Recruit - Microsoft Copilot Harness
Welcome, Recruit.
Your mission in this course is to master the art of building agents powered by the Microsoft Copilot harness in Microsoft Copilot Studio.
This beginner, hands-on course introduces the Microsoft Copilot harness and its instruction-driven approach to agent building. You'll use a familiar IT support scenario so you can focus on how instructions, skills, tools, and workflows work together.
Harness naming update
Microsoft Copilot harness
Microsoft has renamed the GitHub Copilot harness to the Microsoft Copilot harness. Agent Academy uses the new name, but the Copilot Studio interface may still display GitHub Copilot or GitHub Copilot harness while the update rolls out. Both refer to the same harness. Instructions and screenshots reflect the labels currently shown in the product. This rename does not apply to the GitHub Copilot coding assistant.
About this learning path
How this path differs from the standard harness path
The standard harness path was created before the Microsoft Copilot harness was available and introduces the topic-based authoring experience. This path revisits a familiar business scenario using a different architecture: natural-language instructions, skills, tools, and workflows replace manually authored conversation paths.
Reusing the scenario is intentional. It helps you compare the approaches without also learning a new business process. It doesn't mean every IT support agent requires the Microsoft Copilot harness; the right harness depends on how the agent must behave.
🎯 Mission Objective
By completing this course, you'll be able to:
- Understand what agents are in the context of Microsoft Copilot Studio
- Explore how Large Language Models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and orchestration come together in an agent
- Distinguish apps, agents, and workflows, and recognize when each fits
- Compare the Microsoft Copilot, Copilot chat, Customer Conversation, and standard agent harnesses
- Build an agent powered by the Microsoft Copilot harness
- Enhance agents with Skills, Tools, and Workflows
- Deploy agents to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot
🧪 Prerequisites
To complete all missions, you'll need:
- A Microsoft 365 Developer tenant (with SharePoint enabled)
- Access to Microsoft Copilot Studio (trial or licensed)
- Microsoft 365 Copilot license
- Copilot Credits available in your tenant
- Optional: Basic knowledge of SharePoint, Power Platform, or Power Fx
2,100 - 4,300 credits across 11 missions
Agents and workflows on the Microsoft Copilot harness use Copilot Credits for usage-based billing during LLM-powered creation and runtime execution. The billing exception available to licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot users in authenticated employee scenarios doesn't apply here, so make sure your environment has credit capacity before you start. Mission 09 covers this in detail.
The course total is the sum of the per-mission estimates shown on each mission page. This is a non-binding estimate. We aim for a conservative guess, but your actual Copilot Credits consumption depends on how much you experiment, re-prompt, and test, and it may end up higher than the range shown.
The Course Setup mission walks you through getting these in place.
🧭 Curriculum Overview
This academy is broken into progressive lessons (aka "missions"), designed to level up your agent-building skills.
| Lesson | Title | Mission Briefing |
|---|---|---|
00 | 🧰 Course Setup | Set up your dev environment, Copilot Studio trial, and SharePoint site |
01 | 🧠 Introduction to Agents | Understand agent concepts, orchestration, and the four Copilot Studio agent harnesses |
02 | 🛠️ Copilot Studio Fundamentals | Choose among apps, agents, and workflows, then explore the Microsoft Copilot harness building blocks |
03 | 🧩 Creating a Solution | Package your agent into a reusable solution for environment management |
04 | ✍️ Build with the Microsoft Copilot Harness | Create a reasoning-first agent grounded in knowledge sources |
05 | 🪪 Add a Tool | Add tools to extend with data integration |
06 | 🧠 Add Skills | Use Skills to fine-tune your agent |
07 | 🔁 Automate with Workflows | Add deterministic logic and automation to your agent |
08 | 📢 Publish Your Agent | Deploy your agent to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot |
09 | 🪪 Understanding Licensing | Learn how licensing and billing works with Copilot Studio |
10 | 🚨 Securing Your Recruit NextGen Badge | Claim your badge and mark your achievement! |
NOTE
✅ Completing this curriculum earns you the Recruit NextGen badge.