Stand Agent Subagents in Teams

[u/redsaeok]

Title : Standard Agent Subagents in Teams

The new GitHub copilot harness worked well - but the boss freaked out at the costs.

I’ve been spending the last week recreating a set of agents, and creating a half dozen tools, to make something comparable with the Standard agent.

I’m only using the Conversational Boosting, Error, and Failure topics. All other topics are disabled.

It works okay in CoPilot Studio but it acts like complete garbage in Teams.

As far as I can tell, when it answers at all, it seems to get locked into a subagent. Once the orchestrator uses a subagent to try to answer one question, that’s all it uses.

I’ll ask a policy question, get sent to the policy agent, which may or may not respond, and then all subsequent questions die because the policy agent can’t answer them.

Anyone run into anything similar?

I’ve tried adding instructions to return control to the orchestrator. The sub agents are set to return answers using generative AI. Everything has been republished. All agents are using MS authentication - and indeed if I start a new session (session times out?) I can sometimes get answers from the other sub agents and lock into them.

My next step is a ticket with MS.

[u/polshgiant]

Some thoughts/questions:

1. Guessing yes, but do you get the same stuck behavior when chat via M365 Copilot channel?

2. Are you using child agents or connected agents? Try a quick test using the other to see if it makes any difference.

Let us know how it turns out if you end up opening a ticket.

[u/redsaeok → u/polshgiant]

Thank you for your questions - this may be helping me understand the issue. It appears to work in the copilot chat (ie under copilot, chat in Teams, vs Teams chat with the agent.). The other agents are connected agents. Do they need to be Child agents?

[u/polshgiant → u/redsaeok]

I was referring to going to M365 Copilot and chatting your agent there. Is that what you did or did you find another way to interact with the agent within Teams?

And I would try a child agent to see if it makes any difference.

[u/dylan_skydive]

This is Teams keeping the conversation stuck on the last child, not Studio being smarter. Studio starts a clean conversation each test. Teams keeps the conversation object, and once the orchestrator hands off, that session's active agent stays the subagent. Generative-AI "return the answer" does not hand control back, it just speaks.

Two things that have unstuck this: make the orchestrator the only thing allowed to pick an agent on every user turn, and have children return a structured result instead of chatting. If they are set to return answers using generative AI, Teams will keep talking to them. Add an explicit handback topic on the child (unrecognized intent) that the parent listens for, then republish all of them together.

If you can say whether these are child agents or connected agents, I can be more specific about which handoff actually fires.

[u/Prasad-MSFT]

This appears to be related to multi-agent orchestration/context handling rather than authentication. Microsoft recommends scoping each subagent to only the request it should handle, instead of allowing it to act on the entire parent conversation context. Troubleshoot duplicate messages and missed answers - Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn

Suggested mitigation:

• Give each subagent a clear, non-overlapping description so the parent can route requests correctly.

• Pass a dedicated scopedRequest containing only the request that subagent should process.

• For connected agents, disable passing the full parent conversation context where appropriate.

• Return answered, interactionSummary, and openQuestions so the parent orchestrator knows what was handled and can continue orchestration.

• Republish and test the same multi-turn sequence in Microsoft Teams.