Summary

  • 1 minute

In this module, you explored how Microsoft Copilot Studio harnesses support different types of agents and workflows.

You learned that:

  • A harness controls how an agent uses a model, information, and tools, and how usage is billed.
  • The Microsoft Copilot harness supports reasoning-heavy, multistep work that can adapt to intermediate results.
  • The standard harness supports topic-based agents and agent flows with classic or generative orchestration.
  • The Customer Conversation harness supports customer service over voice and chat, with specialist sub-agents and defined human escalation paths.
  • Agents powered by the Microsoft Copilot harness use instructions, knowledge, tools, skills, models, connected agents, and memory.
  • Build, Preview, Evaluate, and Monitor support different stages of the agent lifecycle.

Select a harness before detailed authoring because you can't move an agent between the Microsoft Copilot and standard harnesses. Base the decision on the work, the level of control you need, where people use the agent, and billing requirements.

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.