Chat Is the Best and Worst UI: What the New Surveys Agent Tells Us About Copilot's Future

Microsoft is adding a new Surveys Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users that provides an agentic portal to Forms in Chat to be able to create surveys. This will be coming to the Frontier Program this month, and is expected to start rolling out to General Availability in September.

This announcement makes me ponder where agent-based chat is the right or wrong interface for the services lying below. Is a chat with an agent a better or more suitable way of creating a Form rather than using the dedicated UI in the app? Or does giving every tool an agent-based easy-mode potentially just lead to more half-baked noise as output?

I remember in the early days of Copilot someone discussing with me the potential to use Copilot's extensibility capabilities (then the in-chat plugins) to avoid needing to use their dedicated accounting software to generate invoices. This seemed to me a terrible idea, as vendors like Intuit (for QuickBooks) and others have spent decades optimizing the experience of quickly viewing, updating, and creating the right data for consistency. Chat seems like a great place to get a quick report on a client's billing status, but a really sub-optimal interface for creating a multi-line invoice.

A few months back Abram Jackson wrote in his newsletter (linked in the comments) that chat is both the best and worst interface for generative AI. Since then, our chat interfaces in Copilot have evolved somewhat to give us a little more (button-based) granular control of some features while still giving chat its primacy. Chat works extremely well everywhere, until it doesn't.

However, the great thing with agents and the agent store is these are tools you can choose to use or not depending on your needs. Undoubtedly, if you *need* a quick survey, and you're not sure of your way around Forms, an agent might help. But if you need the survey equivalent of a multi-line invoice, the arrival of a surveys agent is no prohibition on jumping over to Forms to create what you require. Copilot is about optimizing your workflow for your individual work preferences and needs, not providing a one-size-fits-all solution that actually fits no one.

First posted on Linkedin on 08/15/2025 -> View Linkedin Post here