After your agent’s content has been created, it must be published so that customers can interact with it. Published agents can be made available on multiple platforms and channels. Before an agent can be added to channels, used, or tested by team members, it must be published at least once. For example, an agent can be deployed on the organization’s websites, mobile apps, and messaging platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Facebook.

Publishing agents as you make changes also ensures that customers interact with the most up-to-date content of the agent. For example, if your organization’s opening hours change, after modifying the Opening hours topic to reflect these changes, you must publish it again from the Microsoft Copilot Studio portal. Once the agent is republished, the updated content is used by all channels where the agent is configured.

Security

Before publishing your agent, you must configure security and authentication settings. This not only ensures that users can access the agent’s data but also that it can be deployed to the necessary channels later. Security settings are available by selecting Settings > Security. There are three options for configuring authentication in your agent:

• No authentication – No authentication is required; the agent can be used publicly on any channel.
• Authenticate with Microsoft – Uses Microsoft Entra ID authentication in Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, or Microsoft 365 Copilot to authenticate users. The agent is available in Teams and Power Apps channels. This is the default setting.
• Authenticate manually – Configure either Azure Active Directory or OAuth 2 authentication. The agent is available on any channel.

Enterprise-level security

Microsoft Copilot Studio also provides robust security measures for tenant administrators, giving them increased control over agents within their tenants without hindering adoption by creators. For example, agents require user authentication by default, and their conversation transcripts are not accessible to agent creators.

Tenant administrators can also view a complete list of Microsoft Copilot Studio audit logs, including reports on tenant-wide usage, inventory (including API support), and tenant hygiene (DLP violations and inactive agents) in Microsoft Purview.

To view these logs, administrators must sign in to the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. In the left menu, select Solutions and choose Explore all. From the solutions homepage, select Audit under Core.

Billing and usage in the admin center

System and agent administrators can view billing and usage details in the Power Platform admin center. By using this data, they can identify and report on how their organization’s teams are using Microsoft Copilot Studio.

To view Copilot Studio usage and billing information, sign in to the Power Platform admin center and go to the Licenses tab from the left navigation menu. In the Licenses pane that opens on the left, select Copilot Studio.

In the first section of the Summary tab for Copilot Studio, you will see links for:

• Purchase capacity licenses – Redirects you to the admin portal for license requests.
• Manage billing plans – Redirects you to the Pay-as-you-go plan management tab.
• Manage messages – Opens a side panel that displays the status of the selected environment, allocated capacity, and messages consumed.
• Manage sessions – Opens a side panel that displays the status of the selected environment, allocated capacity, and sessions consumed.
• Download summary reports – Downloads a report on Copilot Studio messages consumed by the tenant.

Next, you will see recommendations for billing plans, which are required when using agents in production and for tracking usage. This is followed by a capacity summary showing both the number of Pay-as-you-go messages and prepaid capacity. Below that, you will find capacity charts for messages and sessions that highlight consumption trends and usage by product. Finally, at the bottom of the page, you will see the Message usage by environment section, which shows total prepaid and Pay-as-you-go usage for each environment and across all environments.

By accessing the Environments tab, you can select a specific environment to manage. Once selected, the region and type of the environment are displayed at the top of the page. Clicking the Manage billing plans link takes you to the Pay-as-you-go plan management tab. In the center of the page, you will find the environment’s message capacity and consumption data by product, as well as message consumption by resource. By selecting the Session capacity tab, you can view the assigned session capacity and its consumption.

Publish an agent

When you are ready to publish your agent, select the Publish button in the top navigation pane. During the publishing process, the agent is checked for errors. Publishing an agent usually takes a few minutes. When publishing succeeds, a green banner appears at the top of the page indicating that everything worked correctly. If errors are detected, you are notified by a message displayed in the application.

Before the agent is deployed to the various channels that use it, you may want to get feedback from other team members. When an agent is published for the first time, it can be made available on the demo site. You can provide the demo site URL to team members or stakeholders so they can try it out. The advantage of using the demo site is that the experience is different from testing the agent during the design phase. The agent test experience is intended only for agent authors to test it. Thus, the demo site link increases the number of users who can test and provide feedback related to the agent’s overall experience.

To add an agent to the demo site, select the Demo site link under Share your agent. This web page shows what your agent looks like to a user visiting your website. The agent canvas is at the bottom. You can interact with it by entering text in the window or selecting a starter phrase from the provided options.

Now that the agent is published, you can start deploying it to other channels. The channels where your agent can be published include telephony channels, websites, Facebook, Slack, Line, GroupMe, and many more.

For more information, see Publish your agent to other channels.

Analyze your agent’s performance

After an agent has been deployed and customers interact with it, statistics related to the agent become available. You can access this information through the Analytics tab in the side navigation pane. This pane provides key performance indicators (KPIs) that show:

• The volume of sessions your agent has handled
• How effectively your agent was able to engage users and resolve issues
• Escalation rates to agent creators
• And abandonment rates during conversations

You can also find information on customer satisfaction at the KPI level and in the Customer Satisfaction tab.

Next unit: Exercise – Create an agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio