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Work with Power Platform environments in Copilot Studio

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With Copilot Studio, you can create agents in different environments and easily switch between them.

An environment is a space to store, manage, and share your organization's business data. The agents you create are stored in an environment (apps and flows are also stored in environments). Environments might also have different roles, security requirements and target audiences, and each environment is created in a separate location. For more information, see the following articles:

Use environments

There are many strategies for using multiple environments. For example, you can:

  • Create separate environments that correspond to specific teams or departments in your company, each containing the relevant data and agents for its audience.
  • Create separate environments for different global branches of your company.
  • Create separate environments to satisfy data residency requirements.

You can also enable maker welcome content for your environments, and configure environment routing in the Power Platform admin center.

You can also build all your agents in a single environment if you don't need or want to use different ones.

Note

We recommend using a non-default production environment for agents that you want to deploy to production.

Learn more about the types of environments.

Create a new environment for your agents

When you first sign in and create a new agent, a default environment is created for you.

You can, however, create more environments as needed by using the Power Platform admin center.

  1. Go to https://admin.powerplatform.com and sign in using your work account. Use the same tenant that you use for Copilot Studio.

  2. Go to the Environments tab and select + New to open the New environment pane.

    Create environment.

    • For Name, specify a unique name for the environment.

    • For Type select the environment type.

      Note

      A production environment is intended for production scenarios and won't be subject to the same restrictions as a trial environment. If you are trying out Copilot Studio for free, you'll need to make sure you set the environment to Trial. The standard limitations for trial environments apply.

    • For Region select the support data region where you want the environment to be created.

    • Set Add a Dataverse data store? to Yes.

    • Select Next.

      Enter the environment details.

      Note

      The environment needs to be created in a supported region, otherwise you won't be able to use it when creating an agent. For more information, see Regional settings and data locations for organizations.

  3. Specify the details of the Dataverse data store, such as the language, currency type, and security group and then select Save. This operation takes you back to the Environments tab.

  4. Select Refresh to see the new environment. It might take a few minutes before the environment becomes available.

After the environment is created, you can return to the Copilot Studio portal and use the environment to create a new agent.

Create an agent in an existing environment

Select the environment in the environment switcher on the top menu bar.

Create an agent in an existing environment where you don't have access

To create an agent in an environment, you need access to the environment. If you don't have access, you need to be a system administrator or contact the system administrator to grant access. You then need to complete the following steps:

  1. Create an agent in the environment (this step installs the necessary Copilot Studio solutions).

  2. Assign the security role of "agent author" to yourself in the environment.

  3. Return to the Copilot Studio portal and create an agent in the environment.

Trial environments

When you trial Copilot Studio, you can create trial environments that expire after 30 days. When the environment expires, all the agents in the environment are deleted. This causes all the data associated with the agent, including any flows and resources you have been using, to be lost.

If you created your own environment and selected Trial as the environment type, you receive email messages shortly before the environment expires. In the Copilot Studio portal, you also see a notification if you have agents created in a trial environment that is going to expire in less than two weeks.

Important

There's a difference between an expiring environment and an expiring license. If your license is expiring, you can extend it without losing any data.

Converting a trial environment to a production environment

When using a trial environment and you want to retain the agents for longer than 30 days, you must convert the trial environment to a production environment.

Supported operations

Copilot Studio supports the following environment lifecycle operations, as described in Power Platform environments overview:

The following operation is unsupported:

Known issues with creating an agent

When you're creating an agent, you might encounter the following issues.

Insufficient permissions for the selected environment

In this case, you see this error: "You do not have permissions to any environments. Get access from an administrator."

You need to create a new environment. Use that environment to create your agent.

The environment doesn't show up in the drop-down menu of Copilot Studio

Your environment might not show up in the drop-down menu due to one of the following causes:

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