Paper: How utilizing the Microsoft Copilot harness in Copilot Studio enabled complex task execution
Abstract: Copilot Studio's Standard harness is built for conversation: several isolated model calls per turn, a reply within seconds, and control handed back to the user as soon as a step needs input. Many business tasks are not simple Q&A. They run for many turns, touch thousands of records, and need code, files and retries along the way. We implemented the Microsoft Copilot harness: a single model-centered agentic loop running inside a secure container, with command line and file tools and a way to materialize large data sets on disk so the model can reason over them iteratively. This paper describes the two architectures and measures the difference. On the same evaluation tasks and the same models, the Microsoft Copilot harness makes 2 times more model calls per task, yet because of efficient caching (on average +40 pp), its cost-weighted token consumption falls 15 to 21% while its eval pass rate rises 10.8 points on GPT-5.5 Chat and 22.1 points on Opus 4.8 and per-call latency falls 10% to 36%. In production, Microsoft Copilot harness agents run longer tasks with more tool calls, use the container's built-in tools in more than half of turns, and keep working after a failed tool call 84% to 91% of the time where the Standard harness does so under 7% of the time. On a business process benchmark the Microsoft Copilot harness scored 65% against 36% for a leading competitor, and hill climbing tool behavior in production, one tool at a time, moved the Excel Online connector's success rate from 85.6% to 96.3% with one telemetry-driven tuning change and no maker action. Read the blog here Read the full paper by clicking the PDF attachment below.
Introducing the Power Platform Admin Plugin in Cowork: Agentic Governance with Natural Language
Explore agentic Power Platform governance with the Power Platform admin plugin in Copilot Cowork. Ask questions about your tenant and turn governance insights into customized reports, dashboards, and apps.
Copilot Studio agents problems connecting to Sharepoint knowledge source
Hello, Since last week users in my tenant are experimenting issues regarding the connection between copilot studio agents and Sharepoint. The agents are not able to extract information from Sharepoint sites, printing there is not information in the Sharepoint site regarding the user's question when that information is in Sharepoint. These agents used to work well till last week. Does have been any update in Microsoft 365 services that can be affecting these agents ability to retrieve information from Sharepoint?Copilot Studio agent behaves differently in Teams and the test pane
Hello, We have built a topic-based agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio that uses SharePoint as a knowledge source and is published to Microsoft Teams. We are seeing the following behavior: The agent sometimes stops responding in Teams. To make it respond again, we need to use commands such as: /debug clearstate /debug clearhistory /debug conversationid 3. One of our topics contains a Question node asking whether the user’s query was resolved. 4. The question and its options appear correctly in the Copilot Studio evaluation/test pane. 5. However, the same question never appears when the agent is used in Teams. Has anyone experienced similar behavior? Any troubleshooting guidance would be helpful.Copilot Studio custom MCP connector: server-verifiable identity of the calling agent?
I am evaluating a Copilot Studio agent calling a custom MCP connector with delegated Entra authentication and client federation. The private pilot uses a synthetic catalogue. In my published PALO Framework, the governance model binds the admitted identity, time-bound mandate and exact proposed action before execution: https://paloframework.org/PALO_AIGovernance.html . The point I want to clarify is how far that identity binding can go for the originating Copilot agent. I read the Microsoft guidance on agent identities: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/govern-agents-identities-overview . An Agent ID in the registry and a connector client identity are different evidence. In our documented pilot, the delegated token admission and the Copilot tool trace are checked separately; I do not treat the connector client ID alone as cryptographic proof of the originating agent. For this custom-connector path, is there a supported claim or signed attestation that a remote MCP server can validate to bind each call to the specific Copilot Studio agent? I would appreciate the documented validation rules and whether the test pane and published channels differ. If this is not supported on this path, which supported isolation pattern would you use for separate agent mandates? This is a design question from an evaluation pilot, not a production capability claim.
Seeking Guidance: Microsoft Copilot Integration with Apache Superset via MCP
Seeking Guidance: Microsoft Copilot Integration with Apache Superset via MCP Hi everyone, We are using Apache Superset 6.1.0 with PostgreSQL and ClickHouse datasets and exploring integration with Microsoft Copilot through Superset's MCP server. Our objective is to allow users to ask questions in natural language and receive text-based answers, tabular results, and AI-generated charts or dashboards based on our existing data. I would appreciate guidance on the following: Integration feasibility: Can Microsoft Copilot Studio connect to Superset's MCP server and support this use case? Capabilities and performance: Can it handle natural-language queries, data retrieval, chart generation, and dashboard creation effectively? Licensing: Which Microsoft plan is suitable for this use case? Would a trial or pay-as-you-go option be sufficient for a proof of concept? Costs: What are the estimated licensing, message-consumption, and Azure infrastructure costs for a small POC and production deployment? Security: Can we enforce authenticated access and read-only permissions while protecting our PostgreSQL and ClickHouse data? Our initial goal is to validate the integration through a small proof of concept before committing to a paid plan. If anyone has implemented a similar integration, I would appreciate your recommendations, practical experience, and estimated costs. Thank you!
GitHub Copilot Harness + Work IQ + Business Data
Hello, I have been trying to use the latest Work IQ MCP from an agent build using Copilot Studio (GHCP Harness). The MCP is able to answer questions to provide details about a dataverse record when i provide the record ID, when i try to ask for questions that require the agent to list/search, it fails with the error "Path is not in the policy allowlist." when trying to perform a post request to the do_action tool. I double checked: Work IQ enabled on Power Platform environment Business Apps in M365 allowed for my user account MDA has required config enabled Semantic index created for MDA Work IQ MCP Policy under M365 and all operations are enabled: 6. Confirmed checked that i have enabled read/write on the Work IQ MCP inside my agent (just in case Post request is considered a write) Any clue what is going wrong or if there are missing configuration somewhere that i need to check?Copilot, Microsoft 365 & Power Platform product updates call
💡Copilot, Microsoft 365 & Power Platform product updates call concentrates on the different use cases and features within the Microsoft 365 and in Power Platform. Call includes topics like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Search, Microsoft Lists, SharePoint, Power Automate, Power Apps and more. 👏 Weekly Tuesday call is for all community members to see Microsoft PMs, engineering and Cloud Advocates showcasing the art of possible with Copilot, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform. 📅 On the 10th of November we'll have following agenda: News and updates from Microsoft Together mode group photo Nicole Woon - Introducing HTML Pages in SharePoint James Eccles - 10 Things Developers Often Get Wrong About SharePoint Embedded Paolo Pialorsi - Building Copilot Cowork Plugins with WIQD 📞 & 📺 Join the Microsoft Teams meeting live at https://aka.ms/community/ms-speakers-call-join 🗓️ Download recurrent invite for this weekly call from https://aka.ms/community/ms-speakers-call-invite 👋 See you in the call! 💡 Building something cool for Copilot, Microsoft 365 or Power Platform (Copilot Studio, SharePoint, Power Apps, etc)? We are always looking for presenters - Volunteer for a community call demo at https://aka.ms/community/request/demo 📖 Resources: Previous community call recordings and demos from the Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel at https://aka.ms/community/youtube Microsoft 365 & Power Platform samples from Microsoft and community - https://aka.ms/community/samples Microsoft 365 & Power Platform community details - https://aka.ms/community/home 🧡 Sharing is caring!Copilot, Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community call
💡 Copilot, Microsoft 365 & Power Platform weekly community call focuses on different use cases and features within the Microsoft 365 and Power Platform - across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, SharePoint, Power Apps and more. Demos in this call are presented by the community members. 👏 Looking to catch up on the latest news and updates, including cool community demos, this call is for you! 📅 On 12th of November we'll have following agenda: Latest news and events from Microsoft Latest on Copilot prompt of the week CommunityDays.org update Microsoft 365 Maturity model PnP Framework and Core SDK extension PnP PowerShell Script samples Copilot pro dev samples Power Platform samples Demos this time Ejaz Hussain – Bringing employee recognition into the Copilot canvas with SPFx Copilot components Kurt Rolland – Document Intake: filing documents from a Copilot conversation with a Copilot UX component Manish Yadav - Creating a Voice Agent using Foundry SDK 📅 Download recurrent invite from https://aka.ms/community/m365-powerplat-dev-call-invite 📞 & 📺 Join the Microsoft Teams meeting live at https://aka.ms/community/m365-powerplat-dev-call-join 💡 Building something cool for Microsoft 365 or Power Platform (Copilot, SharePoint, Power Apps, etc)? We are always looking for presenters - Volunteer for a community call demo at https://aka.ms/community/request/demo 👋 See you in the call! 📖 Resources: Previous community call recordings and demos from the Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel at https://aka.ms/community/youtube Microsoft 365 & Power Platform samples from Microsoft and community - https://aka.ms/community/samples Microsoft 365 & Power Platform community details - https://aka.ms/community/home 🧡 Sharing is caring!
