Building Agents with Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Most professionals who use Copilot daily have never built a custom agent for their team. In this course, Alex Banks guides you through Agent Builder in Microsoft 365—from evaluating the right use case to deploying a tested, governed agent your colleagues can rely on. Alex begins by clarifying what separates an agent from commonly confused alternatives, and then reviews the prebuilt Microsoft Researcher and Analyst agents to see when building your own makes sense. From there, he shows you how to configure an agent connected to your organization's data, extend it with document-creation capabilities, and troubleshoot common configuration mistakes. Alex also covers testing approaches, sharing permissions, IT governance, and when to graduate an agent to Copilot Studio. No coding experience needed.

Learning objectives
Differentiate a Microsoft 365 agent from common look-alikes such as saved prompts, chatbots, and Copilot chat.
Evaluate potential agent use cases by scope, value, and knowledge readiness.
Configure an agent with instructions, knowledge sources, and capabilities in Agent Builder.
Diagnose and resolve common agent configuration issues across instructions, knowledge, and capabilities.
Apply a structured testing strategy covering happy path, edge case, and out-of-scope prompts.
Determine when to govern an agent within Agent Builder and when to graduate it to Copilot Studio.