Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio is a graphical, low-code studio for building and managing AI agents and workflows, then publishing them into the channels your teams and customers already use.

You can describe the business goal in plain language and let the natural-language builder assemble the agents and workflows for you, or you can wire up topics, knowledge sources, tools, and connectors by hand.

Each agent runs on one of three harnesses, and Microsoft documents the trade-off explicitly: the standard harness for structured, rule-based conversations, the Copilot chat harness for extending Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat with your own knowledge, and the GitHub Copilot harness for reasoning-heavy, multi-step business processes.

Drag-and-drop workflows and agent flows sit alongside agents with built-in testing and human-in-the-loop review steps, and an agent can be given its own account so it works proactively inside shared business processes.

The studio pitches itself as low-code: capable solutions without an extensive technical background, while still giving professional makers depth through prebuilt and custom connectors.

Marketing teams are usually pointed at two parts of it.

First, internal agents: published into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, they can summarise accounts, answer questions from approved knowledge, or surface cross-sell recommendations inside the tools teams already open every day - and Microsoft publishes a personalised cross-sell or upsell agent as one of its own customer-service use cases.

Second, external agents: a standalone Copilot Studio plan is what unlocks publishing to websites, mobile apps, and social platforms, which is the part most customer-facing marketing programmes need.

Knowledge can be grounded in Dataverse, Power Platform connectors, and existing models and indexes from Microsoft Foundry and Azure AI Search, while costs and rollout are governed from the Power Platform admin center.

Budget for it carefully, because Copilot Studio is priced as a platform plus metered usage rather than a flat subscription.

Microsoft's pricing page, read on 20 September 2026, lists Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30.00 user/month paid yearly, which includes Copilot Chat and the standard harness in Copilot Studio for agents used inside the organisation; publishing or sharing agents to external channels requires a standalone Copilot Studio plan, listed on the same page as a $200.00 license alongside a pre-purchase plan built on prepaid Copilot Credit Commit Units (with up to 20% off for up-front commitment) or pay-as-you-go billing.

An Azure subscription is required to use agents, every agent action consumes Copilot Credits, and Microsoft's own licensing documentation requires both a per-user license for the people who build agents and a tenant license for the organisation - so the real question is rarely the feature list, it is how many credits your agents will burn per month.