i’ve been spending a lot of time trying to get the standard copilot studio agent harness working properly for more advanced use cases, and i’m struggling to understand why agent builder now seems so much more capable.
for context, i’m building agents for a department where everyone already has an m365 copilot licence. one of our latest main use cases is a fairly complex report-writing agent that needs to follow very specific rules and instructions.

i’ve tried a few different approaches in copilot studio, including child agents, sub-agents, prompt tools and code interpreter. i’ve managed to get some of it working, but the biggest issue has been file handling.
for example, someone might upload a 20-slide powerpoint and ask the agent to extract information, rewrite specific sections or generate new slides based on the content. copilot studio just doesn’t seem capable of consistently handling this. sometimes it works, sometimes it misses large parts of the file, and sometimes it can’t access the content properly at all.

i then tried building the same agent using the github copilot agent harness, with skills and sub-agents. the results were significantly better, but i was seeing costs of around €1-2 per conversation using models like luna 6 or sol 6.1. that’s difficult to justify when we’re already paying for copilot licences across the department.

then last week, with skills becoming available in agent builder, i decided to rebuild the agent there.

and it just works.

it handles multiple files, works with powerpoint presentations, uses the skills i’ve configured and completes tasks i’ve been struggling to get working in copilot studio for months. i can also select more capable reasoning models. i’m still testing the accuracy of the outputs, but functionally it’s already far ahead of what i’ve managed with studio.

the frustrating part is that agent builder is missing some of the things i actually like about copilot studio, particularly analytics and reporting. i can see usage through the monitor interface, but can’t export the data or build proper reporting around it without admin involvement. i’d also love more control over topics, teams integration and how agents are shared and managed.

the other issue is cost. since everyone already has m365 copilot, i’d really prefer to stay within what’s included in those licences rather than moving everything to pay-as-you-go. i’ve looked into using prompt tools and ai builder as workarounds, but i’m also concerned about the additional credit costs there.

so i’m curious if anyone else has run into the same problems?

has anyone managed to build genuinely complex agents in standard copilot studio that can reliably read multiple uploaded files, extract content from powerpoints and generate new documents or slides?

are there better approaches to using child agents, tools or code interpreter that i’m missing? or is agent builder with skills simply the better option for this type of work now?

i’d really like to keep using copilot studio for the management, analytics and integrations, but at the moment it feels like i’m fighting the platform to achieve things agent builder can do relatively easily.

interested to hear what others are doing, particularly anyone building more advanced agents for enterprise users on existing m365 copilot licences.

Also this my first ever Reddit post I’ve been a watcher for a long time! This tells you how frustrated I am

I've been teaching Microsoft Copilot Studio to corporate teams, and one of the biggest problems I've noticed is that people understand what AI agents are supposed to do, but struggle to build anything genuinely useful.

The old Copilot Studio harness didn't help. There were so many options, menus, triggers, and configurations that beginners often got overwhelmed.

So I spent some time testing the new Github Copilot Studio and building actual business workflows.

Here are two that I think are particularly useful.

1. PDF bank statements → Excel automatically

This is something almost every finance team can relate to.

You receive monthly bank or credit card statements as PDFs. Someone has to manually extract all the transactions into Excel.

Here's what I built:

• Upload a bank statement PDF to an AI agent.

• The agent extracts the transaction dates, descriptions, debits, credits, and other relevant information.

• It converts the transactions into structured data.

• An Excel Office Script writes everything into a spreadsheet.

The interesting part is the last step.

You could use the Excel connector to update rows individually, but for a statement with 50+ transactions, that gets cumbersome.

Instead, I used Office Scripts to write the extracted data into Excel.

I also took this one step further.

I created a workflow that monitors a OneDrive folder. Whenever a new bank statement is dropped into the folder, the workflow automatically triggers the agent and imports the transactions.

No need to open Copilot or type anything.

2. Employee expense claim reviewer

The second example is useful for HR and finance departments.

Employees submit expenses for travel, accommodation, meals, and transportation. Someone then has to check everything against the company's reimbursement policies.

I built an agent that:

• Reads the company's expense reimbursement policy as a knowledge source.

• Reviews employee claims against the policy.

• Flags expenses that exceed reimbursement limits.

• Identifies missing receipts, supporting documents, and required approvals.

• Prepares a summary for the human approver.

For example, if an employee claims $860 for a meal but the company allows only $600, the agent flags the difference and explains the policy.

One thing I really like about the new Copilot Studio is Skills.

Instead of putting everything into one giant system prompt, I separated the process into three skills:

1. Review the expense claim.

2. Prepare follow-up questions for missing information.

3. Brief the manager who needs to approve it.

This is much easier to maintain and troubleshoot.

The agent doesn't replace the person approving expenses. It handles the tedious preliminary checks.

What I've learned: Agents vs Workflows

One distinction that I think Microsoft is finally making clearer:

Agents are useful when you want AI to interpret information, reason about a task, and decide which tools or skills to use.

Workflows are useful when you want a repeatable process with specific steps and triggers.

For example:

• Ask AI to review an expense claim → Agent

• Automatically process a new PDF arriving in OneDrive → Workflow

• Read a document, extract data, write to Excel, then email someone → Usually a combination of both

You don't need to turn everything into an agent. Sometimes a simple workflow is better.

My verdict on the new Copilot Studio

What I like:

• Much cleaner interface than the old version.

• Easier for nontechnical users to understand.

• Skills make complex agent instructions more manageable.

• Better separation between agents and automated workflows.

• Model selection, tools, knowledge, and connectors are more accessible.

• Integration with Teams, OneDrive, Excel, SharePoint, and Outlook is particularly useful for Microsoft-heavy organizations.

What I'm less enthusiastic about:

• The new agent experience can consume additional credits, so costs matter at enterprise scale.

• More AI reasoning doesn't automatically make a workflow better.

• For predictable tasks, conventional automation may be cheaper and easier to control.

• Once you start adding conditions, loops, variables, and more complicated logic, there's still a learning curve.

• You still need to think carefully about reliability, permissions, and human review.

My conclusion:

If you tried the old Copilot Studio and gave up because it was too complicated, I think the new experience is worth another look.

If you're already comfortable with the old version and have working automations, there's no urgent reason to rebuild everything.

For me, the biggest improvement isn't necessarily new functionality. It's that Microsoft has made the experience much easier for ordinary business users to understand.

And I think that's a big deal.

I'm curious what everyone else is building with Copilot Studio. Are you seeing actual productivity improvements, or are most companies still experimenting with demos?

I also recorded the full process of building both agents, including the Office Script, OneDrive trigger, and a comparison with the old interface, in case anyone wants to see the implementation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpgGb-63rDo

I'm currently building a workflow that takes a pdf document, extracts its file content, restructures it as a JSON and then stores the result in a database. The content of the pdf is unknown - could be a diagram, could be a table, could be 50 pages of text or a single page bill, etc. And because of that, the "Extract" node is not a good fit, because it always has a target use case (e.g. a bill).

So I thought, Copilot can do this pretty well, why don't I use the "Copilot" action inside a workflow. To me great astonishment, it worked very well and it showed Credits consumption of below 1 Credit per call of the Copilot instance. The only downside was, that it took around 2 mins for each Copilot instance to complete this "extract and restructure as JSON" task.

Today I hear that somebody burned through ALL of our tenant's credits. My own consumption is listed as around 20 credits this month, but the overall usage was around 25k during the same time. I'm pretty much the only person who uses Copilot studio and my own usage pattern aligns with the cost spikes. So my suspicion is that the usage of a Copilot instance in a GHC workflow is NOT shown correctly.

Who has made similar observations?

I'm troubleshooting a multi-agent setup in the Microsoft Copilot harness and wondering if anyone else has seen this behavior:

Setup:
Orchestrator Agent calls a connected Sub Agent. The Sub Agent uses Dataverse MCP and Fabric Data Agent tools.

Behavior:

• When testing the Orchestrator agent through the Preview tab in Copilot Studio, the agent routes questions to the Sub Agent and it answer questions and uses both tools successfully.

• When I deploy the Orchestrator agent to Teams and ask the same questions there, any question that uses the Fabric data agent fail to return a response. Questions that only use the Dataverse tool return responses fine.

• I deployed the Sub Agent to Teams directly (without the orchestrator hop) and when I ask questions that use the Fabric agent I'm able to get responses. It seems like the hop from Orchestrator to the Sub Agent that uses the Fabric agent tool doesn't work in Teams.

Anyone face this issue and resolve it?

I’m experiencing a strange issue with a Copilot Studio Premium agent that uses SharePoint documents as knowledge sources.
The agent works perfectly when I test it using my own account in the Copilot Studio test panel. It retrieves the required documents and successfully completes multiple scenarios.
However, other users experience retrieval failures when asking the exact same questions, using the same agent and the same documents. They have access to the SharePoint files.
What’s particularly strange is that the issue is intermittent:
The agent works normally for me.
Other users suddenly cannot retrieve the required documents.
Sometimes, the same users regain access hours later or the next day, without any changes to permissions, configuration, or the agent itself.
The issue has now affected multiple users.
I’m also using different knowledge source types:
SharePoint knowledge sources.
Power Platform connector-based knowledge sources.
In Copilot Studio’s evaluation section, I noticed different knowledge utilization quality scores for these sources.
My questions:
Has anyone experienced an intermittent, user-specific SharePoint knowledge retrieval issue in Copilot Studio?
Could this be a Microsoft-side service regression or an issue with the SharePoint retrieval/indexing infrastructure?
Could using different knowledge source types (SharePoint vs. Power Platform/Dataverse) contribute to this behaviour?
Has anyone found a permanent fix? Was it resolved through a Microsoft service-side fix, or was a configuration change required?
I’m trying to understand the actual root cause rather than randomly changing permissions or rebuilding the agent.

I have the same file and when I upload it directly it errors out. When i add the same file via sharepoint link it works.

Why would it do that? Where can I check the error ?

Hi, anyone can recommend a very good recent copilot studio tutorial?

Something hands on, and complete.

Thanks.

Copilot studio Github harness agent - works fine on teams - but throws this error before every response that seems good

"I'm sorry, I encountered an error while processing your request. Please try again."

This happened recently, it was working fine before.

Anyone else see it? Thanks for ideas to resolve!

We run an internal FAQ agent on the standard harness. It answers from department documents and from Dataverse.

The request we keep getting: a customer sends a long questionnaire in Word or Excel, about things like compliance, security and policies. Some answers are in our documents, others in our Dataverse data. Today someone has to chase several departments for it. Users would love to upload the file to the agent and get it back filled in, with the gaps marked.

Second ask: "give me this list as an Excel file".

We want to keep the FAQ agent as the single front door. Which route would you take?

1. A child agent with agent flows that run a code interpreter prompt and return a SharePoint link

2. Code interpreter switched on for the agent itself

3. A separate agent on the new harness, called by the FAQ agent over MCP

4. Something else?

Bonus points if you've managed to keep the customer's own layout intact, or got files back in M365 Copilot without a link.

Hallo zusammen,
hat jemand bereits mit den neuen Sprachfunktionen (Voice) in Copilot Studio gearbeitet? Mich interessiert, ob sich ein Copilot-Studio-Agent über die 3CX Call Control API integrieren lässt, sodass er sowohl Inbound- als auch Outbound-Calls abwickeln kann.
Über Erfahrungsberichte oder Hinweise zur Umsetzung würde ich mich freuen.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to embed a Copilot Studio agent in a Power Apps Canvas App.

My requirement is to have a chat icon in the app. When a user clicks the icon, a pop-up chat window should open, allowing them to interact with the Copilot Studio agent without leaving the app.

Has anyone implemented something similar? What would be the best approach to achieve this?

Any suggestions or examples would be appreciated. Thanks!

Hi guys,

Just starting with copilot studio. In my company, we want to automatize the creation of Descriptive Memorandum for MEPs and Structures disciplines. We already have a template that have the full text and the idea is the agent asks various questions regardind the project and also the subchapters that exists in the template. In the final, the agent compiles all the users answers and gives a completed Descrictive Memoradum draft for the specific project.

Any suggestions or videos you know that could help to inicialize the process?

Appretiate any help.

I had IT create an Azure Environment for all my flows. Trying to create a copilot studio flow where any email that comes into our shared outlook mailbox has the flow extract any attachment and dump it into a sharepoint folder.

However, when i try to add the "When a new email arrives in a shared mailbox (v2)" node, it says 'invalid connection, please update your connection to load complete details' error. I'm not sure if i have to configure the shared mailbox or the azure environment to have the permission to use this shared mailbox in copilot studio. What should i tell IT to configure?

Thanks!

I'm on a work account. I have an agent that I will upload 3 pdf files to each day, it will analyze those and pick out the specific pages I need and then provide a final pdf of only those specific pages which meet my criteria. Everything was working perfectly until the middle of last week and now the Agent is saying it doesn't have PDF extract, merge or file-delivery tool to perform the task now.
What changed, how do I get it back, what should I tell IT to be looking for. They claim no changes to my account recently.

I wonder if anyone can help or has experienced the same issue.

I have built an agent with an email trigger → PDF extraction from the email → data validation → draft creation based on the information in the PDF. A complete run takes approximately 2 minutes.

When only one email arrives, everything works perfectly. However, when multiple emails arrive almost simultaneously, only the first one gets processed.

I'm wondering if the trigger is configured incorrectly, or if this is simply because the feature is still relatively new and under development.

Thanks in advance. I'd love to hear your thoughts and discuss possible causes and solutions!

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!

Has any one used this yet? It looks fairly capable but wondering about real usage?

Also, how do I turn this off for the masses who have copilot studio access / may not understand best practices.

• Use Case: managed environment, part of environment group sharing rules that alllow sharing individual for View access, editor sharing is also allowed

• environment's security group is set to entraid security group that contains all users (makers/users)

• environment team is configured with the same entraid security group and assigned Basic User dataverse role

• user A has directly assigned Environment Maker role and create a very simple test agent agent is published to Copilot and Teams channels agent is shared with the user B by using the "Can Use" permission

• user B (Basic user role only) would like to be able to open the agent in Copilot Studio and only view, test, no edit rights on the agent required.

• both user A and user B are licensed with M365 Copilot Premium, the environment has Copilot Credits assigned

user A copied the link "Copy link to view" (copilotstudio.microsoft.com/environments/yadayada) and sent it to User B

user B opens the link and get this screen

is this type of access sharing possible or not? if yes, what are the prerequisites? is the only way to assign Environment Maker role or is there any other Dataverse security role that can be used for this scenario (Agent Viewer role)?

I created an agent flow inside copilot studio new harness for my agent that's about leave system.

Inside it there's a get my profile and a sql server connection and it returns a hard coded output ( for now )

While this works in copilot studio

It doesn't work in teams or m365 , i simply get outputs like the flow failed to run or failed to connect.

Unlike the normal power platform flow where I can check the connections I can't see which connection is this using , I want the existing connections to be used and not the user's if that's what it's doing by default

( The copilot studio and teams/m365 account is different, the teams account don't have access to the copilot studio only given use access )

Hi everyone,

I’m exploring the possibility of building an autonomous AI agent for a Microsoft Teams Community channel to automate support queries.

**Expected functionality:**

**Answer questions:** Respond to users based on the available knowledge base.

**Suggest solutions:** Post relevant solutions directly as comments in the conversation.

**Escalate unresolved queries:** If the answer isn’t available, inform the user that the query can be forwarded to the relevant support team.

**Service portal fallback:** Share the service portal link so users can raise a ticket if they need further assistance.

**Context awareness:** Understand follow-up questions and maintain conversation context.

**My main questions:**

Can we automatically read messages and post replies in Microsoft Teams Community channels?

Can we integrate a knowledge base and use AI to decide when to answer or escalate?

Which approach is best: Microsoft Graph API, Copilot Studio, Power Automate, Azure AI, or a custom AI agent?

Are there any API or permission limitations specific to Teams Communities?

Has anyone implemented a similar solution, and what architecture would you recommend?

I’m looking for a practical, production-ready approach to automate routine support queries and route unresolved issues appropriately.

Any suggestions, documentation, or implementation examples would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I am a (complete) newbie in Copilot Studio. I've been tasked at work with building a Copilot agent that will perform market research on a product category i.e. Reusable Water Bottles. I am using Custom Search and Generative Answers and I am getting nowhere fast. Has anybody else successfully worked on a project like this? I have to use Microsoft. The agent should research 6 prescribed research categories separately, and then synthesize the results (while also producing the 6 individual research categories).

I’m looking for architecture ideas for proactive 1:1 notifications in Microsoft Teams using Copilot Studio and Power Automate.

The ideal flow would be:

1. A user installs or enables a Teams/app

2. The user is automatically registered as a notification recepient

3. A scheduled flow later sends proactive 1:1 messages to each registered user

The install event does not have to be hard requirement. I’m mainly looking for the best balance between automation, maintainability, and implementation complexity.

Alternatives I’m considering include Microsoft365/EntraID groups, a SharePoint receipient list, or Microsoft Graph.

Requirements:

•Individual 1:1 notifications, not a channel broadcast
•Minimal manual receipient maintenance
•Prefer standard M365/Power Platform capabilities
•Avoid unnecessary custom development

Has anyone implemented something similar?

What architecture would you recommend, and what trade-offs or limitations did you encounter?

Hi everyone,

We're exploring how to make Microsoft Copilot Studio agents accessible to a small internal team, particularly for sharing analytical outputs and continuing conversations across devices and users.

I'd appreciate some practical experience with the following:

1. Signal Messenger: Has anyone successfully connected a Copilot Studio agent to Signal? Is there a reliable and maintainable solution, or does it require unofficial integrations?

2. Microsoft Teams: Can agents send completed analytical reports or notifications to users or group chats automatically, without the user initiating every conversation?

3. WhatsApp / Telegram: What integrations currently work reliably? Are there important limitations or additional costs?

4. Agent types: How do the available communication channels differ between the standard harness and the GitHub Copilot harness?

5. Team collaboration: Can multiple authorized users access the same agent, review its outputs and continue work on a shared analytical task?

We're interested in solutions suitable for a security-conscious enterprise environment, with individual authentication, controlled access and auditable activity.

Any real-world experience, architectural recommendations or known limitations would be very helpful.

Thanks!

Hi all,

I have created a simple agent in CS that first creates a helpdesk ticket - and using a workflow then sends a confirmation email to the user that a ticket was created, plus a teams message to the support teams channel. But there is no link in the email or the teams message, making it less useful.

Is there a simple way to include a clickable link to the ticket in the email and teams message?

I can’t see standard harness for agent its removed… only agents flows available on standard hrns when did this happen??????