What you need to know when building Autonomous Agent in Copilot Studio

Hello everyone,

Intro

Today, I want to share my findings regarding the creation of an autonomous agent in Copilot Studio (CS).
What I missed and spent too much time figuring out, the pre-requisites and so on.

As you know, we can build agents in Copilot Studio using Topics, Generative Answers, Orchestration, Generative Actions.
Those capabilities are awesome but this need to be used using a chat to discuss with the agent.

At the end of last year (October 2024), Microsoft announce the autonomous capability which can help to change the “agent game” (details).

Use cases

Basically in few words, an autonomous agent is an agent as you know it with the trigger to automatically trigger it with a cloud flow.
Of course, this is way beyond a cloud flow.

From my point of view, the main difference and advantage of the autonomous agent compare to a cloud flow is the Orchestration side of the agent.
Having the capability to automatically trigger the right topic or action based on an input is a must have. In a Cloud flow, you would need to define all branches of your processes to know where to route a request.

My very simple use case for the following was to leverage the capabilities of the autonomous agent, to grab the information from a devops ticket with a timeframe in order to reflect it in Outlook calendar automatically.

I create a DevOps ticket assigned to me with the time slot, I want to see this in my outlook.

How to configure it

Few steps :

1. Activate the orchestration (for english agents only for now and in preview)
2. Define your trigger with Power Automate
3. Test your trigger and the orchestration in Copilot Studio
4. Deploy

I feel like there is no need to paraphrase the documentation, you can find details here

You have 2 ways to test your autonomous agent :

• Trigger at least once your trigger flow and reuse it in Copilot Studio using :
  
• Trigger the flow and “wait” for the automated run of the agent

How to debug !

That’s a real pain point for now on Copilot studio, the lack of information when building and debugging an agent.

To follow all run of your agent, you do have the “Activity tab”, there you will find something like :

Quick explanation here :

• Complete : well done, all good !
• Waiting for user : this relates mainly to the fact that connections are missing or need to be reconfigured
• In Progress : something went wrong, argh …

Let’s focus on the In Progress mainly for now.

Something went wrong but where ? what ? how ? why ?

When tested the agent directly within Copilot Studio everything was fine !

You can click on each run in order to find more details :

This displays the activity map of all actions / topics triggered automatically using the orchestration.
By checking the screen, all seems fine, but no !
The golden ticket is not far away but you need to find it the first time :

This will lead you with (obviously) the transcript of this run, and for example here, I can see that I do have a datetime format issue which prevent my Outlook creation of event fail.

Therefore, I now know where to check and test in order to fix this.

The behavior between the test in CS and the direct trigger are different

One other point to be aware of is how the agent works between CS and autonomously.
As soon as you know it, it makes perfect sens but …

In Copilot Studio, every changes on your agent are directly reflected.
However, when using it with the “real” trigger, this will trigger the latest version of the agent published.

Be sure to publish your agent as soon as you are done or fixed thing to prevent you some time wasted sadly (my story)

Connection issue in the actions

For now, make sure that all actions are using the Copilot Author connection, that’s the only way it can work for now.

This means that if you go for an autonomous agent right now (besides the fact that it’s in preview), you can’t use ootb the context of the user who are using the agent.

Conclusion

I have to admit that I struggled a bit with these 3 points and wanted to share it before people would waste time like I did because I missed important part.

Hope this can help you,
Cheers,

Original Post https://stuffandtacos.azurewebsites.net/2025/03/03/what-you-need-to-know-when-building-autonomous-agent-in-copilot-studio/