Building your own Agents with Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio and the Power Platform

This module introduces the various Microsoft Copilot products available today. You will discover how Copilot Studio leverages Power Platform features to support enterprise-grade governance and lifecycle management.Finally, you will get familiar with the three distinct harnesses that determine how your agent reasons, what it can do out of the box, and how it's billed.

• The Microsoft Copilot Landscape
• Understanding Agents
• The Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse
• Understanding Environments and Solutions
• Introduction to Microsoft Copilot Studio
• The GitHub Copilot Harness vs. The Standard Harness
• Comparing Harness Capabilities and Performance
• Licensing and Copilot Credits
• Estimating and Monitoring your Consumption
• LAB: Prepare Your Environment for Agent Creation

Creating Declarative Agents

Declarative agents are powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot. This chapter explains how to build these declarative agents outside Copilot Studio.

• What are Microsoft 365 Copilot Declarative Agents?
• Creating Declarative Agents with Agent Builder
• Publishing and Sharing Declarative Agents
• Building Agents in SharePoint and Teams
• LAB: Create Your First Declarative Agent

Building Your First Agent with the GitHub Copilot Harness

This module introduces the new Agent Designer. How you describe an agent's behavior, how the Build, Preview, Evaluate and Monitor tabs work together, and how the harness's enhanced orchestration reasons through a request.

• The Agent Designer
• Build, Preview, Evaluate and Monitor Tabs
• Describing an Agent's Instructions
• Testing Your Agent in the Preview Tab
• Understanding the Enhanced Orchestration Runtime
• LAB: Create Your First Agent with GitHub Copilot Harness

Knowledge and Tools

Ground your agent in real organizational knowledge and give it the ability to take action. This module covers connecting knowledge sources and adding tools, including the native ability to create and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files.

• Adding Knowledge Sources: Websites, Documents and SharePoint
• Native File Creation and Editing (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF)
• Adding Tools: Connectors, APIs and MCP Servers
• Connected Agents
• LAB: Enhancing Agents with Knowledge and Tools

Skills and Memory

Skills and memory are two capabilities unique to the GitHub Copilot harness that let an agent go beyond a single conversation turn. This module explains what a skill is, how it differs from a tool, and how memory lets an agent retain useful context across tasks and time.

• What is a Skill
• Adding and Configuring Skills
• Introduction to Agent Memory
• What Persists Across Turns and Tasks
• Designing Agents for Longer-Running Work
• LAB: Adding Skills and Memory to Your Agent

Publishing Agents

Once your agent is developed, it's essential to thoroughly test its performance before making it available to users. After testing, you can publish your agent across multiple platforms and monitor how it performs through detailed analytics. This chapter walks you through the full process: testing your agent, configuring authentication, sharing it with others, publishing to various channels, and analyzing its overall effectiveness.

• Testing Agent Performance
• Setting up Authentication for Agents
• Authentication Modes
• Monitoring Agent Quality and Performance
• Publishing Agents to Channels
• Sharing Agents with Users and Teams
• Tracking Copilot Credit Consumption After Publishing
• LAB: Publish Your Agent to a website

Workflows

Workflows are the answer to deterministic, repeatable automation. This module shows how workflows differ from Agents, and how agents and workflows call on each other to combine adaptability with predictability.

• Workflows vs Agents
• Building a Workflow
• Adding an Agent Node Inside a Workflow
• Using a Workflow as a Tool Inside an Agent
• Workflow Triggers
• Testing a Workflow
• Human in the Loop for Governance
• The Spectrum: Deterministic vs Generative
• The Hybrid Pattern: Adaptive Where You Want It, Controlled Where You Need It
• LAB: Create a Workflow and Use it Inside an Agent

Building Agents with the Standard Harness

Learn how to build agents using the Standard harness in Copilot Studio. This chapter provides the fundamentals of creating agents using the standard harness, compared against what you already know from the GitHub Copilot harness.

• Creating an Agent with the Standard Harness
• Configure Agent Settings
• Understanding Generative vs Classic Orchestration
• Adding Knowledge and Tools
• Introduction to Agent Flows
• Working with Topics
• Publishing an Agent
• LAB: Create an Agent with the Standard Harness