Publish the agent and find its channels

You're an HR operations specialist at Contoso, and your HR help agent is ready for a small pilot. This chapter returns to the HR Help Assistant you built in Chapter 1, not Chapter 3's Workplace Assistant. Until now every change has lived only in your editor: nobody outside it can reach the agent.

You'll publish the agent, confirm the publish succeeded, and find the channel a pilot group would use to try it. Publishing is what turns your draft into the version other people meet.

Plan to finish this chapter in one sitting. If you come back after a long break, your session may start fresh with an empty Copilot Studio. Each exercise tells you how to recreate anything it needs. If Copilot Studio looks broken, click Restart session; that keeps your saved work.

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Building Agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio

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Building Agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio

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Find out what Copilot Studio is and which everyday questions are worth handing to an agent. You'll build an HR help agent the credit-free way, write instructions that keep it in its lane, and test it. Then add expense claim and bank details topics, and use the activity map to prove each question lands in the right place.

Exercise 1: What is Copilot Studio?Exercise 2: Agent or one-time prompt?Exercise 3: Take a tour of Copilot Studio Exercise 4: Create your first agent Exercise 5: Build an HR help agent Exercise 6: Keep the agent in its lane Exercise 7: Topics and routing Exercise 8: Add an expense claim topic Exercise 9: Add a bank details topic Exercise 10: Prove each question reaches its topic

Move your agent from answering to acting. You'll build a flow that turns an IT service desk ticket into a drafted reply, store an employee's name in a variable, and branch on urgent tickets. Then watch the Microsoft 365 blog's feed with an RSS trigger and add a human review step before anything reaches staff.

Exercise 1: Your first agent flow Exercise 2: When to build a flow Exercise 3: Build a draft-response flow Exercise 4: Branching logic and variables Exercise 5: Store and use a variable in your flow Exercise 6: Add an urgent-ticket branch Exercise 7: Event-driven and multi-path flows Exercise 8: Build the blog post review flow Exercise 9: Add a human-review step to the flow

Give your agent answers it can back up. You'll read details from the company directory with a connector, attach Contoso's workplace FAQ with Web Search off, and check which answers it can cite. Then build a Workplace Lookup assistant that draws on the FAQ and a meeting rooms spreadsheet, and one that collects equipment loan requests.

Exercise 1: Connecting data sources with connectors Exercise 2: Add a connector and retrieve data Exercise 3: Grounding agents in knowledge sources Exercise 4: Add a knowledge source and ask a scoped question Exercise 5: Test answers inside and outside the source Exercise 6: Building a grounded assistant Exercise 7: Build the Workplace Lookup assistant Exercise 8: Build the Equipment Loan Request assistant

Your HR agent is ready for a pilot. Publish it, find its channels, and check who can use it in the Share dialog. Learn where the Monitor dashboard reports usage, let the Flow checker pinpoint a broken step so you can fix and republish, and plan a handover that keeps the agent running without you.

Exercise 1: Publishing agents and channels Exercise 2: Publish the agent and find its channels

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Exercise 3: Check who can use your agent Exercise 4: Monitoring and analytics Exercise 5: Read the Monitor dashboard Exercise 6: Troubleshooting and governance Exercise 7: Find the break with the Flow checker Exercise 8: Fix it and republish Exercise 9: Hand the agent over safely Exercise 10: Congratulations!