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Getting Started with Microsoft 365 Copilot agents - A Phased Approach

Getting started with Microsoft 365 Copilot agents can transform how your organization leverages AI to streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and empower employees to build intelligent solutions. This blog outlines a phased approach—starting with forming a champion team, training employees, and scaling deployment—to help your organization confidently adopt Copilot Studio’s Agent Builder. 

To start empowering employees to create and manage Microsoft 365 Copilot agents securely at scale, it is recommended that a three-phase approach is taken: 

  1. Form an "agent adoption champion" team within IT and try out Agent Builder.
  2. Train employees to build agents with Agent Builder.
  3. Provide selected employees with access to Agent Builder and set up pay-go meters. 

Phase I – Form a team

Step 1: Create an "agent adoption champion" team 
Select a group of early adopters (your "champion team”) to explore building agents using Microsoft Copilot Studio Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot. Provide them with the required Copilot licenses to test features, develop best practices and identify use cases. 

Step 2: Provide the right controls to the right audience 
Use the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to assign Copilot extensibility rights exclusively to your selected champion team. By doing so, you can empower a trusted group to explore advanced Copilot capabilities while ensuring your environment remains secure and compliant. 

Step 3: Empower your champion team to build an agent 
Empower your champion team to create the first org-wide agent using Agent Builder. This process will both validate best practices before broader deployment and provide employees with an initial on-demand resource. Learn more about building agents with Build agents with Copilot Studio agent builder. 

Phase II – Train employees 

Step 4: Gradually enable web-grounded agent development 
Provide structured training and best practices on Copilot Chat fundamentals and safe, web-grounded agent building to each department in your organization. Then, grant development permissions through Microsoft 365 Admin Center security groups—ensuring each team is prepared before rolling out this capability. 

Step 5: Enable proof-of-concept agent consumption 
Use the Power Platform Admin Center to grant Copilot Chat users access to your initial proof-of-concept agent. This allows IT to gather insights on agent performance and refine capabilities before a broader organizational rollout. 

Step 6: Establish a Center of Excellence 
Establish a Center of Excellence (CoE) to govern all agents built across the organization. The CoE, led by your champion team, will define standards, approve new agents, and ensure each department follows best practices for secure and effective development. 

Phase III – Deploy and engage 

Step 7: Identify and train departmental agent makers 
Designate key individuals to develop agents that can access critical work data. Provide them with specialized training before migrating them from Copilot Chat to Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, equipping them with the tools they need to securely and efficiently build robust, department-specific solutions. 

Step 8: Set up pay-go meters and control agent sharing 
Configure a dedicated pay-go meter in Copilot Studio for each department. Allow approved agent makers to build solutions using their department's meter and enable limit sharing in the Power Platform Admin Center to prevent agents from being overshared across the organization. 

Step 9: Govern org-wide agent sharing 
Invite employees to share the agents they create, so the Center of Excellence (CoE) can evaluate each one and decide whether it should remain within a specific group or be accessible across the entire tenant. If agents fail to meet CoE standards, IT can block them at the tenant level from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Once the agents meet the standards, IT can unblock them. 

Step 10: Manage spend and monitor usage 
IT admins can monitor and manage agent spend in the Power Platform Admin Center. For example, IT admins can turn on consumption alerts for agents by navigating to 'Copilot Studio’, selecting 'Manage Capacity' and setting up alerts based on desired usage thresholds. 

Example use cases

Below are some example use cases for agents that could be created to get started. 
2025’s Gartner® CFO & Finance Executive Conference featured sessions and hands-on product demonstrations from finance and operations providers covering growth strategies, cost management tools, and of course, AI in finance. Refer to  Get started with agents for finance: Learnings from 2025 Gartner® CFO & Finance Executive Conference for more exciting information about applying agents and generative AI.

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