Question 1

Why would I even need a custom agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Accepted Answer

If you find yourself pasting the same prompt, the same instructions, or the same knowledge sources into Copilot over and over, that's your signal. A custom agent lets you create a repeatable, scenario-specific conversational experience with preloaded instructions, knowledge, and actions — so you're not re-coaching Copilot every time. It also lets you connect to external business systems and take actions on your behalf, turning a generic chatbot into something tailored to your actual work.

Question 2

How many options do I really have for building a Copilot agent?

Accepted Answer

Microsoft marketing likes to pitch it as two choices — Copilot Studio or jump off a cliff into pro-code with Foundry SDKs — but that's disingenuous. You actually have four options when extending M365 Copilot: SharePoint agents, Agent Builder (formerly called Copilot Studio Light), Copilot Studio, and declarative agents built with the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit in VS Code. The fifth option is owning your entire AI stack outside M365 with something like Foundry, Bedrock, or Vertex.

Question 3

Is the declarative agent / Agents Toolkit path only for developers?

Accepted Answer

No, and I'll push back hard on Microsoft for framing it that way. Declarative agents are JSON and text files — a manifest, instructions, and capability definitions. It's a developer-oriented tool, but it's not a pro-code-only experience. You can do almost everything Copilot Studio does without writing real code. It's more accurate to call it low-code with a developer workflow.

Question 4

What's the difference between Agent Builder and Copilot Studio?

Accepted Answer

Agent Builder (what Microsoft briefly called Copilot Studio Light) lives inside the Copilot chat experience and is meant for quick, personal or small-team agents. It supports knowledge sources like SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, and web search, plus a few capabilities like image generation. Copilot Studio is the full-featured, web-based, low-code tool with topics, Power Automate flow integration, triggers, model selection, Dataverse, and publishing for the whole enterprise. Agent Builder is a lightweight subset.

Question 5

Do different agent-building tools use the same orchestrator?

Accepted Answer

No — and this is one of the biggest hidden surprises. There are at least two orchestrators. Declarative agents built with the Agents Toolkit run on the orchestrator codenamed Sydney. Copilot Studio agents run on a different one codenamed Samba. You can't switch between them, and they have different capabilities and different access to tools and data.

Question 6

Does the orchestrator choice actually change what I get back?

Accepted Answer

Yes, materially. Build the exact same agent with the exact same name, description, and instructions in both tools and you can get different results. For example, the declarative agent orchestrator can return up to ten SharePoint documents from the semantic index, while Copilot Studio is limited to three — and there's no setting to change that. New capabilities also tend to land on the declarative agent orchestrator first because Microsoft's own first-party agents like Researcher and Analyst are built as declarative agents on that same stack.

Question 7

What is the semantic index and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

The semantic index is Microsoft's moat — nothing in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity has an equivalent. On top of Microsoft Graph, Microsoft built a second index (separate from the keyword-based Microsoft Search index) that stores content as embeddings in a vector database. There are actually two: one for organizational content (SharePoint, OneDrive) and one for user content (mailbox, chats, transcripts). It enables semantic, meaning-based retrieval instead of keyword matching, and everything is security-trimmed per user at query time.

Question 8

Do I get the semantic index if I'm only using pay-as-you-go Copilot?

Accepted Answer

No. The semantic index only turns on in your tenant if you have at least one active $30/user/month Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you're doing pure pay-as-you-go / metered consumption with no per-user licenses, you're missing the semantic index entirely — which means a much worse Copilot experience and agents that look far less capable than they actually are.

Question 9

What's the real pricing picture for Copilot?

Accepted Answer

It's $30/user/month for Microsoft 365 Copilot, but organizations with fewer than roughly 2,000 employees can get it for about $21/user/month. There are also message/credit packs (around 25,000 credits for $200/month) and a pure pay-as-you-go metered model. One per-user license in the tenant is enough to light up the semantic index for everyone else on the metered model. Don't take licensing details as gospel though — it changes constantly.

Question 10

Can I elevate permissions for a specific agent so it can access things the user can't?

Accepted Answer

Not with standard declarative agents or Copilot Studio — Copilot always acts on behalf of the current user and everything is security-trimmed. There's emerging work around Entra agent IDs and digital IDs that give agents their own identity, but today if you truly need elevated access, the practical answer is to stand up a REST API you control that enforces its own auth, and call it from your agent as an action.

Question 11

How secure is it to build an agent that reads confidential content?

Accepted Answer

Security trimming is automatic. When Copilot's orchestrator queries the semantic index, it issues the query as the user who asked the question. If you don't have access to a document, email, or calendar in the first place, it won't come back in results — same model as SharePoint search. Content is all indexed, but access is enforced at query time per user.

Question 12

Can I connect a declarative agent to Azure AI Search?

Accepted Answer

Copilot Studio has a native Azure AI Search connector. With declarative agents there's no native connector, but you have two paths: wrap it in a REST API that you expose to the agent as an action, or connect an MCP server that fronts Azure AI Search. So yes, it's doable — just via different plumbing.

Question 13

Can declarative agents read from Dataverse?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A lot of people assume Dataverse is a Power Platform thing and therefore Copilot Studio only, but declarative agents built with the Agents Toolkit can access the same Dataverse tables via the capabilities model.

Question 14

Can I trigger Power Automate flows from my agent?

Accepted Answer

Yes, if you use Copilot Studio — you can wire up agent flows (and multiple child flows) natively. No, if you're using declarative agents with the Agents Toolkit — that's not a native capability today.

Question 15

SharePoint agents — what are they actually limited to?

Accepted Answer

A SharePoint agent lives inside a single document library and its only knowledge source is documents — from that site, other sites, or OneDrive. You can give it a name, description, starter prompts, and instructions to coach its tone and behavior, but you can't give it skills, REST API calls, or other external sources. As of the webinar, SharePoint pages were still not supported as a source.

Question 16

Can I publish agents to unlicensed users?

Accepted Answer

No. Anyone using a Copilot agent needs to be licensed for Copilot — whether that's a $30/user/month seat, message/credit packs, or pay-as-you-go metered. You can publish agents inside or outside your org, but consumers still need a license.

Question 17

What's the cheapest way to get a dev tenant for Copilot work?

Accepted Answer

Rather than fighting with the Microsoft 365 Developer Program tenants, buy a Microsoft 365 Business Basic / Essentials license directly. Month-to-month it's about $7.20/user/month; commit annually and it drops to about $6/user/month (effectively two months free). Add one Copilot license on top (~$21/user/month for small orgs) and you're looking at roughly $415 for a full year of a real tenant you can build and test in. Copilot is a 12-month commitment so you might as well commit on the base license too.

Question 18

Do I need a Copilot Studio license separately?

Accepted Answer

If you have the $30/user/month Microsoft 365 Copilot license, Copilot Studio is included for building agents that run inside Copilot. Licensing changes constantly, so don't quote me — verify before you buy.

Question 19

How does Copilot actually answer a prompt under the covers?

Accepted Answer

It's not one round trip. You send a prompt, the orchestrator first asks the LLM 'based on my available data sources and this question, what data do you need?' The LLM replies with a shopping list (for example: Andrew's calendar for today, attendees, recent communications with each). The orchestrator goes off to Graph, the semantic index, web search, connectors, plugins, etc., collects it all, then sends a second prompt to the LLM with the user's question plus all that RAG data. There can be multiple round trips before a final answer comes back — that's why you see the thinking animation.

Question 20

What's the difference between knowledge and actions?

Accepted Answer

Knowledge is what the model already 'knows' — either from its foundational training (how many continents there are) or from custom knowledge you've attached (your corporate PTO policy as a Word doc in SharePoint). Actions are when the agent needs to go do something in the real world in real time — fetch a stock quote, call a REST API, submit a request, get current weather. Knowledge is recall; actions are doing.

Question 21

How do external connectors differ between Copilot Studio and declarative agents?

Accepted Answer

If you create an external connection in Copilot Studio (ServiceNow, Salesforce, etc.), that content lives inside Dataverse and is only usable from inside Copilot Studio. If instead you create a Graph connector from the Microsoft 365 admin center, you get a much larger connector gallery (around 90&#43; connectors), fine-grained control over what gets indexed, per-item ACLs, and activity signals — and that index is usable by declarative agents, Microsoft Search, Work/Content IQ, and more. You can also build custom Graph connectors to ingest unstructured content like transcripts and SOPs into the semantic index.

Question 22

How did Andrew Connell get the semantic index to see his course transcripts?

Accepted Answer

He built a custom Graph connector to ingest transcripts from all of his video courses — content that didn't live in Microsoft 365 — into an external connection. Once ingested it gets semantically indexed, and declarative agents can reference that connection by ID as a knowledge source.

Question 23

Can Copilot agents call MCP servers?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Both Copilot Studio and declarative agents support actions backed by REST APIs or MCP servers. It's a practical way to plug in capabilities that aren't native — including using Microsoft Graph from a declarative agent to read and write SharePoint lists without writing any code yourself.

Question 24

Can a declarative agent do 'topics' the way Copilot Studio does?

Accepted Answer

Not natively. Copilot Studio's topics let you collect specific fields from the user (for PTO: when, how long, where, balance). In a declarative agent you replicate that with good prompt engineering in the instructions — tell the model what information it needs, how to prompt the user if it's missing, and how to respond when it has everything.

Question 25

What's behavior overrides in a declarative agent?

Accepted Answer

It's a setting that tells the orchestrator to ignore the LLM's foundational knowledge when it conflicts with the knowledge you've given the agent. For example, if you only want PTO policy decisions based on your specific SharePoint Word doc — not whatever the model thinks is standard — flip behavior overrides so foundational knowledge is suppressed.

Question 26

Is Copilot adoption actually strong? What did the Wall Street Journal report say?

Accepted Answer

It was not flattering. A Wall Street Journal article from early February covered a survey of about 150,000 Copilot subscribers run from July 2025 through January 2026. The share using Copilot as their primary AI dropped from ~18% to ~11% over six months. Many cited poor UX and restrictive usage limits and preferred ChatGPT or Gemini. Some companies were only using about 10% of the Copilot licenses they'd already paid for. Microsoft appears to know — the internal reorgs around Copilot reflect that.

Question 27

What governance story is there for agents?

Accepted Answer

Honestly, it's weak — and that's one of the biggest red flags. Especially with Copilot Studio, agents can be published broadly with minimal controls. At DEF CON there was a live demo where researchers scanned the public web, found unauthenticated Copilot Studio agents published on company sites, and on stage talked one into dumping an entire Salesforce CRM. Almost certainly not the builder's intent. If you have real governance requirements, think twice about who gets to build and publish, and consider the Agents Toolkit path where SDLC and source control are first-class.

Question 28

Should my team pick Copilot Studio or the Agents Toolkit?

Accepted Answer

It's not a ranking — they target different humans. Copilot Studio fits low-code / no-code makers, information workers, and business analysts who want a visual experience. The Agents Toolkit fits teams that want source control, CI/CD, real SDLC, deployment control, and a security mindset. Also consider: who's using the agent (you, a small team, the enterprise?), what knowledge sources and actions are needed, and your governance requirements. Both can build almost the same agent — the Venn diagram is nearly a circle — but each has small things only it can do.

Question 29

Fun fact: how long has Andrew been doing this, and what's the SharePoint anniversary joke?

Accepted Answer

SharePoint recently turned 25. Andrew had his 50th birthday two days before that — meaning he's spent roughly half his life and the majority of his career on one product. He called it either depressing or a midlife crisis. He's been a Microsoft MVP for 22 years.

Question 30

Where can I hear more from Andrew besides the workshops?

Accepted Answer

He co-hosts the Code, Deploy, Go Live podcast with Julie Turner — episode 29 (with the PnPjs maintainers) dropped the day of the webinar. He also writes a bi-weekly newsletter called the Full Stack M365 Dev Playbook that ships every other Tuesday.

Evaluate your Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Options

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