver a powerful digital assistant tailored to your delivery workflows. Whether you're using it to pull insights, complete actions, or expand it with custom agents, Altus Copilot brings intelligent support directly to where you work.

Getting Started

Prerequisites for Altus Copilot are:

  • At least 1 Microsoft Copilot license in your M365 Tenancy
  • Available Copilot credits for users to consume either via license entitlements, or the Copilot PAYG meter.
  • Altus Kusanagi (SenseiAltusCopilot) solution package installed in your Power Platform environment.
Note

At the time of writing this solution is manually installed, but is intended to be deployed to all environments when the underlying Preview features reach GA.

Once the Kusanagi layer is installed and published by a user who also has a Copilot license, then the Altus Logo will appear in the Copilot right-hand pane in the Altus application:

Kusanagi Installed

If the Altus Copilot does not appear please follow the Additional Steps as necessary.

AI Features

The feature set of Altus Copilot is growing all the time and we will be shipping updates to expand the AI assistance features over time.

Improved General Knowledge

The Altus Copilot has an extensive PPM specific vocabulary and can answer general questions about your data and about anything in this website.

Specific Actions

Altus Copilot has also been given the ability to perform specific helpful actions:

  • Add potential risks to this project: Looks at the details for the project, formulating potential risks the project might face, offering the user to add them to the project if acceptable.
  • Add deliverables to this project: Looks at the schedule for the project and identifies potential deliverable items that could be included in the deliverables list for the project, offering the user to add them to the project if acceptable.
  • New Status Update: When adding a new Status Update record to a project, the data for the project, related tables and previous status updates are reviewed and the textual commentary for each aspect of the project is created, as well as an overall summary. This can then be reviewed and edited if required before creating the new Status Update record.

More actions will be added over time.

Altus Copilot Field

The Altus Copilot Field can be is utilised throughout Altus, beginning with the Status Update form to provide tailored and specific AI assistance to users. This takes the form of an additional button that appears in certain text boxes:

Sparkle button

Pressing this button will utilise Microsoft Copilot to provide AI generated text specific and tailored based on the context of the field. For example pressing the button on a deliverables status field will consider the project, the schedule and existing deliverables to generate an assessment of the current project's deliverables:

Field is generated

When using the ALtus Copilot field for the first time you may encounter a message asking you to first perform an action with Microsoft Copilot to grant consent:

Consent needed

If this occurs, open the right-hand Copilot pane and perform any action that requires the Agent to read information on your behalf. A message will be displayed:

Consent question

Once the consent is granted, the Altus Copilot Field can proceed to utilise Microsoft Copilot.

Additional Steps

If the Altus logo does not appear in the right-hand rail, additional deployment steps may be necessary

Enable Copilot

If the Copilot right-hand rail is not available at all, check that the Microsoft Copilot features are enabled in the Power Platform Administrative Centre

  • Select your target environment
  • Go to Settings->Product->Features

PPAC Features

  • Ensure Copilot features are enabled

Enable copilot feature

After changing this feature, it may take some time for the feature to appear for all users - use an InPrivate browser tab to confirm it has taken effect.

It may be necessary to consent to the agent. If this is the case, ensuring your user account has a valid Microsoft Copilot License proceed to Microsoft Copilot Studio, select the Altus Copilot Agent and agree to consent:

Copilot studio consent

Please continue to publish the agent after consenting.

Publish Agent

It may be necessary to republish the agent. If this is the case, ensuring your user account has a valid Microsoft Copilot License proceed to Microsoft Copilot Studio and select the Altus Colpilot Agent:

Publish Kusanagi Agent

Publish all customisations

Proceed to the Maker Portal, select your environment and navigate to the solutions page, then press Publish All Customisations.

Publish all customisations

Note

After making these changes the previous UI can be cached in the browser - it may be necessary to use an InPrivate or Incognito browser tab to validate these changes have taken effect.

Advanced Features

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