What is a Copilot Studio agent? (And what it costs)

What a Copilot Studio agent is

An agent is three things put together: instructions you write in plain English, the places it is allowed to look things up (a SharePoint site, uploaded documents, company-wide Microsoft Graph data), and a set of actions it can take. You describe what you want, try it in the test chat panel, then publish it to Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, or a website. Publishing is an admin decision, not yours.

What running one costs

Billing runs on Copilot Credits, pooled across the whole tenant, with no per-seat fee. A preset answer costs 1 credit, an AI-written answer 2, an action 5, and pulling from company-wide Microsoft Graph data adds 10, so one well-grounded question can run 12. A prepaid pack is 25,000 credits for $200 a month and unused credits expire at month end. Pay-as-you-go is about 1 cent per credit. At 125% of the pool Microsoft switches agents off and people see "This agent is currently unavailable. It has reached its usage limit."

Where new builders get stuck

Two traps. On a trial license the publish button is simply greyed out with no error explaining why, until an admin adds you to the Copilot Studio authors role. And Copilot Studio now has two build modes that bill differently: the older standard one starts charging after you publish, while the newer GitHub Copilot harness charges from the moment you start building, so previewing and testing already drain the pool. Before opening an agent to a team, cap its monthly credits in the Power Platform admin center and check who already holds a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, since their everyday use is free. If nobody does, run one pilot group on pay-as-you-go for a month and size the packs off real spend.