Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio is Microsoft's SaaS platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents and agent workflows, formerly known as Power Virtual Agents and rebranded in 2024. It builds conversational agents that answer natural language requests and guide users through workflows, and autonomous agents that plan, act, and escalate work on their own. Multi-agent orchestration routes tasks across specialized agents, and agents can call other agents over the agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol. Everything built in Copilot Studio runs on one of three harnesses. The GitHub Copilot harness, generally available since September 2026, handles reasoning-heavy, multistep business processes: it plans the steps toward a goal, retries when a step fails, creates and edits Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files, and supports reusable skills and per-user memory. The standard harness runs rule-based agents and structured conversations built from topics, and the Copilot chat harness extends Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat with company knowledge. Makers pick each agent's primary model, with Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.5 Chat both generally available. Agents connect to more than 1,400 external connectors, MCP servers, Microsoft Graph, Dataverse, and Azure AI Search, and computer use lets them operate web and desktop apps that have no API. Pricing has five paths. (1) Users licensed for Microsoft 365 Copilot (from $21/mo billed annually per user) can build and use internal agents in Microsoft 365 on the Copilot chat and standard harnesses at no additional cost, and their classic answers, generative answers, and Microsoft Graph grounding are zero-rated. (2) The standalone Copilot Studio license is sold as capacity packs of 25,000 Copilot Credits at $200 per pack per month. (3) Pay-as-you-go through an Azure subscription bills the credits actually used at $0.01 per Copilot Credit, with no upfront commitment. (4) A one-year prepurchase plan of Copilot Credit Commit Units saves up to 20% on prepaid credits and falls back to pay-as-you-go when they run out. (5) Microsoft 365 E7, the Frontier Suite, bundles Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365 at $99 per user per month (generally available May 1, 2026). Paths 2 to 4 unlock autonomous agents, the GitHub Copilot harness, publishing to websites, apps, and social platforms, and use by people without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Copilot Credits replaced messages as the billing unit on September 1, 2025, and the credits an action consumes depend on the agent type, its knowledge sources, and the complexity of the task. Agent 365, $15 per user per month standalone, adds a central agent registry, Microsoft Entra access control, and monitoring across Copilot Studio and third-party agents. Copilot Studio is also available in the US Government Community Cloud (GCC). Copilot Studio suits organizations standardized on Microsoft 365 that want internal agents for HR, IT service desk, and knowledge questions on top of existing Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. It also fits teams publishing customer-facing agents to websites, apps, and social channels, IT groups with an existing Power Platform investment, and builders automating multistep processes such as accounts payable. Teams that want an agent builder independent of the Microsoft stack should consider Botpress or Voiceflow. Current state Q4 2026: Microsoft says 90% of the Fortune 500 use Copilot Studio, and named Copilot Studio deployments include Estee Lauder, Amgen, Morningstar, Premera Blue Cross, State Farm, and the NFL. In September 2026 the GitHub Copilot harness reached general availability, adding skills, memory, and file handling for reasoning-heavy agents, and app building entered public preview, so makers can build business apps alongside agents and workflows from a conversation. Those apps run on Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime, which Microsoft put into public preview on September 25, 2026 to host app code inside the Microsoft 365 tenant under Entra identity and IT policy. Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.5 Chat became generally available as primary models in June 2026, computer use reached general availability in May 2026, and Copilot Studio now creates a Microsoft Entra Agent ID for every new agent. Microsoft Scout, a separate always-on personal agent that launched June 2, 2026 alongside the Work IQ APIs, is a distinct product from Copilot Studio.