Introduction

  • 1 minute

By extending declarative agents with actions, you can connect them to external systems and services through their APIs. Connecting an agent to your existing systems can help you automate tasks and get insights using natural language. To improve the user experience, you can use Adaptive Cards to render information that the agent retrieves from APIs in a visually appealing way.

Example scenario

Suppose you've recently built a declarative agent that integrates with an API of a local restaurant. Using the agent you can browse today's menu and place an order using natural language. The restaurant's API provides a detailed list of dishes, their ingredients, and allergens. You want to enhance the agent's responses by rendering the information about dishes using Adaptive Cards. You also want to render the order summary using an Adaptive Card to provide a visual representation of the order. By using Adaptive Cards, you can include images, text, and buttons to make the information more engaging.

What will we be doing?

In this module, you extend an existing API plugin for a declarative agent to render information that it receives from an API using Adaptive Cards. You learn to:

  • Create: Create an Adaptive Card template that shows the data from the API.
  • Verify: Verify that the Adaptive Card template correctly renders API data.
  • Configure: Configure the API plugin to render the data using the Adaptive Card template.
  • Provision: Upload your declarative agent to Microsoft 365 Copilot and validate the results.

Screenshot of a declarative agent that responds to a user with information from an external API using an Adaptive Card.

What's the main goal?

By the end of this module, you know how to build Adaptive Card templates for use with declarative agents. You can verify that the templates render the data correctly and configure the API plugin to use the templates.