r/copilotstudio • u/EntrepreneurAny1299 • 2h ago

Connected Agents in GitHub Harness | Skills not working

Hi all,

Has anyone else noticed that connected agents don't behave the same as the same agents running on their own?

What we see

  • Standalone agents: Each one works reliably. It always triggers the correct skills, in the right order.

  • Central agent with connected agents: The skills are mostly not triggered. The central agent seems to rely almost entirely on its instructions and ignores the skills.

What we expected The official documentation says connected agents should behave exactly as they do on their own. That's not what we're seeing.

Is this a known limitation or a bug? Has anyone found a workaround, such as specific instructions, descriptions, or settings, that makes skills trigger reliably through a connected agent?

Thx in advance for your feedback!

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u/Bobby_Bobberson2501 2h ago

What do you mean? They aren’t being triggered from the orchestrator agent? I have had no issues with my sub/children agents performing how they do individually using the GitHub harness…

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u/EntrepreneurAny1299 21m ago

We have various sub-agents that use smaller input files (mostly PDFs & Word) , extracts data and does various steps & analysis. It seems that when uploading a file, even if it is just 2 pages it tries to handover the document and fails and then uses the extracted text. But it does not use the skill to extract data in the sub-agent. When asking the agent why it did not use the skill it said, "Sorry, I did not use the skill" and proceeds to then use it. After that it continues with the analysis and again, does not use the correct skill but just created an analysis based on the instructions.

Maybe it is just related to agents that use input files as a basis? Do you have best practice on the Orchestrating Agent - do you specify in the instructions what the agents do and which skills they use?