What you’ll see this month: New generally available capabilities for multi-agent coordination across Microsoft Fabric, the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK, and open Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocols—all of which help agents collaborate across your ecosystem and perform more valuable work. Plus, you’ll find updates to prompt authoring, model choice, and governance controls that can help make it faster to build and refine high-quality agent experiences with confidence.

Agents that work together across your entire ecosystem

The challenge in scaling AI inside an organization isn’t creating a useful agent. It’s about getting many agents—across teams and tools—to work together in a way that’s reliable and repeatable.

In many organizations, data teams might build one kind of agent, app teams another, and productivity teams yet another. Each agent can be valuable on its own, but once a workflow needs knowledge from one system, reasoning from another, and action in a third—teams often run into brittle handoffs and custom integration work. This slows agent adoption and makes it harder to move from promising pilots to real business impact.

This month, Copilot Studio takes a meaningful step forward: several multi-agent capabilities are rolling out to general availability over the next few weeks, giving your teams new ways to connect and orchestrate agents across your ecosystem. These updates include Microsoft Fabric integration, Microsoft 365 Agents SDK orchestration, and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication—all designed to help your agents operate together as a coordinated system rather than in isolated silos.

Multi-agent support for Microsoft Fabric

With multi-agent support, your Copilot Studio agents can work with Fabric agents to reason over enterprise data and analytics at scale. That means you can connect business-facing agent experiences more directly to the data estate they already rely on, without treating every data-intensive scenario like a one-off engineering project. Instead of working with limited or disconnected data, these agents will be able to operate with full business context—helping make their outputs more accurate, relevant, and actionable.

Multi-agent support for the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK

Using the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK, teams can now orchestrate Copilot Studio agents alongside agents built for Microsoft 365 experiences. Instead of recreating the same logic across multiple agents (think retrieving data, applying business rules, or completing common tasks), you’ll be able to reuse and combine existing capabilities. This makes it easier to compose cross-app workflows from what’s already been built, reducing duplication and keeping experiences more efficient and consistent.

Agent-to-Agent (A2A) support

With A2A support, Copilot Studio agents can directly communicate with and delegate work to other agents—first-party, second-party, or third-party—using an open protocol that allows universal access. This matters because the future of enterprise AI will not belong to a single stack. Organizations need to build agents on platforms that can participate in a broader ecosystem, not just operate within one product boundary. Copilot Studio A2A provides that interoperability and power.

The impact of multi-agent systems

We’ve already seen the power of this approach with the Ask Microsoft web agent, one of our early “customer zero” implementations. As site traffic and knowledge sources grew, the single-agent architecture began to strain, creating slower response times. Using Copilot Studio, the team upgraded the agent to a modern architecture with generative orchestration and multi-agent coordination.

Now, multiple sub-agents handle different parts of the site—Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, pricing, trials, and more—while the main agent orchestrates them to provide fast, coherent, multi-turn responses. This setup allows Ask Microsoft to answer complex questions involving multiple products or services, and to tailor responses based on where the customer is on the site.

Building a more advanced assistant with Copilot Studio has meaningfully raised the bar for our customer experience and enabled us to scale faster across products to deliver real business impact

– Alyse Muttera, Director of eCommerce Programs at Microsoft

To show how this approach works in other organizations, consider a common scenario at a bank. The loan department has one agent handling mortgage applications, while the banking department runs a separate agent for account inquiries. A customer, however, expects a single seamless experience.

Multi-agent orchestration lets each specialized agent manage its area of expertise while coordinating responses behind the scenes. For instance, if a customer asks about a mortgage payment and their account balance in the same interaction, the system delivers a cohesive, context-aware answer that combines insights from both agents—no juggling multiple interfaces required.

When specialized agents work together behind the scenes, customers can get a unified experience and employees can get time back.

That’s exactly the kind of impact Coca‑Cola Beverages Africa is realizing today by using Copilot Studio agents and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to autonomously run planning cycles and automate workflows end to end, saving planners 1 to 1.5 hours every day.

These features will be fully available to all eligible customers as of April 2026. Three capabilities, one outcome: agents that can operate more like a system and less like a collection of disconnected point solutions.

Build prompts faster while maintaining control

As agent experiences grow more sophisticated, the quality of the prompt an agent maker uses matters more. A great prompt yields more powerful results from agents than a good prompt, and fine-tuning prompts is key to unlocking them.

But in practice, prompt iteration has historically felt disjointed and slow. Makers previously balanced their flow of work with jumping into a separate editor, making a small change, testing it, and then repeating the process again. That friction can add up quickly, especially when teams are tuning prompts for specialized business scenarios.

The new immersive Prompt Builder, now generally available, helps reduce that friction by bringing prompt editing directly into each agent’s Tools tab. You can update instructions, switch models, add inputs or knowledge, and test changes—all in one place. Instead of breaking context every time you want to refine an agent’s behavior, you can iterate while staying grounded in the agent you’re building.

This matters most in real-world scenarios where prompt behavior is tied to domain knowledge and policy nuance. For example, a team building an agent to support clinical documentation might need to refine instructions, swap in a better knowledge source, and test outputs against terminology that is common in healthcare but more likely to trigger default safeguards. Doing that from one workspace can make iteration faster and help lower the effort required to get a production-ready result.

More options for prompts: Content moderation and model choice

Speaking of triggering default safeguards, Copilot Studio has also added content moderation settings for prompts, now generally available in supported regions. This gives makers more control over harmful content sensitivity on managed models, including turning down that sensitivity to help unblock legitimate scenarios in industries like healthcare, insurance, and law enforcement, where default settings may be overly restrictive for the content being processed.

For even more control over prompts, the Prompt Tool now supports Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 in paid experimental preview in the United States. That gives makers more choice in matching the right model to the right prompt, rather than forcing every scenario into the same tradeoff profile. This feature is great for teams that want more flexibility in how they balance performance, reasoning depth, and cost.

All together, these improvements help teams move faster on prompt iteration while maintaining the control and flexibility required in production scenarios.

What else is new and improved in Copilot Studio

We have also recently released several additional updates across automation, meetings, retrieval quality, and model support.

• ServiceNow and Azure DevOps connector quality improvements are now generally available. These help agents better understand operational questions, retrieve the right ticket or work item data, and return more complete, actionable answers automatically.
• Evaluation automation APIs are now generally available through Microsoft Power Platform APIs and connectors. These APIs help make it easier to run evaluations programmatically and integrate quality checks into continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows.
• Agents for Microsoft Teams meetings can now access real-time meeting transcripts and group chat. This supports scenarios like answering questions during the meeting, surfacing relevant information, or helping track decisions and follow-ups as they happen.
• Model context protocol (MCP) apps and Apps SDK support have expanded how agents connect to your external work apps, helping to make it easier to integrate business systems and enable agents to take action across your broader ecosystem—not just respond with information.
• Additional model support, including Grok 4.1 Fast, GPT-5.3 Thinking, and GPT-5.4 Instant in paid experimental preview, gives makers more options as they tune experiences for speed, cost, and capability.

Overall, these updates reflect a continuing broader shift in Copilot Studio: moving from building individual AI experiences to building connected, governed systems that can fit more naturally into how work already happens. As you scale up your organization’s use of multi-agent ecosystems, these will help your teams reach further across channels and knowledge sources to more accurately fulfill your business needs.

Stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio

More is coming in April 2026 across voice channels, workflows, and the building experience. Check out all the updates as we ship them, as well as new features releasing in the next few months here: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

To learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio and how it can transform productivity within your organization, visit the Copilot Studio website or sign up for our free trial today.

The post New and improved: Multi-agent orchestration, connected experiences, and faster prompt iteration appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Microsoft Copilot Studio and Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot are designed to help customers reliably create agents that scale and deliver real, sustained business value—not just prototypes. Recent enhancements focus on making it easier to move from building an agent to running one confidently across complex, dynamic environments, with consistent quality and the ability to evolve as business needs change.

Discover the latest capabilities in agent evaluations, exciting updates for computer-using agents (including expanded model support), a new Agent Academy Operative training path, and more. Plus, learn how you can use these capabilities to help ensure your agents are ready for scale.

Build trust at scale with enhanced agent evaluations in Copilot Studio

Agents aren’t “set and forget.” Prompts evolve, models update, and data changes—which raises a critical question as agents take on real work: can we trust them at scale? Agent evaluations answer that question with evidence. They’re designed to turn expectations into measurable checks, help teams catch regressions early, and provide a repeatable way to assess agent quality as behavior and context evolve.

For example, a finance leader rolling out an agent for expense policy guidance or month‑end analysis needs to trust its behavior before moving beyond a pilot. With enhanced agent evaluations in Copilot Studio, teams can now validate performance using their own scenarios, policies, and production data—measuring quality, usability, and responsiveness across a full test set instead of isolated cases.

Side‑by‑side comparisons then help catch regressions before changes go live. Meanwhile, built‑in transparency and session replays support internal and external stakeholder review. The result is a clear, evidence‑based path from experimentation to trusted deployment.

Available in public preview, here’s a quick rundown of the latest eval enhancements.

Holistic and multi-dimensional agent evaluation

• Set-level grading framework: You can now evaluate agents across an entire test set instead of individual test cases, enabling an accurate measure of overall quality. By consolidating results from multiple tasks, makers can better understand real-world performance by seeing how agents maintain quality across a range of scenarios.
• Multiple graders per test set: With the ability to apply multiple grading approaches—such as quality, performance, and usability assessments—to the same test set, teams can gain a more complete evaluation without the complexity of managing separate test sets.
• Comparative testing: Teams can compare multiple agent versions side by side, which can make it easier to spot regressions and validate improvements before pushing the best version live.

Improved transparency and control

• User reactions and feedback: Makers can now provide quick feedback on evaluation results using a simple thumbs up or thumbs down action. This feedback helps Copilot Studio capture signals about evaluation accuracy, grader alignment, and edge cases, which means our team can continuously refine our evaluation models and improve result quality for agent makers.
• Open activity map in evaluation: Direct integration with the activity map gives teams immediate insight into how agents executed tasks, helping identify where issues occurred faster and improve optimization.
• Enterprise-grade auditing: Advanced session replays, action logs, and Microsoft Purview integration offer detailed visibility into agent behavior, helping makers preserve quality and streamline troubleshooting.

Streamlined workflow and data integration

• CSV downloadable format: Makers can now download a ready-to-use comma-separated values (CSV) template that follows the exact structure required for importing test cases into evaluation. Instead of creating files from scratch—and running into formatting errors, missing columns, or failed imports—teams can rely on a validated template that can help shorten setup time and remove unnecessary friction.
• Import production data into evaluation: Real-world production data can now be imported directly into evaluations, providing high-quality test sets that reflect actual user interactions. This is designed to improve evaluation accuracy and help makers tune agents more closely to their specific audiences.
• Import and export of test sets, test cases, and results: Makers can import or export test sets, individual test cases, and evaluation results. This helps simplify teamwork and support repeatable testing across environments—essentials for enterprise-scale agent development.

Scale automation across real-world systems with nimbler computer use

Most organizations don’t lack ideas for automation. Instead, the challenge tends to be with fragmented systems, limited APIs, legacy desktop tools, and workflows that go across multiple departments. Replacing everything isn’t realistic. But maintaining brittle, script-based automation isn’t sustainable either.

Copilot Studio’s computer-using agents (CUAs) can address this gap by interacting directly with web and desktop interfaces, supporting automation across systems that weren’t designed to integrate. They facilitate automation in complex, dynamic environments where traditional robotic process automation (RPA) falls short.

Consider a customer support organization handling service requests across disconnected systems. When a customer submits a support request, a computer-using agent can:

1. Retrieve customer and entitlement details from the customer relationship management (CRM) system.
2. Create or update a case in the service management system.
3. Pull relevant troubleshooting steps from a knowledge base.
4. Update the case status and resolution checklist in Microsoft SharePoint.
5. Notify the assigned service representative and escalate if service-level agreements (SLAs) are at risk.

This would be impossible with RPA alone because of the need to transcend systems. Although pieces could be automated, a person historically would need to initiate each step. With computer use, the organization can now accelerate this process and mitigate missed steps, without requiring a redesign of existing systems.

And the latest updates enhance the value of your computer-using agents, adding key capabilities that enable improved flexibility, security, and scalability:

• Expanded model availability: We’ve added Claude Sonnet 4.5 as an additional model choice for CUAs. You can choose between Anthropic models and OpenAI’s Computer-Using Agent to get the best possible results for your task.
• Built-in credentials: Simplify and secure authentication with built-in credentials that require minimal setup. Users simply input their username and password once, and Copilot Studio stores the credentials securely.
• Enterprise-grade logging and auditing: New monitoring tools, integrated with Microsoft Purview, enhance computer-using agent session visibility. This includes detailed logs of agent activity and session replays with screenshots that support traceability and compliance processes.
• Cloud PC pool: Powered by Windows 365 for Agents, this scalable, managed cloud infrastructure integrates with Microsoft Entra and Intune. These PC pools auto-scale based on workload demand, helping you handle spikes without over-provisioning.

We know the more tools that help drive operational efficiency while maintaining control over automated workflows, the more confident teams can be about adopting computer use. That’s why these updates help elevate computer-using agents as a more reliable, adaptable solution for enterprises looking to scale their use of agentic automation.

Learn to build multi-agent systems with the Agent Academy Operative path

Finished the Recruit training from the Copilot Studio Agent Academy and looking to go deeper? The new Operative path unlocks the next level of training for agent makers who are ready to build their skills. It’s designed for practitioners who already have their first agent working and want to expand their skills to build more sophisticated, production-ready solutions.

The Operative path walks learners through building a complex, multi-agent hiring automation system, using it as an applied learning example that can be adapted to any business scenario.

Along the way, participants develop critical skills such as writing clear and effective agent instructions, selecting and evaluating AI models, and applying advanced prompt patterns, agent flow integration, and Model Context Protocol (MCP). The curriculum also emphasizes operational readiness, including feedback loops, telemetry, and AI safety throughout the agent lifecycle.

By the end of the path, learners can gain a deeper understanding of how to design, build, and architect scalable multi-agent systems that can evolve with business needs. For creators ready to move from basic agents to more advanced, reliable solutions, the Operative path provides a practical and structured next step.

What else is new and improved in Copilot Studio

Now, let’s take a quick look at some other exciting updates—all generally available (GA)—that further enhance your Copilot Studio (and Agent Builder) experience:

• Copy agents from Agent Builder into Copilot Studio to scale impact: Agents that start as individual ideas in Agent Builder and prove team-wide value can now be opened directly in Copilot Studio for a more extensive maker experience. This unlocks advanced features such as topics, automations, expanded publishing channels, and enterprise governance controls, including data loss prevention and application lifecycle management. For example, a support representative’s personal helper agent can be expanded into a shared tool that categorizes tickets, suggests responses, and routes issues to the right specialists—without rebuilding from scratch.
• Query your agent inventory from Azure Resource Graph: The Microsoft Power Platform agent inventory, which organizes and displays all your published Copilot Studio and Agent Builder agents, is now generally available. Admins can query this inventory programmatically using Azure Resource Graph to access detailed data about both draft and published agents across the tenant, using Azure portal, CLI, PowerShell, or REST API.
• Generate icons for your agents using AI in Agent Builder: Makers can now generate custom agent icons directly in Agent Builder using AI. Instead of browsing or creating artwork manually, they simply describe how the icon should look—using the agent’s description or a custom prompt—and get a unique icon designed to stand out in the Agent Store.
• Try the Copilot Studio extension for Visual Studio Code: The Copilot Studio extension lets teams version, edit, and deploy agents directly from Visual Studio Code, making it easier to align with existing software development workflows.

The big takeaway: Stronger Copilot Studio tools for more scalable agent experiences

These updates aren’t just new features; they strengthen the tools teams rely on to create agents that scale with their business. By enhancing flexibility, security, and visibility, these updates are designed to make it easier to scale agents without starting over each time.

This continuity helps makers innovate quickly while IT teams maintain control over governance, compliance, and performance—bridging the gap between rapid iteration and enterprise-grade reliability. Why? Because at the end of the day, the best agents are those that are built to grow with your needs, and with these updates, that evolution becomes more attainable every month.

Stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio

Check out all the updates as we ship them, as well as new features releasing in the next few months here: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

To learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio and how it can transform productivity within your organization, visit the Copilot Studio website or sign up for our free trial today.

The post New and improved: Agent evaluations, computer use, and advanced maker training appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

This shift marks the moment AI moved from helping people do work faster to helping organizations optimize their workflows.

Microsoft Copilot Studio has played a central role in this transition. It gives you more flexibility to evaluate and use the models best suited to your business as agent adoption scales.

In 2025, we laid the groundwork for what scalable, impactful agentic work should look like. In 2026, we believe the organizations that benefit most will be the ones that build on that foundation. These six trends define what organizations need to make agent adoption stick in 2026 and beyond:

1. Ability for anyone to turn intent into agents
2. Agents that can own workflows from end to end
3. Power to coordinate agents for real outcomes
4. Flexibility to control your agent models
5. Agents that can act across your systems
6. Capability to scale agents without sacrificing control

Organizations that have all six aren’t just experimenting with agents. They’re operationalizing them, turning curiosity into confidence, and transmuting innovation into sustained business value.

1. Ability for anyone to turn intent into agents

Historically, building an agent meant translating business intent into technical instructions. This process slowed adoption and limited who could participate. In 2025, that barrier fell away. Conversation became the agent-making interface in both Copilot Studio and the Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Now, people can describe what they want done using natural language and create an agent to do it. These agents can interpret intent, context, and goals thanks to their underlying model and knowledge, not specially built code.

That shift is designed to empower everyone on your team to build agents. Sales leaders, operations managers, and human resource (HR) officials no longer need to wait for technical assistance to automate everyday work. Meanwhile, IT teams retain clarity and structure under the hood, with agents grounded in logic that can be reviewed, refined, and governed—all in Copilot Studio.

The results? Faster fast agent creation, broader participation, and fewer translation gaps between business needs and technical execution.

For example, a sales operations manager can now describe and publish an agent that:

• Monitors pipeline changes, such as changed estimated close dates.
• Flags deals that may be at risk, based on predefined criteria (e.g., no activity with stakeholders for over a month).
• Notifies account owners with recommended next steps based on the type of flag.

The payoff: More people can build knowledgeable, context-aware, and helpful agents, which can translate to less bottlenecking on centralized teams and faster time to value.

2. Agents that can own workflows from end to end

For many teams, early adoption wins came from AI assistance: drafting content, summarizing meetings, answering questions. Useful, but incremental. In 2025, agents crossed an important threshold; they evolved from helping with work to handling it on your behalf. With agent flows and the Workflows Agent, agents can now own repeatable processes from end to end, automatically advancing work when required.

In other words, agents unlock new opportunities to streamline and scale how work gets done. An onboarding process no longer stalls due to a missed handoff. A request doesn’t linger in a queue waiting for manual follow-up. Agents move work along reliably with automated approvals, escalating to humans only when judgment is required. For leaders, that can mean faster cycle times and fewer hidden bottlenecks. For teams, it can translate to more time spent on decisions—not coordination.

For example, a company could use Copilot Studio to automate a multi-step process for expense submission, validation, and reimbursement. The process:

• Triggers when an employee submits a wellness or reimbursement request.
• Guides the employee through required forms and documentation in a single, user-friendly flow.
• Validates submissions against global wellness policy rules and regional guidelines.
• Routes requests across the appropriate software as a service (SaaS) tools and internal HR systems.
• Escalates exceptions to a human only when needed.

The payoff: Faster resolutions using consistent criteria, less potential for human error, and a daily pain point made smoother with an agent.

3. Power to coordinate agents for real outcomes

Often, meaningful business outcomes don’t happen in a single step or system. As soon as agents move beyond simple tasks, coordination becomes increasingly challenging. Multi-agent systems addressed this complexity head-on in 2025, allowing agents to specialize, delegate, and collaborate toward shared goals.

Instead of designing one agent to handle every step, organizations can now compose agents that mirror how teams already work. One agent might monitor signals, while another gathers or validates information, and a third prepares recommendations or takes action.

Together, these agents are designed deliver outcomes that would be difficult for any single agent to manage alone. More importantly, they remove a layer of decision-making from the stakeholder. Instead of figuring out which system or agent holds the right answer, you can simply ask your question and let the agentic system coordinate the rest. Complex workflows become easier to reason about, evolve, and scale—without adding mental overhead for the people involved.

For example, a manufacturing company might use:

• One agent grounded in internal policy and safety documentation.
• Another agent trained on equipment manuals and training materials.
• A third agent connected to supplier-provided expertise.
• A coordinating agent that evaluates each question and routes it to the right source automatically.

The payoff: More clarity around which system or agent to use—just ask, and the right expertise can come together behind the scenes. This can help keep complex work cohesive, not cobbled together.

4. Flexibility to control your agent models

As agents moved into real business workflows, one reality became clear: not every task has the same requirements or permissions. Some scenarios call for deeper reasoning. Others prioritize repeatability and efficiency at scale. Still, others must meet strict regulatory, security, or data residency standards.

In 2025, Copilot Studio expanded model choice to meet those needs. It now supports Anthropic models, chat and reasoning-specific models, access to thousands of models through Microsoft Foundry, and bring-your-own-model options. You can select the right model for each workload while IT teams maintain policy alignment and oversight. This gives your organization flexibility in how agents behave and perform, without fragmenting the experience.

For example, an organization in a regulated field might use:

• One model optimized for policy interpretation and complex reasoning.
• Another tuned for cost efficiency in high-volume, repeatable requests.
• Central governance to ensure each model is applied appropriately.

The payoff: Instead of compromising between performance and compliance, agents can be configured to match the realities of the work they support—and evolve as those requirements change.

5. Agents that can act across your systems

For years, AI has been good at suggesting what people should do, but it hasn’t been equipped to help make it happen. In 2025, capabilities like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and computer use began to close that gap. Agents can now connect to systems, navigate interfaces, and take action across tools—not just give recommendations.

This addresses one of the biggest gaps in early AI adoption by reducing the handoffs that drastically slow work. When agents can act across environments to update records, trigger workflows, and interact with real systems (like clicking around a website and filling out form fields), work moves forward automatically, at any time of day. This can help reduce delays, manual errors, and the risk that important follow-ups get lost between tools or teams.

For example, an operations agent could autonomously:

• Identify a supply issue based on predefined signals.
• Update the system of record with the latest status.
• Fill out and file a ticket to initiate remediation.
• Notify relevant stakeholders with context and next steps.

The payoff: Faster response times, fewer handoffs, and agents that operate across real-world systems, not just chat windows.

6. Capability to scale agents without sacrificing control

Widespread agent adoption raises a familiar concern: How do you prevent innovation from outpacing governance? Leaders want to move quickly, but not at the expense of visibility, security, or cost control. In 2025, Copilot Studio addressed that gap by bringing lifecycle management, agent evaluations, and enterprise controls directly into the agent experience.

Organizations can now understand which agents are in use, how they’re performing, and what they cost across environments. Admin controls are designed to align agent behavior with intended use, while agent evaluations support ongoing quality and improvement. Paired with Microsoft Agent 365, organizations get a unified view of agents across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, giving business and IT leaders the clarity needed to scale with confidence.

For example, IT leaders can:

• See which agents are used, by whom, and at what cost.
• Evaluate agent quality and performance over time.
• Communicate performance insights to business leaders to help increase buy-in, investment, and adoption.
• Apply consistent governance without slowing innovation.

The payoff: Agents can move from pilots to production faster, with fewer surprises and clearer business impact.

How to turn agentic momentum into results

The question for 2026 isn’t whether agents will be used—it’s how deliberately they’ll be put to work. Over the past year, the foundations for scalable agent adoption came together. The opportunity now is to move from experimentation to widespread execution.

We believe organizations that’ll get the most value in the year ahead will do three things consistently:

1. Broaden who builds by empowering business teams to create and refine agents in partnership with IT teams, who provide guardrails without stifling creativity.
2. Standardize how agents are shared and reused, so successful patterns move beyond individual productivity into team and enterprise workflows.
3. Measure what matters as a matter of course, using visibility into usage, quality, and cost to guide where agents are expanded, improved, or retired.

When business and IT teams operate from the same foundation, agents stop being side projects and start becoming part of how work happens. That’s how teams move faster, reduce rework, and work together with AI and automation to create true business transformation.

Where to start—and how to go further

Your best agentic year isn’t defined by how many agents you build, but by how many people rely on them to get work done. Copilot Studio gives you the foundation to do exactly that. Now, 2026 is about building out, driving adoption, and scaling up.

Try this three-step plan for building and scaling your agent strategy with Copilot Studio:

1. Get quick wins. Start by focusing on business-to-employee (B2E) assistive agents. Try downloading the Employee Self-Service Agent from the Agent Store.
2. Create a Center of Excellence (COE). Set up a central team that can help triage cross-team needs and get the broader organization comfortable with agents. This could be a representative from every department, or made up of agent champions (regardless of where they sit in their org). A great COE can help reduce geographic silos and bring consistency to an AI strategy.
3. Measure and reward adoption. What gets measured gets focus and investment. Compare the situation today with the situation post-agent adoption. Did the agent provide value? Has it improved what you set out to change? Prove the progress, and then you can move onto the next process.

Get started today and turn agent curiosity into capability, confidence, and commitment this year.

The post 6 core capabilities to scale agent adoption in 2026 appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

November 2025 was a busy month for Microsoft Copilot Studio, marked by major announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2025 and a wave of new features now rolling out to makers. It’s clear that organizations are moving beyond traditional automation and into a new era of agent-driven work. In this month’s roundup, we’re spotlighting our most significant Ignite updates and introducing powerful new capabilities you can start using today.

Copilot Studio enhancements and new features

From automation to outcomes: Ignite 2025 highlights

Microsoft Ignite 2025 underscored a clear trend: organizations are accelerating their shift toward agentic business transformation. Copilot Studio is the fully managed platform that enables them to build, govern, and scale AI agents across the enterprise. At Ignite 2025, we introduced new capabilities that create a more robust, secure agent creation experience for every user—from makers to professional developers to IT administrators.

Highlights included a redesigned conversational authoring experience, natural language file generation, and a seamless one-click upgrade path from Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot to Copilot Studio. That means business users can turn ideas into working agents faster, without waiting on development cycles and then expand when ready. This changes the game on how teams use technology to make a step change within a business process.

Makers now have even more flexibility with model choice across GPT-5 and leading third-party models, built-in agent evaluations, expanded computer use automation, and deep integration with more than 1,400 systems through Model Context Protocol (MCP), Power Platform connectors, and Microsoft Graph. In real-world terms, this removes the “user tax” of context switching and managing data silos. Whether you’re looking for help with invoice processing or supplier discovery, these agents bring collective insights to help drive a process forward.

For administrators, Ignite 2025 delivered major governance updates. These included expanded analytics and insights, real-time protection powered by Microsoft Defender, and new oversight capabilities through Microsoft Entra Agent ID that gives IT teams the confidence to scale AI safely.

We also introduced Microsoft Agent 365, the unified control plane for enterprise agents. Agent 365 centralizes governance, policy management, and monitoring. This includes new MCP servers that allow agents to schedule meetings, generate documents, send emails, and update CRM records with full compliance and audit support.

To dive deeper into all the announcements, see our full Ignite 2025 recap: Why Microsoft Copilot Studio is the foundation for agentic business transformation.

GPT-5 Chat: Ready for production in Copilot Studio

GPT-5 Chat is now generally available in the European Union and United States. This means makers can confidently use this model in production scenarios for workloads that could benefit from GPT-5 Chat’s improved responsiveness, accuracy, and instruction-following.  This means makers can confidently use this model in production scenarios for workloads that could benefit from GPT-5 Chat’s improved responsiveness, accuracy, and instruction-following.

You can enable GPT-5 Chat directly from an agent’s overview page. You can even set it as the primary model for scenarios like high-volume employee support or step-by-step process guidance.

We’ve also started rolling out the GPT-5.2 series as experimental models for U.S. customers in early release environments. These models improve performance across the board, including coding and multilingual use cases. This replaces the GPT-5.1 series, including in any agents created using GPT-5.1 models. Since these models are experimental, they’re best suited for test scenarios rather than production—but they give you an exciting preview of what’s coming next. 

You can read more about model choice and how to test them out in Copilot Studio.

Combine autonomous workflows with human judgment

One of the most important evolutions this month is human-in-the-loop (HITL), now in preview. This capability lets agents pause and ask for human input before moving forward. That may sound simple, but it fundamentally changes what organizations can trust agents to do.

With this feature, an agent can send a structured request (delivered as an Outlook form) to designated reviewers. Once the reviewer responds, the agent resumes and uses the submitted values as parameters. This provides real-time human judgment without disrupting the overall workflow.

HITL is especially useful when an agent needs clarification, additional context, or explicit approval to proceed. It supports scenarios such as confirming project updates, confirming procurement orders, validating financial reports, escalating complex customer support cases, resolving ambiguous data, or gathering information that only a person can provide. The result is more flexible and reliable automation that adapts to real-world conditions.

To use HITL, open the agent-building experience and select Add tool. Choose the request for information in Copilot Studio agent flows (preview) action under the Human-in-the-loop connector, then configure fields such as the title, message, assignee, and inputs. The agent will automatically trigger the request whenever the workflow calls for it. Learn more about request for information.

Add curated Outlook and SharePoint tool groups to agents for faster setup

Makers can now streamline agent configuration by adding curated Action Groups from Outlook and SharePoint connectors, now in preview. Instead of identifying and configuring individual actions one by one, teams can bring in complete sets of related tools, such as “manage emails” or “manage files,” with a single selection. This makes it easier to equip agents with the capabilities they need to support common workflows across communication and content management.

Each Action Group contains the most relevant and reliable tools for its scenario. Shared inputs automatically apply across the group to reduce setup time and improve consistency. Makers can either specify their own values or opt to have AI dynamically fill inputs based on context. Try it both ways—each action is fully editable even after it’s added. This flexibility helps ensure agents behave predictably while still allowing customization for unique business processes.

To use Action Groups, open an agent’s Tools section, select Add tool, choose Outlook or SharePoint, and pick the tool group you want to add. This provides a faster, clearer, and more guided way to build workflow-ready agents.

SharePoint grounding: Turning content chaos into decision clarity

Any team that uses SharePoint knows that it can sometimes be tough to find exactly the nugget of information you need among all your content. Fortunately, if you’re using SharePoint as a knowledge source, your agents just got a lot smarter. We shipped an upgraded tenant graph grounding architecture that improves how agents retrieve and rank information across your organization. This translates into more precise, more context-aware responses, especially in content-heavy environments. 

On top of that, you can now filter SharePoint content using metadata like filename, owner, and last modified date. That gives you much tighter control over which documents your agents rely on when answering questions. 

Learn more about these features and using SharePoint as a knowledge source.

Agent Builder enhancements and new features

Use the latest GPT-5 Chat capabilities in Agent Builder

Microsoft 365 Copilot now uses GPT-5 Chat when responding to prompts in agents created with Agent Builder. This brings immediate improvements to speed, quality, and accuracy in carrying out instructions. Organizations relying on agents built in Microsoft 365 Copilot will see immediate quality improvements in employee support, decision guidance, and informational use cases. No additional configuration or opt-in is required where GPT-5 Chat is available.

GPT-5.2 is also now available to use in Microsoft 365 Copilot with both web and work data. This new model series brings improved code generation and multilingual capabilities. Users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license received priority access to GPT-5.2 on December 11, 2025, and the series is expected to be available to all users in the coming weeks.

Extend your agent seamlessly from Agent Builder to Copilot Studio

Makers can now seamlessly move agents built in Agent Builder (the lightweight agent-building experience inside Microsoft 365 Copilot) into the full Copilot Studio application using the new “Copy to Copilot Studio” action. This capability is generally available everywhere Agent Builder is supported.

This feature allows makers to start prototypes quickly in Microsoft 365 Copilot and then expand them into fully governed, enterprise-ready Copilot Studio agents without rebuilding from scratch. The copy operation creates a version of the agent in the selected environment while preserving the original in Agent Builder. In addition to providing peace of mind, this means your users can still partake in the existing experience while the enhanced version is developed.

Once an Agent gets copied into Copilot Studio, makers gain access to a suite of richer capabilities. This includes lifecycle management, analytics, more third-party connectors, and publishing options that give agents access to channels such as the Teams app store. This helps create a healthy innovation cycle: fast at the edges, controlled at the core. Learn more about copying agents to Copilot Studio.

Streamline employee support with the Employee Self-Service Agent

The Employee Self-Service Agent in the Microsoft 365 Copilot agent building experience is now generally available. This agent provides a centralized AI-powered experience for common employee support scenarios, including HR- and IT-related needs. The Employee Self-Service Agent helps employees quickly get answers and complete tasks such as checking leave balances, reviewing benefits, or submitting IT tickets. This agent provides a centralized AI-powered experience for common employee support scenarios, including HR-related and IT-related needs. The Employee Self-Service Agent helps employees quickly get answers and complete tasks such as checking leave balances, reviewing benefits, or submitting IT tickets. 

Built for makers to configure and extend in Copilot Studio, the agent includes prebuilt connectors and workflows for systems like Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP SuccessFactors. It’s fully customizable and extensible. This allows teams to tailor responses, logic, and integrations to their own organizational processes.  

To keep employees in their flow of work, the agent can also hand off to Workday or ServiceNow agents when deeper actions are required. This means that instead of employees navigating portals or emailing multiple teams, they can simply ask for what they need. From a business lens, this reduces ticket backlogs, shortens resolution times, and improves employee sentiment. 

The Employee Self-Service Agent is designed to work within your existing Microsoft 365 security, privacy, and compliance boundaries. Expanded support for Facilities and other verticals is coming soon. Learn more in the Employee Self-Service Agent announcement blog.

Unlock organizational intelligence: People as a knowledge source

Makers can now add People as a knowledge source in Agent Builder for declarative agents. Agents can reference live directory information, including employees’ roles, reporting relationships, team memberships, and profile details, to answer questions such as “Who is the manager for X?” or “Who is on Y team?” with current, accurate details. 

This feature, now generally available, promotes richer organizational insight across internal workflows, approvals, and employee support experiences. It’s especially valuable for onboarding, internal support, approvals, escalation paths, or any workflow where it can be difficult, but critical, to identify the correct person. By grounding agents in live directory data, makers can deliver more accurate, context-aware responses without manual upkeep or duplicated lists.

To enable People as a knowledge source, open Agent Builder, navigate to Knowledge sources, and select “Reference people in organization.” Learn more about People as a knowledge source.

Generate polished documents, spreadsheets, and presentations

This is where AI shifts from “assistant” to “producer.” Agents built inside Microsoft 365 Copilot can now create high-quality Word documents, Excel worksheets, and PowerPoint presentations using the “Generate documents, charts, and code” skillset (formerly known as Cope Interpreter). This capability is generally available everywhere Agent Builder is supported.

These enhanced Office skills bring richer creation and formatting tools directly into your custom agents. Agents can generate structured documents, well-designed slides, and Excel files that incorporate charts, visuals, layouts, and other professional elements. This makes it easier for teams to create reports, summaries, plans, proposals, and analysis as part of an automated workflow. You can do all this using natural language.

To try out this feature, open Agent Builder and toggle on Generate documents, charts, and code. If Code Interpreter was previously enabled, the new capabilities are automatically available.

Use OneNote pages as living knowledge

Makers can now add OneNote pages as knowledge sources in Agent Builder. Many teams rely on OneNote to capture meeting notes, brainstorming sessions, project plans, research summaries, and personal workstreams. This update, now in preview and due to roll out worldwide in December, brings all that information directly into your agents’ grounding experience.

By selecting specific OneNote pages, makers can empower agents to provide responses that reflect real project context and decision history. This is especially helpful for roles that depend on ongoing notes, such as customer success, project management, operations, or research, where critical details often live outside traditional documents.

OneNote support also reduces the need to copy content into files or recreate notes elsewhere. Makers can simply choose the pages they want to include and let Microsoft 365 Copilot agents draw from them automatically during conversations and workflows.

To add this capability: Open Agent Builder, go to Knowledge sources, choose OneNote from the file picker, and select the pages you want to include. Learn more about knowledge sources in Agent Builder.

The bigger takeaway

The story of November 2025 isn’t just new features. It’s a shift in how work gets designed.

We’re moving toward a world where organizations don’t just automate steps—they design intelligent systems of work, where AI agents handle complexity, people apply judgment, and businesses operate with more speed, clarity, and resilience.

And we’re just getting started.

Stay up to date on all things Copilot Studio

Check out all the updates as we ship them, as well as new features releasing in the next few months here: What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

To learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio and how it can transform productivity within your organization, visit the Copilot Studio website or sign up for our free trial today.

The post What’s new in Microsoft Copilot Studio: November 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.