Microsoft · Copilot agents

The agents you already own.

Most Microsoft Copilot (formerly Microsoft 365 Copilot) buyers only use the chat box. The agents in the license go further. Here is what each does, what unlocks it, and what it changes for nonprofits, foundations, and rural hospitals.

Take the three-minute Opportunity Finder

Three minutes, no email.

See Copilot Kickstart →

$15,000 fixed fee, four weeks.

Microsoft Solutions Partner, five designations · In operation since 2004 · Reviewed October 2026

Why this list exists

The gap is not capability. It is that nobody told the staff these existed.

We see the same pattern in nearly every tenant we inherit. Copilot is licensed. Adoption reporting shows people opening the chat box, asking it to summarize an email thread, and closing it. Meanwhile Researcher, which will do a week of funder landscape work in four minutes with citations, sits unopened in the agent menu.

That is not a training problem in the usual sense. It is an inventory problem. Nobody wrote down what was in the box. So here is the box.

A note on how to read this: an agent is not a chatbot. Microsoft groups them along a spectrum.

  1. 01

    Retrieval agents

    Find, reason over, and summarize information you already have access to.

    Most of this page

  2. 02

    Task agents

    Take an action when asked.

    Most of this page

  3. 03

    Autonomous agents

    Plan, orchestrate other agents, and escalate to a human when they need one.

    Later, with governance in place

Almost everything on this page is a retrieval or task agent, which is the right place for a mission-driven organization to start. We wrote about where each class belongs on the AI Agents & Automation page.

Three things unlock agents. Only one of them costs money per seat.

Knowing which tier an agent sits in is the difference between a rollout you can afford and a surprise on the Microsoft invoice.

No added cost

Copilot Chat

Every Copilot-eligible user has Copilot Chat with enterprise data protection. The coaches (Prompt, Writing, Idea, Career, and Learning Coach) run here as first-party agents with no per-message cost. This is the cheapest AI capability in your tenant and the least used.

Per user, per month

Microsoft Copilot license

The paid seat. It unlocks the reasoning agents (Researcher and Analyst), the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents, Facilitator and Interpreter in Teams, and everyday Copilot in SharePoint (advanced, at-scale SharePoint work is billed in Copilot Credits). Most of this catalog lives here.

Metered, or licensed separately

Copilot Credits and Copilot Studio

Agents you build, and agents that run work beyond the seat, draw on Copilot Credits, pooled at the tenant and bought pay-as-you-go or prepaid. That includes Copilot Cowork, generally available since June 2026, which carries out long multi-step work and needs a Copilot license plus a spending policy. Building agents in the full Copilot Studio needs its own license. See licensing.

Availability below reflects Microsoft’s Agent Success Kit as published in March 2026, re-checked against Microsoft Learn in October 2026. Preview and early-access status moves quickly, and Microsoft has been shipping new agents roughly every quarter. Confirm the current state of any agent in the Microsoft 365 admin center before you build a rollout plan around it.

The catalog

Nineteen agents, grouped by what unlocks them.

Available to every Copilot Chat user

Generally available · No per-seat license required · No per-message cost

Prompt Coach

Copilot Chat

Sits beside a user while they write a prompt, suggests refinements, explains why a prompt is producing weak output, and flags prompts that fall outside responsible-AI guidance.

In the sector: the most valuable hour of training you can give a twelve-person nonprofit, and it costs nothing.

Writing Coach

Copilot Chat

Feedback on clarity, coherence, grammar, and tone. Adjusts a document for a named audience, and flags wording that may not travel across cultures or reading levels.

In the sector: grant narratives, donor appeals, and the board memo that has to say a hard thing carefully.

Idea Coach

Copilot Chat

Runs a guided brainstorm through question-based dialogue, builds a session agenda, proposes creative exercises, and helps prioritize what comes out.

In the sector: program design retreats and strategic planning sessions that otherwise consume a facilitator’s fee.

Included with a Microsoft Copilot license

Generally available · Researcher and Analyst are pre-pinned for licensed users

Researcher

Copilot Chat

The one to know. Researcher builds a research plan, works recursively across your tenant data and the web for several minutes, and returns a synthesized report with explicit source citations. It can call other agents. Users can choose the model, including Claude, from the model picker. Use it when the output has to be trusted, cited, and shareable, not when you are iterating.

In the sector: funder landscape scans, policy and regulatory reviews, and the competitive analysis a development director would otherwise outsource.

Analyst

Copilot Chat, Teams, Outlook

Writes and runs Python against files you give it, up to five at a time, mixing spreadsheets with PDFs and documents. It hypothesizes, tests, and adjusts, and shows its analysis steps so you can review how it reached the answer. No data science staff required.

In the sector: program outcome reporting, grant spend-down analysis, and the year-over-year donor retention question nobody has had time to answer.

Word Agent

Copilot Chat, Word

Turns a prompt into a structured long-form document, asks clarifying questions before it drafts, and applies your approved Word templates. Files save to OneDrive under your existing policies. It runs only on Anthropic models: if an admin turns Anthropic off as a subprocessor, the agent is hidden, even for licensed users.

In the sector: letters of inquiry, board packets, and policy documents that follow a house structure.

Excel Agent

Copilot Chat, Excel

Builds real workbooks, not screenshots of workbooks: working formulas, PivotTables, charts, conditional formatting, and best, base, and worst-case scenario models with the assumptions written out. It runs only on Anthropic models: if an admin turns Anthropic off as a subprocessor, the agent is hidden, even for licensed users.

In the sector: multi-year program budgets, restricted-fund tracking, and the scenario model a CFO builds before every board meeting.

PowerPoint Agent

Copilot Chat, PowerPoint

Generates a complete first-draft deck, pulls context from emails, chats, and meeting notes, applies your company template, and turns bullet lists into charts on request. It runs only on Anthropic models: if an admin turns Anthropic off as a subprocessor, the agent is hidden, even for licensed users.

In the sector: the quarterly board update, and the funder site-visit deck assembled the night before.

Facilitator

Teams meetings

Joins the meeting as a shared participant, not a private assistant. Builds and tracks the agenda, captures notes and decisions live where everyone can see them, answers questions in the room, and turns discussion into tasks. Requires Loop experiences in Teams to be turned on, and is not supported in meetings with external participants.

In the sector: board and committee meetings, where the decision record is a governance artifact and the secretary is a volunteer.

Interpreter

Teams meetings

Real-time speech-to-speech interpretation across up to nine languages, so each participant speaks and listens in the language they choose. Only participants with a Copilot license hear translated audio, and each license includes 20 hours a month.

In the sector: the most underrated agent on this list. Community meetings with limited-English-proficiency participants, and rural hospital care coordination calls where the alternative is a phone interpreter line billed by the minute.

Surveys Agent

Copilot Chat, Forms

Creates, distributes, and analyzes surveys, turning free-text responses into themes rather than a spreadsheet somebody has to read.

In the sector: constituent feedback, post-program evaluation, and the staff engagement survey that never gets tabulated.

Microsoft 365 Admin Agent

Admin center, Copilot Chat

Assists administrators with tenant tasks across Microsoft 365 services. Pre-installed for every Microsoft 365 admin with no added license; what it can do follows the admin’s existing role permissions.

In the sector: useful precisely where IT is one person who also runs the help desk.

In public preview

Included with a Microsoft Copilot license · Preview terms apply · Not for regulated production work

Planner Agent

Microsoft Planner

Formerly Project Manager. Creates plans, executes tasks, tracks progress, and writes status reports inside Planner.

In the sector: grant-funded project reporting, where the funder wants a milestone update and nobody owns the tracker.

Agents in Channels

Teams channels

A channel-scoped agent grounded in that team’s conversations and meetings, so the answer comes from what the team actually said.

In the sector: a program team’s institutional memory, which currently lives in one person’s head.

Agents in Communities

Viva Engage

Surfaces expertise across communities so knowledge is findable rather than re-asked.

In the sector: multi-site organizations and hospital systems where the same clinical or operational question is answered independently in four places.

Frontier early-access program

Included with a Microsoft Copilot license · Requires Frontier enrollment

Workflows Agent

Copilot Chat

Automates recurring work: sending reminders, managing calendars, and pushing team updates on a schedule.

In the sector: the recurring administrative load that quietly consumes a program coordinator’s week.

Workforce Insights Agent

Copilot Chat

Gives leaders and their delegates a current view of the organization for staffing decisions. Requires setup before first use.

In the sector: handle with care. Workforce analytics in a small organization can identify individuals even when the report says it does not.

Learning Agent

Copilot Chat

Recommends skill-building paths against the work someone is actually doing, and runs AI role-play practice. Private preview through the Frontier program; a Viva Learning license is optional and adds content.

In the sector: a plausible substitute for a training budget that does not exist.

Available as a template, but you have to wire it up

End users need a Microsoft Copilot license or pay-as-you-go billing · Admins and builders need Copilot Studio and capacity

Employee Self-Service

Teams chat, Copilot Chat

A single front door for routine HR and IT requests: checking leave balances, updating personal information, requesting a device. Ships with prebuilt connectors, but it still has to be integrated with the systems that hold the answers.

In the sector: worth it above roughly 150 staff. Below that, the HR generalist is faster than the integration project.

Not covered here: Microsoft also ships agents for Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Finance, Supply Chain, and Field Service, plus a Sales Agent and Finance Agent that reach into Dynamics 365 or Salesforce. Almost none of our clients run those systems, so we have left them out rather than pad the list. If you do run Dynamics 365, ask us and we will walk the relevant ones with you.

Before you turn them on

Every agent on this page reads with the permissions of the person using it.

That is the design, and it is the right design. It is also why controls have to be in place before the first agent reaches a real user.

Agent interactions stay inside the Microsoft 365 and Azure service boundary. Sensitivity labels are inherited, data loss prevention policies apply, and grounding respects the permissions already on the file. Your existing Microsoft 365 commitments carry over. None of that is in question.

What is in question is whether those controls were ever configured. Three things are worth checking before the first agent goes to a real user:

  1. 01

    Oversharing

    Researcher will find the board minutes in the Communications folder because the person asking already had access to them. It did not create the exposure. It found it.

  2. 02

    Agent creation

    In a default tenant, Copilot Studio authoring access belongs to every user in Microsoft Entra. Restricting it to a named security group is a change someone has to make on purpose.

  3. 03

    Cost

    Agents that run work beyond the seat draw Copilot Credits from a tenant-wide pool. Without a billing policy scoped to a group, one enthusiastic department spends the whole allocation.

An agent rollout is a data governance project wearing a productivity costume.

We wrote the full control list, nine settings across the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Power Platform admin center, in a separate field note: your staff can already build agents. If you are enabling Copilot for the first time, start instead with the seven questions every mission-driven board should answer first.

Where to start

Turn on what you own before you build anything new.

The order matters, and it is not the order most partners sell.

Four weeks

Copilot Kickstart

A governed Copilot pilot. We set the control baseline, pin the right agents for the right groups, and train staff on Researcher, Analyst, and the coaches before anyone talks about building something custom.

See Copilot Kickstart →

Four to six weeks

Agent Launchpad

When the built-in agents genuinely do not cover the workflow, this is the path from Copilot license to a first production agent, with the governance baseline set in week two rather than after the incident.

See Agent Launchpad →

About two weeks

90-Day AI Roadmap

Not sure which of the above you need. A paid assessment, from $7,500, of where your tenant actually stands, what is safe to enable now, and a 90-day roadmap the board can act on.

Get your 90-Day AI Roadmap

Questions we get about the built-in agents.

Do I need to build anything to use these agents?

No. Every agent on this page except Employee Self-Service ships with Microsoft Copilot or Copilot Chat. The work is not building them. The work is deciding which ones to turn on, for whom, with what data access, and then getting staff to actually use them.

What is the difference between Researcher and ordinary Copilot Chat?

Copilot Chat answers in seconds and is built for iterating, brainstorming, and drafting. Researcher takes several minutes: it builds a research plan, works across your tenant data and the web, and returns a synthesized report with explicit source citations. Use Chat when you know what to ask and how deep to go. Use Researcher when you want the research done for you and the output has to be trusted, cited, and shareable.

Are these agents safe to enable in a HIPAA environment?

Agent interactions stay inside the Microsoft 365 and Azure service boundary, and the same permissions, sensitivity labels, and data loss prevention policies that govern your tenant govern the agents. That is the floor, not the finish. The controls have to actually be configured, agent creation and sharing have to be scoped, and someone has to own the review loop. A Copilot license does not make a tenant HIPAA-aligned on its own. See Healthcare AI Readiness.

Can our staff create their own agents?

In a default tenant, yes. Copilot Studio authoring access defaults to every user in Microsoft Entra, and Copilot Studio lite is reachable from Copilot Chat for licensed users. Restricting authoring to a named security group is a deliberate change an administrator makes in the Power Platform admin center. Most organizations discover this after the first unsanctioned agent appears.

How current is this list?

This catalog reflects Microsoft’s Agent Success Kit as published in March 2026, reviewed October 2026. Preview and early-access status changes frequently. Confirm the current state of any agent in the Microsoft 365 admin center before you plan a rollout around it. As your CSP, we track these changes on your behalf.

We are a nonprofit. Do we get Copilot at nonprofit pricing?

Where Microsoft has activated nonprofit pricing for Copilot, yes, and we can place it. The agents on this page do not have separate nonprofit pricing; they come with the seat. See Microsoft licensing for nonprofits.