Microsoft Copilot Studio Labs

Using Multi-Agent in Copilot Studio

⏱️ 30 minutes 📊 Level 100 🏷️ Local
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Help makers understand how to leverage multi-agent configurations including child and connected agents.

🧭 Lab Details

Level Persona Duration Purpose
300 Maker [30 minutes] After completing this lab, participants will be able to leverage multi-agent configurations with Copilot Studio. This lab teaches the concepts of multi-agent and shows the difference of connected and child agent configurations.

📚 Table of Contents

🤔 Why This Matters

Makers and Architects - Want to know how to appropriately leverage mutli-agent configurations and when to use connected vs child agents to optimize how your agent orchestrates and is built for scale?

Think of a complex agent that might have many tools and knowledge sets that should only be used when appropriate:

  • Without Multi-Agent: Makers are heavily limited in the number of orchestratable topics and tools they have at their disposal.
  • With Multi-Agent: Makers are able to logically group their tools, topics, and knowledge into contextualized agents that allows for additional instructions and descriptions to be used to guide their orchestration on the best way to find the data it is looking to provide to the user.

Common challenges solved by this lab:

  • "Abusing connected agents"
  • "Not knowing if something should be a connected agent or child agent"
  • "Don't understand the capabilities and rationale of child agents"
  • "Not classifying their agents capabilities and putting excessive instructions in the Overiew instructions to compensate"

Become a multij-agent master - no need to continue to wonder about how to work around limitations of tools and topics that can be orchestrated or have the wrong tool being called at the wrong time.

🌐 Introduction

Welcome to the Copilot Studio Multi‑Agent Lab. In this hands‑on session, you’ll learn how to design, orchestrate, and extend intelligent copilots using multi‑agent patterns, including child agents, connected agents, and coordinated task delegation. This lab is designed to help you understand how complex workflows can be broken into smaller, specialized agents that collaborate to solve problems—mirroring modern enterprise AI architectures. You’ll build and configure agents, define how they communicate, and connect them to real data and actions. By the end, you’ll have a working multi‑agent copilot capable of distributing tasks, retrieving information from external systems, and chaining logic across multiple agent types.

What You Will Learn

  • How multi‑agent patterns work in Copilot Studio
  • Creating and configuring child agents to handle specialized tasks
  • Chaining logic so a parent agent delegates tasks to child agents
  • Building connected agents that access data sources and external systems
  • Designing agent‑to‑agent communication flows
  • Using dynamic chaining to route user intent to the right agent
  • Implementing branching logic for conditional task routing
  • Best practices for agent design, naming, and responsibility boundaries
  • Testing multi‑agent scenarios end to end in Copilot Studio
  • Troubleshooting common multi‑agent issues

🎓 Core Concepts Overview

Concept Why it matters
Child Agents Allows a maker to group common set of tools and knowledge including instructions into a logical group
Connected Agents Allows a maker to connect an external agent to another agent in Copilot Studio
Orchestration Allows a maker to let the agent decide what tools and agents are best to solve the user's request

📄 Documentation and Additional Training Links

✅ Prerequisites

  • Access to Microsoft Copilot Studio
  • Dataverse Search Enable in Environment
  • Access to Dataverse unbound action connector
  • Sample Data loaded into Dataverse Tables
  • Access to Account / Contact table in environment
  • Access to modify views and create search indexes on Account / Contact table

🎯 Summary of Targets

In this lab, you'll build a parent agent that will leverage both connected agents and child agents. By the end of the lab, you will:

  • Create a parent agent for a Sales Associate
  • Configure a child agent that gets information about products
  • Connect to a connected agent that gets information about Accounts and Contacts
  • Use generative orchestration to select the correct agent and tools to execute the request

🧩 Use Cases Covered

Step Use Case Value added Effort
1 Create Sales Assistant Agent Creates parent agent to help sales associate find information they need [X min]
2 Create Product Information Child Agents Creates child aget to provide product information [X min]
3 Connect to Account and Contact Information Agent Connect existing Copilot Studio agent that provides account and contact information [X min]

🛠️ Instructions by Use Case

🧱 Use Case #1: Create Sales Assistant Agent

Creates parent agent to help sales associate find information they need

Use case Value added Estimated effort
Create Sales Assistant Agent Creates parent agent to help sales associate find information they need [X minutes]

Summary of tasks

In this section, you'll learn how to create a parent agent to use as the base agent for a Sales Associate Assistant.

Scenario: Your Sales Team needs to be able to quickly be able to answer questions and help customers with information on your products and help with finding account and account contact information.

Objective

Create the parent agent base that will be needed to host all your tools / agents / knowledge for sales associates.

Step-by-step instructions

Create Sales Associate Assistant

  1. Navigate to the Copilot Studio home page at https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com.

  2. On Home page in the description of the agent your want to build enter: Agent that assists sales associates with getting product information and lookup account and contact information in the sales system.

[!IMPORTANT] Do not click Enter or submit this text yet as we need to do the agent settings before we do that.

Home Creation Text

  1. Click the Gear on the description input area and edit schema name to include salesassistant and then click Update

Agent Settings

[!TIP] [Putting an agent into a dedicated solution and changing the schema name is always helpful for helping with application lifecycle management in the future]

  1. Click Enter or the Arrow button on the description field

  2. Once your agent is fully provisioned, review the instructions and tool or knowledge reccomendations provided by the Copilot Studio provisioning process.

Prevent Hallucinations

  1. To ensure that our agent doesn't use model knowledge, we want to turn off some features. So select Settings (In the upper right hand corner)

  2. Scroll to the bottom of the list of settings on the Generative AI settings screen and turn Off both Use general knowledge and Use information from the Web

Turn off Model and Web Knowledge

  1. Click Save and then Close the settings page

[!TIP] [Turning off model and web knowledge helps to keep your agent from hallucinating information that the model might know about our product catalog or other items that might confuse it. This is best practice if you want it to keep to just the content you provide.]

Collect Sales Associate's Market

  1. Click Topics in the top navigation menu

  2. Click Add a Topic and select From blank

Create blank topic

  1. Hover your mouse over the box that says The agent chooses and click the Double Arrows to show the Change Trigger menu then select It's redirected to

Set Trigger on Topic

  1. Change the name of the Topic to Select Market by clicking on the name in the upper left hand navigation

Set Topic Name

  1. Add a node after the Trigger by clicking the + and select Ask a question

Add Question

  1. Enter What market are you wanting information in? and add to Options for user both US and UK by selecting New option

Create Question and Options

  1. Under Save user response as click on Var1 and set the Variable name to Market

  2. Select Global as the Usage of the Variable and select External sources can receive value

  3. Enter The market that the sales associate is requesting information about. in the Variable description

Variable Settings

  1. Delete all the Condition nodes by selecting … and then selecting Delete on each

Delete Conditions

  1. Click Save to save the topic

  2. Click the V next to the name of the topic "Select Market" and select Conversation Start to go to the Conversation Start Topic

Go To Conversation Start

  1. Add a new node at the end of the topic by selecting the + and the selecting Topic Management > Go to another topic > Select Market

Add Node to Conversation Start

  1. Click Save

  2. Open the Test chat by click Test in the upper right hand corner

  3. Click the + in the Test chat to start a new test session and verify that you now are asked which market at the beginning of each new chat.

Test Chat Market Selection

🏅 Congratulations! You've completed Use Case #1!

🔄 Use Case #2: Create Product Information Child Agents

Create child agents that allow the user based on their market get the right product market information.

Use case Value added Estimated effort
Create Product Information Child Agents Group common tools and knowledge into logical groups for orchestration optimization [X minutes]

Summary of tasks

In this section, you'll learn how to create child agents to logically group knowledge and tools allowing them to be orchestrated based on a condition.

Scenario: You want to orchestrate to knowledge about your products based upon the market that the user selects.

Create Child Agent for US product information

  1. In the Sales Associate Assistant, select Agents on the top navigation menu

  2. Click Add on the Agents page

  3. Select New child agent

Select Child Agent

  1. Set Agent Name to US Product Information Agent

  2. Set the Description to This agent provides details about the Surface products offered in the United States

  3. Expand Advanced and set the Condition to the Global.Market variable is equal to US

Set Child Agent Details

[!TIP] You can use a formula or variables to make conditions for when this agent should be available.

  1. In Instructions add This agent should only answer questions about Microsoft Surface products in regards to the US-based products. It should never provide details or stats on any products not offered or details about models offered outside of the United States. You should only talk about Microsoft Surface products and not discuss any products that are not Microsoft Surface products even if they are made by Microsoft.

Add instructions

  1. Add Knowledge to the Child Agent by click Add in the Knowledge section of the Child Agent configuration

  2. Select Public Websites

  3. Enter microsoft.com in Public website link and click Add

  4. Click Add to agent

  5. Click Save to save your child agent

Create Child Agent for UK product information

  1. In the Sales Associate Assistant, select Agents on the top navigation menu

  2. Click Add on the Agents page

  3. Select New child agent

Select Child Agent

  1. Set Agent Name to UK Product Information Agent

  2. Set the Description to This agent provides details about the Surface products offered in the United Kingdom

  3. Expand Advanced and set the Condition to the Global.Market variable is equal to UK

Set Child Agent Details UK

[!TIP] You can use a formula or variables to make conditions for when this agent should be available.

  1. In Instructions add This agent should only answer questions about Microsoft Surface products in regards to the UK-based products. It should never provide details or stats on any products not offered or details about models offered outside of the United Kingdom. You should only talk about Microsoft Surface products and not discuss any products that are not Microsoft Surface products even if they are made by Microsoft.

Add Child Agent Instructions UK

  1. Add Knowledge to the Child Agent by click Add in the Knowledge section of the Child Agent configuration

  2. Select Public Websites

  3. Enter microsoft.com/en-gb in Public website link and click Add

  4. Click Add to agent

  5. Click Save to save your child agent

  6. Open the Test chat by click Test in the upper right hand corner

  7. Click the + in the Test chat to start a new test session

  8. Select UK

  9. Enter What are the starting prices for the Surface laptop?

  10. Verfiy that the correct Child agent was triggered and that your answer is appropriate for the UK market

Example Response UK question

  1. Reset the conversation and do again for US market

🏅 Congratulations! You've completed [USE CASE 2]!

🧱 Use Case #3: Connect to Account and Contact Information Agent

Connect Account and Contact Information agent to our parent Sales Associate Agent. Will need to ensure indexing is working in environment ahead of testing.

Use case Value added Estimated effort
Connect to Account and Contact Information Agent Connect to Account and Contact Information agent [X minutes]

Summary of tasks

In this section, you'll learn how to connect a Copilot Studio agent to another Copilot Studio connected agent using connected agents.

Scenario: Your Sales Team needs to be able to quickly be able to answer questions and help customers with information on your products and help with finding account and account contact information.

Objective

Connect existing agent to our Sales Associate Assistant agent to add ability to find account and contact information from the sales system.

Step-by-step instructions

Test and Publish the Account and Contact Information Agent

  1. In the Copilot Studio tab in your browser open the Account Data Lookup Agent

  2. Open the Test chat by click Test in the upper right hand corner

  3. Enter What are the accounts in Texas?

  4. Verify that you get a response showing that the agent is working and the data is indexed

Test Account Lookup

  1. Click Settings in the upper right hand menu

  2. Make sure that the setting in the Generative AI menu in the Connected Agents section for Let other agents connect to and use this one is set to On

  3. Close the Settings menu by clicking the X in the upper right hand corner

  4. Click Publish and make sure that your agent publishes

    [!IMPORTANT] You can't connect to an agent unless it is published

Connect the Account and Contact Information Agent

  1. In the Copilot Studio tab in your browser open your parent agent (Sales Associate Assistant)

  2. Navigate to the Agents menu on the top navigation bar

  3. Click Add an agent

  4. Select Account Data Lookup Agent out of the menu

Select Connected Agent

  1. Notice that the Description provides details on when to use this agent

  2. Make sure that the Pass conversation history to this agent is Checked

Validate Setting Connected Agent

  1. Click Add and configure

  2. Open the Test chat by click Test in the upper right hand corner

  3. Select US in the test canvas to select that geography

  4. Enter What are all of the details of accounts in Texas? and send to agent

  5. Notice that the agent orchestrated to the connected agent which then called it's child agent that then called numerous tools to answer the question.

Account Info Results

🏅 Congratulations! You've completed [USE CASE 3]!

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