Copilot Studio Foundations — Standard Harness

Build, publish and cost a working agent in twelve hours. No coding.

By the end of twelve hours, every participant has built, tested, published and cost-modelled a working customer service agent running in Microsoft Teams. It answers from both scripted topics and a knowledge source, captures validated detail across a multi-turn conversation, writes a ticket to SharePoint, sends a confirmation email, and hands off cleanly to a human. Participants keep the agent, and it is fit to extend into production.

Business analysts and process owners who have been raising tickets instead of building.

IT, HR and service desk teams carrying repeat questions.

Developers new to the platform, before moving to generative orchestration.

Technical managers who need the harness decision and the cost model.

Teams wanting generative orchestration, custom connectors or MCP servers. Our Practitioner — Standard Harness course covers those.

Anyone needing the GitHub Copilot harness or autonomous reasoning agents. Our Foundations — GitHub Copilot Harness course covers those.

Teams whose immediate problem is ALM, governance or tenant policy. Our Copilot Studio Enterprise course covers those.

Voice channels and telephony, which are not in the curriculum.

Duration: 2 days or 6 sessions × 2 hours
Level: Foundation · Standard Harness
Delivery: Remote or on-site
Group size: Up to 12
Price: Priced per team — ask us

Get dates and a quote

We reply within one working day. No sales sequence.

What your team will be able to do

Outcomes, not topics covered.

By the end, each of these is something they have done rather than watched.

Explain what an agent is in business terms, and name the processes in your own organisation worth automating.

Justify a harness choice on both capability and cost grounds, before it becomes unchangeable.

Author topics, trigger phrases, nodes and variables, and trace a message end to end through a topic.

Attach a knowledge source, and judge when knowledge beats an explicit topic.

Design a multi-turn capture flow with validation, confirmation and a clean exit.

Call external systems through actions and agent flows, and handle failure gracefully.

Publish to Microsoft Teams and run a pre-publish readiness check.

Convert unrecognised questions from the analytics dashboard into a topic backlog.

Estimate Copilot Credit consumption for a given volume, and build the return-on-investment case.

What's covered

10 modules, a little under half of it building.

Labs run on your own tenant, so whatever gets built stays with you. We publish what each day produces rather than a minute-by-minute timetable — good sessions run long exactly when the questions are good.

Day 1

Understand and build

Leaves with: A published agent answering real questions in Microsoft Teams 5 modules 2 hands-on

01

Why agents, why now

What an agent actually is, the business problem it addresses, and four cross-sector patterns. Closes with a live preview of the finished artefact.
02

Harnesses: the runtime decision

The structural choice made at creation and never again. All three harnesses on capability, traceability and when billing starts.
03

Core building blocks

Topics, trigger phrases, nodes, variables and knowledge sources, traced end to end through a live build.
04

Lab 1: Build the agent

Five FAQ topics, trigger phrases and an attached knowledge source.
Hands-on
05

Lab 2: Publish to Microsoft Teams

Channel configuration, publication, and cross-testing with a peer.
Hands-on

Day 2

Enhance and integrate

Leaves with: An agent that captures, decides, acts in real systems, and pays for itself 5 modules 2 hands-on

06

Conversation design and data capture

Multi-turn flows, validation, confirmation and the exits most builds skip.
07

Lab 3: Capture and qualify

Multi-turn capture, validation, confirmation and category branching.
Hands-on
08

Connectors, actions and agent flows

Reaching real systems, and handling the failure paths gracefully.
09

Lab 4: Integrate and escalate

SharePoint ticket, confirmation email, human handoff and a full end-to-end run.
Hands-on
10

Production, cost and what comes next

Analytics into a topic backlog, credit estimation, the ROI case and the onward path.

Upcoming batches

No public batch scheduled yet.

Teams book this course on their own dates. Joining as an individual? Tell us and we'll let you know when the next batch opens.

Before the first day

What we need from you.

Prerequisites

No coding, no AI background, no prior Copilot Studio exposure. Comfort with Teams and a browser is enough.
Copilot Studio access on a trial or licensed tenant.
Permission to create an environment and an agent in that tenant.
A SharePoint site the participant can write to, and a mailbox that can send.
Every participant completes a five-minute access check 48 hours before day one.

We send a checklist a fortnight ahead and will talk to your platform team directly if access needs arranging.

Next step

Tell us about your team.

Roughly how many people, what they build today, and when you'd want to run it. We come back with dates and a quote.

Check availability