Key concepts - Publish and deploy your agent
With Copilot Studio, you can publish agents to engage with your customers on multiple platforms or channels, such as live websites, mobile apps, or messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams and Facebook.
Each time you update your agent, you can publish it again from within Copilot Studio. Publishing your agent applies to all the channels associated with your agent.
You need to publish your agent before your customers can engage with it. You can publish your agent on multiple platforms, or channels.
After you publish your agent to at least one channel, you can connect it to more channels. Remember to publish your agent again after you make any changes to it.
When you publish your agent, this agent updates on all connected channels. If you make changes to your agent but don't publish after doing so, your customers won't be engaging with the latest content.
The agent comes with the Authenticate with Microsoft option turned on. The agent automatically uses Microsoft Entra ID authentication for Teams, Power Apps, and Microsoft 365 Copilot without requiring any manual setup.
If you want to allow anyone to chat with your agent, select No authentication.
Caution
Selecting the No authentication option allows anyone who has the link to chat and interact with your bot or agent.
We recommend you apply authentication, especially if you are using your bot or agent within your organization or for specific users, along with other security and governance controls.
If you want to use other channels and still have authentication for your agent, select Authenticate manually.
Important
If you select No authentication, it won't be possible for your agent to use Agent actions with user credentials.
Publish the latest content
With your agent open for editing, in the navigation menu, select Publish.
Select Publish, and then confirm. Publishing can take a few minutes.
Test your agent
Test your agent after you publish. You can make the agent available to users in Microsoft Teams with the installation link or from various places in the Microsoft Teams app store.
You can share your agent later by selecting Make the agent available to others from the Publish page, in Teams.
You can also install the agent for your own use in Microsoft Teams by selecting Open the agent in Teams.
If you selected No authentication or Authenticate manually, select the Demo website link to open a prebuilt website in a new browser tab, where you and your teammates can interact with the agent.
The demo website is also useful to gather feedback from stakeholders before you roll your agent out to customers. Learn how to configure the demo website and add the agent to your live website.
Tip
What's the difference between the test chat and the demo website?
Use the test chat (the Test agent pane) while you're building your agent to make sure conversation flows as you expect and to spot errors.
Share the demo website URL with members of your team or other stakeholders to try out the agent. The demo website isn't intended for production use. You shouldn't share the URL with customers.
Configure channels
After publishing your agent at least once, you can add channels to make it reachable by your customers.
To configure channels for your agent:
On the top menu bar, select Channels.
Select the desired channel from the list of available channels.
The connection steps are different for each channel. For more information, see the article for the desired channels, in the following list:
- Microsoft Teams
- Demo Website
- Custom Website
- Mobile App
- Azure Bot Service channels, including:
- Skype
- Cortana
- Slack
- Telegram
- Twilio
- Line
- Kik
- GroupMe
- Direct Line Speech
Channel experience reference table
Different channels have different user experiences. The following table shows a high-level overview of the experiences for each channel. Take the channel experiences into account when optimizing your agent content for specific channels.
| Experience | Website | Microsoft Teams | Dynamics Omnichannel for Customer Service | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer satisfaction survey | Adaptive card | Text-only | Text-only | Text-only |
| Multiple-choice options | Supported | Supported up to six (as hero card) | Supported up to 13 | Partially Supported |
| Markdown | Supported | Partially Supported | Partially supported | Partially Supported |
| Welcome message | Supported | Supported | Not supported | Supported for Chat. Not supported for other channels. |
| Did-You-Mean | Supported | Supported | Supported | Supported for Microsoft Teams, Chat, Facebook, and text-only channels (short message service (SMS) via TeleSign and Twilio, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Twitter). Suggested actions are presented as a text-only list; users must retype an option to respond |
Important
Users can't send attachments to Copilot Studio agents. If they try to upload a file (including media, such as images), the agent will say:
Looks like you tried to send an attachment. Currently, I can only process text. Please try sending your message again without the attachment.
This applies to all channels, even if the channel or user-facing experience supports attachments (for example, if you're using the Direct Line API or Microsoft Teams).
Attachments can be supported if the message is sent to a skill, where the skill bot supports the processing of attachments. For more information, see Use Microsoft Bot Framework skills in Copilot Studio.
Next steps
| Article | Description |
|---|---|
| Publish an agent to a live or demo website | Publish your agent on your live website, or use a demo website to share internally. |
| Connect and configure an agent for Microsoft Teams | Use Teams to distribute your agent. |
| Publish an agent to Facebook | Add your agent to Facebook Messenger. |
| Publish an agent to mobile or custom apps | Add your agent to mobile or custom native apps (developer coding required). |
| Publish an agent to Azure Bot Service channels | Add your agent to Azure Bot Service channels (developer coding required). |