Forum Discussion
Limitation of Copilot agent development in M365 developer tenants
I am using a M365 developer subscription and have hit a wall trying to develop a functioning Copilot agent. I was able to sign up for Copilot Studio trial license. This enables creation of M365 Copilot agent with knowledge held in SharePoint lists. However, not having 'Semantic Index' is a severe limitation that defeats the purpose of developer subscription. The agent being unable to use 'Enhance SharePoint Search' setting aka 'Semantic Index' aka vector embeddings means the agent is basically dumb and not an intelligent AI agent.
After some research, I discovered the tenant needs at least one M365 Copilot license to enable 'semantic index'. To get my Copilot agent built, I decided to invest in this expensive license and then discovered a developer agent can neither have M365 Copilot or PAYG metered license.
What this all means is that 'M365 developer subscription CANNOT be used to build a Copilot agent grounded in data in SharePoint'. You may be able to create a dumb agent with web search.
A note that the agent I was building was not for a commercial customer. It was for my learning. By creating a proper agent, I will be able to showcase it in a YouTube video with the hope that some client somewhere may find it useful enough to pay for me as well as pay for Microsoft licensing, a win-win.
I guess I will have to increase my investment fund, and sign-up for 'M365 Production Tenant + M365 Prod License Business or Enterprise + M365 Copilot + M365 Copilot Studio'. Seems like this type of development is a luxury only few could afford.
Just thought to share as this may be useful for others trying to do the same.
3 Replies
Hi. You do need the MS 365 Copilot License to allow your agent to search your Microsoft Graph, meaning only with this license bound to your user, the Copilot is allowed to read your data in e. g. SharePoint, Outlook etc.
For development you can set up in Power Platform Admin Center different kinds of environments like sandbox, default, developer (your actual environment) and production.
You can then in the Power Platform Admin Center create under Licensing a pay-as-you-go billing plan and assign this to the environment of your choice. Lastly under Copilot Studio in PPAC you need to assign your agent to that specific environment.
This worked for me well.
Thank you, Alsiesta.
I ultimately used the setup below for my learning.
- M365 Copilot Billing policy to allow me to use Copilot agents
- Copilot Studio trial license
- Power Platform trial environment with a Dataverse database.
This has served me well, as I was able to develop various types of agents connected to SharePoint, public websites, and Dataverse tables and experiment with them. Initially, I was a bit sceptical about using a billing policy connected to my Azure subscription. However, since my developer work has limited usage, the Azure charges are negligible.
However, I am still unsure if my setup gets me the usage of 'semantic index, aka vector embeddings index' and whether this still requires the full M365 Copilot license.
Overall, the setup has met my development needs.
Thanks for sharing, I think this can be useful for other people too.
From the technical architectural perspective, it makes sense that a M365 Copilot license is required to achieve what you described aboved.
