Publish your Copilot Agent to Microsoft Teams for ALL users

Copilot agents are the AI assistants for your daily tasks. And anyone with the appropriate license can create agents to help other users by customizing their purpose.

In this blog post, we’ll see how a newly created agent can be published to Microsoft Teams for all users to access it.

Copilot Agent in Copilot Studio

Create your Copilot Agent in Copilot Studio so you can control multiple aspects of it:

• Name and icon
• Knowledge sources
• Actions
• Triggers
• Topics

And so many more. Don’t forget to test it extensively so it answers the way you intend to.

Here I’ve created my agent (using a template) and added a knowledge source from an official website. I’ve changed the icon and also disabled “Allow the AI to use its own general knowledge” because I want the answers to come from the website only.

Security Settings

In our case, we want to publish the agent internally to Microsoft Teams. Therefore we need to choose the correct authentication method.

Click on the Settings button (top right next to the Publish button) and navigate to the Security tab on the left menu, then select Authentication.

Here we want to choose the Authenticate with Microsoft option. This is the default option when creating a new agent.

Once your agent is ready, go back to the Overview page and click the Publish button (top right), then Publish on the popup.

Channels

Now that we have chosen our authentication and published our agent, let’s configured it for Microsoft Teams.

Click on the Channel tab, and straight away we’ll see a warning that other channels (i.e.: custom website) are not available due to our authentication method.

So let’s click on the Microsoft Teams tile and go through the configuration required.

The first thing when the blade opens is to click on Turn On Teams for the new agent.

Click on Edit details to update the icon, short & long description, developer name, and many more settings that will be useful for the admins to understand your agent for approval. Then click Save.

Next, we’ll click on Availability options.

We’re now presented with multiple options:

• Copy link: to share with a few users
• Show to my teammates and shared users: Appears under the Copilot extension section
• Show to everyone in my org: Appears under “Built for your org” in Teams app store
• Download as a .zip: Upload directly as a custom app or to give an updated package to Teams admins

The one we’re interested in is Show to everyone in my org.

Because we want to make this agent available for everyone under the “Build for your org” section, we need to get an approval from an admin, so click on Submit for admin approval then click on Yes.

The agent has now been submitted for an admin to review and approve.

Approve Copilot Agents

Let’s navigate to the Teams Admin Centre and review the agent.

Under Manage apps, you can see 1 app is waiting for approval. By either searching by name or sorting with the Publishing status, we can rapidly find our agent.

Here you can review the app / agent, and publish or reject.

Once we publish the app, it’s now unblocked and available to users in Microsoft Teams.

Note that you can also see the status of apps from the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre, however it may take some time, and you’ve got more options in the Microsoft Teams admin centre directly.

Built For Your Org

After publishing the app, the Copilot Agent may take a few minutes to a few hours for it to be available to your users. But it will eventually show up! 😉 (it took roughly 45 mins for the agent to appear for this blog post)

Users can now add and use this Copilot Agent!

Thanks for reading! 🙂