Copilot vs. Agents: Two Different Jobs

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Microsoft draws a sharp line between two things that often get conflated. Copilot is personal: grounded on one employee’s emails, chats, meetings, and documents. Agents are organizational: programs that use AI to automate business processes, running alongside a person, a team, or an entire company. IDC predicted 1 billion agents by 2028; the Build 2025 keynote raised that figure to 1.3 billion. Those agents will come from both directions, process owners building in low-code tools and C-suite-funded dev teams building pro-code systems, all powered by Azure AI Foundry underneath.

“Agents are, in the simplest form, programs that use AI” — Vid Chari

Lightweight Sub-Agents Inside a Single Agent

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Copilot Studio now lets you embed focused sub-agents inside a parent agent. Each gets a name, a description the orchestrator reads to route calls, and a plain-text instruction block that chains tools conditionally, with no topic nodes. The lost card agent demo with conditional dispute filing (16:00) ran the full sequence: freeze account, list the last five transactions, ask which ones looked suspicious, then call a dispute endpoint twice for the flagged ATM withdrawals. Sub-agents travel with the parent on publish, and a tool-scope setting controls whether a shared tool is callable by the main agent or only from within a named sub-agent.

Connecting Discrete Agents Across Platforms

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Copilot Studio agents can now connect to other published agents, from a different Copilot Studio environment or from external platforms. Salem Bacha added a mortgage agent to a checking agent in one click, with a toggle to pass full conversation history or run the connected agent in isolation. The Foundry Car Loan agent connected live (24:48) required only an agent ID and connection string from Azure AI Foundry, with GPT-4.1 powering the sub-agent and multi-turn follow-up visible in Foundry’s thread view. Enabling Spanish for the same agent required no content translation; the generative orchestrator handles all 29 supported languages, with GA within weeks.

Pro Dev Authoring: VS Code Extension for Copilot Studio

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A VS Code extension for Copilot Studio, now in preview, lets pro developers work on agents like any other code. Mike Stall demonstrated the VS Code offline edit and push (31:56): clone an agent from a URL, switch to airplane mode, edit YAML files with full IntelliSense, go-to-definition, and error squiggles, then push the changes back to the cloud. New files show green in the source-control pane. The extension follows the Git clone, push, pull pattern but writes directly against the cloud agent store. The team updates it daily; the prerelease version is available in the VS Code marketplace today.

“We now have a Visual Studio Code extension for Copilot Studio.” — Mike Stall

M365 Agents SDK: Embedding Copilot Studio into Custom Code

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The M365 Agents SDK is an open-source library in C#, JavaScript, and Python. It handles conversation management, state, auth, and channel delivery across 15-plus targets including Teams, Slack, and M365 Copilot. Sarah Critchley showed the integration point: drop a connection string from Copilot Studio’s new “Native app” tab into CopilotStudioClient, add your own logic, and the SDK routes messages to a published Copilot Studio agent. No rebuild required if you already have an agent. The Agent SDK console app connecting to Copilot Studio (47:54) surfaced typing events, message events, and adaptive card events in an output window, demonstrating the full event surface the client exposes.

Notable Quotes

every employee will have a copilot Vid Chari · ▶ 1:03

Agents are, in the simplest form, programs that use AI Vid Chari · ▶ 1:50

We now have a Visual Studio Code extension for Copilot Studio. Mike Stall · ▶ 29:22

it is multi-turn with the Foundry agent Salem Bacha · ▶ 25:23

The Agents SDK is an open source SDK from Microsoft, Sarah Critchley · ▶ 38:40

Key Takeaways

  • Multi-agent orchestration enters public preview in early June 2025, connecting low-code and pro-code agents across Copilot Studio, Foundry, and the M365 SDK.
  • Lightweight sub-agents replace manual topic flows: describe behavior in plain text, chain tools conditionally, and the agent handles the rest.
  • The new VS Code extension and open-source M365 Agents SDK let pro developers version, test, and extend Copilot Studio agents without rebuilding from scratch.