Welcome Recruit
Welcome, Recruit.
Your mission—should you choose to accept it—is to master the art of building agents powered by the GitHub Copilot harness in Microsoft Copilot Studio.
This beginner, hands-on course introduces the GitHub 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.
How this path differs from the standard harness path
The standard harness path was created before the GitHub 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 GitHub Copilot harness; the right harness depends on how the agent must behave.
🎯 Mission Objective
By completing the Agent Academy, 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
- Understand the GitHub Copilot, standard, and Copilot chat harnesses
- Build an agent powered by the GitHub 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)
- Copilot Credits available in your tenant
- Optional: Basic knowledge of SharePoint, Power Platform, or Power Fx
This path consumes Copilot Credits
Agents and workflows on the GitHub 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 Setup mission walks you through getting these in place.
🧭 Curriculum Overview
This academy is broken into progressive lessons—each one designed as a field mission 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 three Copilot Studio harnesses |
02 | 🛠️ Copilot Studio Fundamentals | Learn the building blocks |
03 | 🧩 Creating a Solution | Package your agent into a reusable solution for environment management |
04 | ✍️ Build with the GitHub 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 badge.