See you at the HELish Summit in September!

I'll be speaking at HELish Summit 2026 on Thursday, September 17th with my old colleague and great friend Gautam Sheth! If you're interested in Microsoft 365, Copilot, Azure, Power Platform, security, or AI - or just enjoy spending a day surrounded by people who are maybe a bit TOO enthusiastic about Microsoft technology - come say hi!

This time, I'll be talking about one of the simplest ways to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot: Declarative agents and Copilot (Graph) Connectors.

That means 3 things:

1. No custom agent runtime,
2. no heroic amount of code, and
3. hopefully no live demo disasters.

... although I'm making no promises about that last one! 😅

Wait, what's HELish Summit?

HELish Summit is the biggest free Microsoft community conference in Finland. It brings together more than 350 attendees and 25 speakers for a full day of sessions covering Microsoft 365 and Modern Work, Power Platform, Azure and Security, and Copilot and AI.

HELish Summit takes place on Thursday, September 17, 2026, at the Clarion Hotel Helsinki Airport in Vantaa. Despite the Helsinki in the name, the venue is technically in Vantaa. But more importantly, it is about 50 metres from the airport train and bus station, so it should be exceptionally difficult to get lost on the way there.

I say "should", because it's the same venue that I almost didn't find last year.

The event is organized by a volunteer team of Finnish Microsoft MVPs, which means it is built by the community, for the community - and attending is completely free!

And the organizers have done a pretty rad job getting sponsors. All of the usual suspects are there: The good old Fresh/Advania as the headline sponsor, Meltlake, Netox, TD Synnex, Innofactor and Glueckkanja as Platinum sponsors and a plethora of other cool companies as well.

What will we be talking about?

Our session is called Baby Steps to Copilot Mastery: Easy Wins with M365 Agents Toolkit & Copilot Connectors.

The premise is simple: extending Microsoft 365 Copilot doesn't always need to start with a complex custom agent, a pile of infrastructure, or weeks of development. There are much easier ways to make Copilot aware of your organization's knowledge and capable of doing useful things - and those easy wins are what this session is all about.

We'll start with declarative agents: what they are, how they behave, and how you define their instructions, knowledge, and capabilities. We'll also look at how Work IQ helps ground those agents in the context of your work, and where the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit fits into the development workflow.

Then we'll move on to Copilot Connectors, which can bring content from your existing systems into Microsoft 365 Copilot. For many organizations, this is the fastest route to something genuinely useful: Copilot can't help with information it can't find, after all.

And because knowledge alone only gets you so far, we'll also cover declarative skills. These let an agent take lightweight actions through REST APIs, Microsoft Graph, or workflows without requiring you to build and host a fully custom pro-code agent.

In other words, this session is about getting practical value without immediately choosing the most complicated option available. A strangely rebellious idea in enterprise software, I know!

What will you take away from the session?

Here's what I hope you'll leave with:

• A clear picture of declarative agents: What they are, what they can do, and when they are a better fit than a custom-coded agent.
• A quick path to value with Copilot Connectors: How connectors make your organization's content available to Copilot without moving everything into yet another system.
• A practical introduction to the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit: How the toolkit helps you scaffold, package, validate, test, and deploy declarative agents.
• An understanding of declarative skills: When a REST API, Microsoft Graph action, or workflow is enough to give your agent useful capabilities.
• A sustainable extensibility model: How to start simple and add complexity only when the use case actually requires it.

The session is aimed at anyone who wants to make Microsoft 365 Copilot more useful but isn't looking to become a full-time AI engineer just to get started. If you work with Microsoft 365, internal IT, enterprise content, communications, or automation, you should come away with something you can actually try in your own environment.

Come find us!

The full event runs from 8:30 to 17:30, and the detailed session schedule is available on the HELish Summit website. Our session starts at 13:45 in room Runway 1!

Registration is free, but you still need to reserve your spot. With more than 350 Microsoft technology enthusiasts expected(!), it should be a great day for learning, meeting old friends, and finding new people to geek out with. 😊

If you're attending, come to the session or grab us in the hallway and say hi. We're always happy to talk about Copilot extensibility, declarative agents, Microsoft's naming conventions, licensing*, or why every new agent product apparently needs a name that is almost identical to three existing ones...

See you at HELish Summit in September!

Footnotes

[*] Please, please, PLEASE do not actually come ask us about licensing. 😅