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Microsoft provides products and services for build agents, with different audiences and capabilities depending on your requirements & use cases.The following sections describe each product in more detail:
| Product | Audience | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot Studio | Fusion teams, citizen developers | Copilot Studio is an end-to-end agent-building tool, with built-in natural language understanding models, data connectivity through Power Automates, and support for multiple channels. |
| Microsoft 365 Agents SDK | Developers | Provides a framework for building agents, including tools, templates, and related AI services. The SDK is ideal for developers who want to build agents that are publicly available on the Microsoft Teams app store. |
| Azure AI Foundry SDK | Developers | Azure agents provide agent development capabilities under a unified Azure AI SDK. |
| Semantic Kernel SDK | Developers | The Semantic Kernel SDK allows developers to build agents and integrates various AI services to define orchestration chains for rapid development. |
Copilot Studio
Copilot Studio is a tool for agent development included in Microsoft Power Platform—a business-application platform that incorporates data analysis, solution building, and process automation. You don't need to write code or understand the details of the underlying AI technologies to build agents in Copilot Studio. Agents built in Copilot Studio can apply automation and other capabilities within the Power Platform, and you can rapidly develop sophisticated agent experiences.
You can connect agents to various user platforms, such as Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
For more information about Copilot Studio, see the product overview page. For details about pricing, see Copilot Studio pricing.
Microsoft 365 Agents SDK
With the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK, you can create agents deployable to channels of your choice, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, Web & Custom Apps and more, with scaffolding to handle the required communication. Developers can use the AI Services of their choice, and make the agents they build available using the channel management capabilities of the SDK.
Use the Agents SDK to:
- Quickly build an agent 'container' with state, storage, and the ability to manage activities and events. Deploy this container across any channel, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot or Microsoft Teams.
- Implement agentic patterns without being restricted to a specific technology stack. The Agents SDK is agnostic regarding the AI you choose.
- Customize your agent to align with the specific behaviors of clients, such as Microsoft Teams.
The Agents SDK utilizes the Azure Bot Service. For details about pricing, see Azure AI Bot Service pricing. Costs vary depending on what AI services are used for implementing and hosting your code.
Azure AI Foundry SDK
Azure AI Foundry includes many development capabilities under a unified Azure AI SDK tailored to suit specific needs or work with specific services. Azure Agents is the name of the feature within the Unified Azure AI SDK that also includes fine-tuning and evaluations.
The agent capabilities include API layers such as Multi-agent API, Assistants API, Responses API and Completion API. These API layer provide various amounts of capabilities to support multi-agent, RAG, and AI services.
Developers can add and use Azure Agents APIs from Assistants and broader APIs including Azure OpenAI Services and Azure Cognitive Services to add functionality and capabilities to the agent.
Semantic Kernel SDK
Semantic Kernel SDK allows developers to build agents and integrates various AI services to define orchestration chains for rapid development.
As with Azure Agents, developers can choose to use Semantic Kernel in the middleware or agent logic components of an Agents SDK agent to add capabilities such as the ability to easily orchestrate between APIs or plugins.
Skills in Copilot Studio (formerly Bot Framework skills)
Copilot Studio provides a range of functionality to create different types of agents, including copilot agents to extend Copilot for Microsoft 365.
A skill is developed, and deployed and hosted (for example, on Azure), and then configured within Copilot Studio. Here is some additional information about skills: