Introduction
Agents powered by the Microsoft Copilot harness use natural-language instructions to pursue goals, respond to users, and decide how to use their available knowledge. Instead of defining a topic path for each conversation, you describe the agent's job and the rules it should follow.
Effective instructions begin with a clear purpose and scope. They also define how the agent communicates, which information it should use, what it must avoid, and when it should refer a user to a person or another process. You then test those decisions in Preview and refine the instructions based on observed behavior.
In this module, you learn how to:
- Create an agent powered by the Microsoft Copilot harness.
- Define an agent's purpose and scope.
- Write instructions for behavior, tone, grounding, boundaries, and escalation.
- Add file and website knowledge sources.
- Configure agent details, a greeting, and suggested prompts.
- Establish baseline behavior in Preview.
- Refine instructions based on test results.
The module focuses on creating, grounding, testing, and refining an instruction-driven agent.
Note
Building, previewing, testing, and evaluating agents powered by the Microsoft Copilot harness can consume Copilot Credits before publication. Confirm that your environment has approved access and sufficient credit capacity before you begin. For more information, see Overview of usage-based billing.
Note
We recognize that different people like to learn in different ways. You can choose to complete this module in video-based format or you can read the content as text and images. The text contains greater detail than the videos, so in some cases you might want to refer to it as supplemental material to the video presentation.