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Core Concepts

Copilot Studio assembles four building blocks into an agent: knowledge, tools, topics, and instructions. The platform's AI orchestrator uses these together to decide how to respond to any given user request.

Instructions​

Plain-language guidance that sets the agent's tone, defines what it should and shouldn't do, and establishes ground rules the orchestrator should follow. This is the closest thing to a system prompt in Copilot Studio.

Knowledge​

Knowledge sources ground the agent's answers in your organization's actual data, such as SharePoint sites, public websites, uploaded files, or enterprise data sources, instead of relying on the model's general knowledge. When a user asks a question, the orchestrator can pull an answer directly from a connected knowledge source.

Tools (Actions)​

Tools, also called actions, are what let an agent do something rather than just answer a question: calling an API, creating a record in a business system, or triggering a Power Automate flow. The orchestrator decides which tool to call, and with what inputs, based on the user's request.

Topics​

Topics are structured conversation paths, the older, hand-authored building block. A topic can define an exact flow for a specific, well-known scenario, like "reset my password." Even as generative orchestration handles more of the conversation dynamically, topics remain useful for tightly-controlled, high-stakes conversation paths you don't want left entirely to the model's judgment.

Generative orchestration​

Generative orchestration is the planning layer that ties everything together. It interprets user intent, decides whether to answer from knowledge, trigger a topic, call a tool, or ask a clarifying question, and can chain multiple of these together to fully resolve a multi-part request. Topic triggers let you hook custom logic into specific points of this orchestration lifecycle when you need tighter control.

Workflows and agent-to-agent communication​

Workflows let you define structured, multi-step processes, and as of 2026, they can include other existing agents as steps. Agent-to-agent (A2A) communication extends this further, letting independently built agents exchange information and delegate tasks to one another. This is how Copilot Studio scales from a single conversational agent to a coordinated set of agents.

Next: Build your first agent walks through creating a simple agent end to end.

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