Microsoft presents: Build Agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio and surface them in M365 Copilot Chat

Overview

The session explains how Copilot Studio is positioned as Microsoft’s recommended platform for building agents, and how agents built there for Business Central are published to the agent store and used in Microsoft 365 Copilot chat. It covers knowledge sources, tools, connectors, the MCP connector, the Workflow Designer and human-in-the-loop approvals.

Two demos are shown: a compliance agent that checks Business Central users, and a laptop equipment order agent that creates purchase orders with an approval step. The later part covers testing and debugging, monitoring, evaluations (manual, and automated through Power Automate or APIs), multi-agent orchestration, security warnings, lifecycle management, the Business Central agent runtime, ISV distribution, and Copilot credit pricing. A Q and A closes the session.

Key points

• Agents built in Copilot Studio for Business Central can be published to Microsoft 365 Copilot chat. They call Power Platform connectors or MCP server endpoints behind the scenes, and publishing creates a declarative agent manifest in the agent store.
• Tools and subagents can be referenced in agent instructions with slash notation, which makes tool selection more reliable than describing them in text.
• Agentic flows can include human approval steps, for example via Teams. The flow resumes with full context, but the agent needs an explicit instruction to tell the user it is waiting.
• In Copilot Studio testing, all tool calls and return values are visible. MCP connections are slow to initialize during testing, so performance is slower than in production.
• Evaluations in the Copilot Studio UI run manually. Power Automate (evaluate agent connector) or the evaluation APIs can run them on a schedule or from external systems.
• In multi-agent setups, child agents inherit the session. Only one agent should talk to the user at a time, and a child agent can have broader permissions than the master agent.
• Copilot Studio billing: credit packs of 25,000 credits per month for 200 per month, or pay-as-you-go. Agents ship through Power Platform solutions and can be published to AppSource. Users calling agent APIs in Business Central need a Business Central license.

Features

A status with a roadmap link comes from the Microsoft 365 roadmap feature this part of the video covers (matched by Haiku; links Opus dropped are not used); other statuses need a status word in the video itself.

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• other “purchase orders” at 13:02
• other “items” at 14:46
• other “MCP server” at 14:46
• other “agentic flow” at 15:44
• other “compliance copilot” at 26:17
• other “compliance agent” at 26:29
• other “expense agent” at 32:33
• other “bank reconciliation agent” at 32:33
• other “sales order agent” at 34:55
• other “payables agent” at 34:55
• other “laptop agent” at 39:02

Quotes

• 0:46 “the difference is basically the level of autonomy, right? As a as a user I give a specific task to Copilot and then Copilot”
• 1:24 “Copilot Studio is, you know, the one recommended flat platform from Microsoft for you to build, manage and customize agents and Copilots and specifically”
• 2:19 “the goal behind Microsoft Copilot Studio is to basically enable everyone to build agents, right?”
• 5:18 “you have the 1400 plus connectors in in in Power Platform”
• 7:15 “if your flow waits for approval then when you come back it automatically resumes and you keep the full context”

Disclaimers in the video

• 10:28 coming-later: Microsoft 365 Copilot uh is also coming to Business Central, and then we’ll have a we’ll have a session tomorrow about it
• 17:24 preview: as also shown as a as a sneak peek, when you test your agents
• 25:31 other: in my attempt to save the the compliance uh parts of uh uh of this demo
• 30:40 preview: a new Copilot Studio experience uh has been has been released that you can you can preview and use.
• 30:51 coming-later: M365 Copilot chat coming to Business Central. We are working in a way that it comes with the agents
• 31:46 coming-later: soon you’ll be able to um customize some of the parts.
• 33:24 coming-later: we have some plans to also have you know, Agent Runtime available in conversational experience. But for now, if you …
• 41:00 coming-later: integrating the Copilot chat within Business Central is that the uh MCS agents that users have access to can be uh interacted with there

Presenters (as heard): Karina, Julia, Julas, Kenny, Yasser, Erina, Polo, Poluraj.