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Building Custom Agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate

Design, connect, and deploy multistep automations

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Explain the core concepts of AI agents and Microsoft Copilot Studio, including grounding, actions, and guardrails
  • Identify and prioritize suitable business use cases for Copilot Studio agents, including when not to use an agent
  • Build, test, and refine no-code knowledge agents that answer questions from organizational data such as SharePoint sites, files, and URLs
  • Create, deploy, and monitor Copilot Studio agents that perform actions (flows, connectors, MCPs) and make them available to your organization in Microsoft Teams

Course description

Microsoft Copilot Studio lets you create AI agents that can answer questions, retrieve knowledge from your organization’s data, and even take actions in other systems, all without you writing a single line of code.

Henry Habib prepared this course for anyone who wants to design, build, and deploy Copilot Studio agents safely and effectively inside their organization. You’ll learn what agents are, how Copilot Studio works, and when an AI agent is (and isn’t) the right solution. And you’ll understand how to add knowledge and actions to agents, and how to manage them. Join in to advance your skills from simple conversational agents to sophisticated, multistep agents that use your SharePoint files and other data sources, perform actions via connectors and flows, and are deployed to Microsoft Teams or your own platform. Each concept that’s covered in presentations is immediately applied in a guided, hands-on exercise.

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a knowledge worker, business analyst, or manager who wants AI agents to automate routine questions and tasks without learning to code.
  • You’re a citizen developer or Microsoft Copilot power user who already builds simple solutions and wants to add AI agents to your toolkit.
  • You’re a team lead or departmental champion tasked with exploring Copilot Studio for self-service support (HR, IT, operations, customer support, etc.).
  • You’re a professional who wants to move beyond basic Copilot prompts into building reusable agents that others can use in Teams.

Prerequisites

  • A Microsoft 365 Copilot Studio license in your org’s tenant, or a sandbox/trial environment that has Microsoft 365 Copilot Studio
  • A SharePoint site or OneDrive folder where sample documents can be safely uploaded
  • Familiarity with other tools in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, like SharePoint and OneDrive

Recommended preparation:

  • Confirm access to Microsoft Copilot Studio (with permission to create bots/agents)

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

The agent mindset (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Course overview, logistics, and what learners will build over this session; What is an AI agent?; how Copilot Studio fits into Microsoft 365; agent use cases versus traditional automation or static - FAQs
  • Group discussion: Where do repetitive questions and tasks show up in your work?
  • Q&A

Copilot Studio tour (no-code building blocks) (30 minutes)

  • Demonstration: Copilot Studio interface, workspaces, copilots, topics, triggers, and analytics; Copilot Studio settings
  • Presentation: Core building blocks (conversation, knowledge sources, actions, and guardrails)
  • Q&A
  • Break

Your first conversational AI agent (30 minutes)

  • Demonstration: Creating a simple agent in Copilot Studio that follows a branching conversation (topics, system messages, answer style); creating a simple AI agent in Copilot Studio that tells jokes; using automated agent builder to build your agent
  • Q&A

Grounding and retrieval—connecting to knowledge (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Grounding versus retrieval; how Copilot Studio reads documents and websites
  • Demonstration: Adding knowledge sources (files, SharePoint, URLs) to an agent; building an HR FAQ agent using policy documents from SharePoint or provided files
  • Group discussion: Where is the most reliable source of truth in your organization today?
  • Q&A
  • Break

Introduction to actions, flows, and connectors (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: What are “actions” in Copilot Studio?; overview of calling Power Automate flows and other services; security, permissions, and approvals when agents perform actions; types of actions
  • Demonstration: Example action—an agent creating a simple item (e.g., a task or request) in a list or external app via a connector
  • Q&A

Build an action-enabled agent (30 minutes)

  • Demonstration: Connecting an agent to a prebuilt or provided flow (for example, logging a support request or submitting a form); connecting an agent to a created automation (i.e., chain of actions) like sending an email → sending a Teams message → recording an entry in an Excel file
  • Group discussion: How does it feel to let an agent take actions on your behalf?; Where would you want approvals or limits?
  • Q&A
  • Break

Combining knowledge and actions into one agent (20 minutes)

  • Demonstration: Building a “support agent” that first answers from knowledge, then offers to create a ticket if the issue isn’t resolved
  • Q&A

Deploying and managing agents (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Deployment options (Teams, web, other channels) and environment considerations
  • Demonstration: Publishing an agent to Teams, adding it to a team/channel, and basic configuration; publishing an agent to a non-Teams channel, adding it to a team/channel, and basic configuration
  • Q&A
  • Break

Build a sophisticated HR agent (25 minutes)

  • Demonstration: Build a knowledge-based HR bot that answers HR questions, sends out emails, seeks approvals, and enables users to book vacations
  • Q&A

Your Instructor

  • Henry Habib

    Henry Habib advises Fortune 500 companies on analytics and operations with a focus on building AI-driven solutions and tools. He teaches GenAI topics online, amassing a network of more than 250,000 students, and facilitates technical programs at large banks and governmental organizations. He also runs The Intelligent Worker platform, where professionals can learn to be more productive with GenAI, no-code, automation, and other technologies.

Skill covered

Microsoft Security Copilot