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Answer routine HR and IT questions with Employee Self-Service

Get the PTO balance, the policy, the "how do I…" answer in seconds — from approved sources, no ticket filed and no waiting on a queue.

Stage: First-Party Agents · For: End user, IT/Admin · Level: Starter · Time: 10 min

Status: Check current status — this agent isn't individually listed on the Agents in Microsoft 365 roster; confirm availability there before assuming it's GA.

When to use this

It's the question that's too small to file a ticket for but too specific to guess at — "how much PTO do I have left," "what's our travel policy," "how do I set up the VPN." The Employee Self-Service agent answers these from your organization's approved HR and IT sources, right in the flow of work. It's the front door that absorbs the routine volume so people get unblocked instantly and the HR/IT queue clears for the things that actually need a human.

For end users it's the fastest path to an answer. For IT/admins it's deflection that improves service instead of degrading it.

What you'll need

  • M365 Copilot license and access to the Employee Self-Service agent in your tenant
  • The agent grounded on your org's approved sources — benefits, policies, IT knowledge base
  • A real question to ask — the more routine, the better the fit

Try it now — the prompt

Ask the everyday question directly, the way you'd ask a helpful colleague:

How much PTO do I have left, what's the policy on carrying it over, and how do I
request time off? Link me to the source for each so I can double-check.

Why this works: it bundles the specific data (your balance), the policy (carryover), and the action (how to request) into one ask — and requests source links so the answer is verifiable. That's the pattern that makes a self-service agent trusted: fast answer, with a receipt.

Step by step

  1. Open Employee Self-Service and ask plainly. No special syntax — ask the HR or IT question in natural language, the same way you'd message the help desk.
  2. Read the answer and the source. The agent answers from approved sources and links them. Open the source for anything that affects a real decision — pay, leave, security.
  3. Take the next action inline. If it can route you to the request form or the right team, follow that path right there rather than re-finding it yourself.
  4. Escalate cleanly when it's not routine: 
    This is a non-standard situation — [briefly describe]. Who's the right person
or team to take this to, and what should I include when I reach out?

Screenshots

We deliberately don't ship screenshots that go stale — the Microsoft Copilot UI changes often. Follow the numbered steps above, which we keep current. Maintainers can regenerate fresh captures with the Playwright tool in tooling/screenshots/.

Make it better

Self-service is a flywheel — feed it and it speeds up: - Mine the misses (IT/admin). Questions it can't answer are your knowledge-base backlog. Each gap you fill deflects the next dozen tickets. - Keep sources current and authoritative. A self-service agent answering from last year's policy is a liability. Assign owners to the HR and IT sources it grounds on. - Publicize the front door. Most of the value is lost if people don't know to ask the agent first. Put it in onboarding and pin it where the "how do I…" questions usually land.

📚 Learn more. The Agents in Microsoft 365 hub describes the prebuilt agents in plain language, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption Hub collects guidance on rolling agents out to your organization.

Watch out for

  • Approved sources only — verify the grounding. A self-service agent is only as right as the sources behind it. For pay, leave, and security answers, the linked source is the authority, not the phrasing.
  • Know where self-serve stops. Sensitive, exception, or compliance-bound cases need a human. The agent should hand off cleanly, not improvise a ruling.
  • Set expectations honestly. "Fast answers to routine questions from approved sources" is the promise. Overselling it as an all-knowing HR oracle invites the one wrong answer that breaks trust.

Where this leads (the ramp)

Employee Self-Service is a grounded, source-cited agent answering from documents you chose — which is exactly the shape of the agent you'll build next, just one Microsoft built for you. Once you've seen how much routine volume a well-grounded agent absorbs, building one tuned to your team's docs is the obvious move. That's Stage 4 · Agent Builder.

Next: Agent Builder → Build a "team knowledge" agent over a SharePoint site

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