Märkus.
Juurdepääs sellele lehele nõuab autoriseerimist. Võite proovida sisse logida või kausta vahetada.
Juurdepääs sellele lehele nõuab autoriseerimist. Võite proovida kausta vahetada.
Tools extend what your agent can do beyond answering questions from knowledge sources. They let your agent call APIs, run automated flows, interact with external services, and retrieve real-time data.
Note
Features in this article are powered by the GitHub Copilot harness, which uses Copilot Credits for usage-based billing. Learn more about Copilot Credits in Overview of billing for agents powered by the GitHub Copilot harness.
Usage-based billing applies to using, building, testing, and evaluating agents. These actions might consume Copilot Credits.
What are tools?
Tools are external capabilities your agent can invoke during a conversation.
When a user asks the agent to do something that requires an action, the agent orchestrator selects a tool based on the conversation context and the tool's description.
Agents powered by the GitHub Copilot harness use enhanced orchestration to automatically determine when to invoke a tool.
Why add tools to your agent?
Without tools, your agent can only answer questions based on its instructions and knowledge sources.
With tools, your agent can:
- Look up real-time data from external systems, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), IT Service Management (ITSM), and databases
- Take actions on your behalf, such as creating records, sending notifications, and updating data
- Integrate with third-party services and APIs
- Run automated workflows
How the agent decides to use a tool
The agent orchestrator evaluates each user message and decides whether a tool is needed.
The tool's name and description are critical. Well-described tools are invoked more accurately.
Your agent's instructions also influence when tools are used.
For conversational tool use in agents powered by the GitHub Copilot harness, you don't need to create explicit triggers or topic flows for each tool call.
Limits
A few limits apply to tools and to files that tools produce:
- Files the agent creates during a turn are capped at 10 MB per file. Files that exceed the cap aren't returned to the user. Ask the agent to split large output into smaller files. See Files the agent creates.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers count against the total number of tools an agent can host. The number of MCP server instances that can run concurrently in one conversation is also capped, so keep the count of attached servers small and remove servers you no longer use. See Add a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server as a tool.