Copy an agent to the Copilot Studio full experience

This article explains how to use the Copy to full experience feature in the Copilot Studio lite experience to copy an agent to the Copilot Studio full experience. When you copy your agent to the full experience, you can take advantage of advanced lifecycle management, analytics, and governance controls.

Why use the full experience?

Copilot Studio provides two ways to build AI agents:

• Lite experience: This option is embedded within the Microsoft 365 Copilot app and is ideal for quick, lightweight agent creation within the Microsoft 365 environment. The lite experience is designed for users who want to add conversational capabilities to enhance productivity.

• Full experience: A dedicated, standalone application that offers advanced capabilities for building, customizing, and managing agents at scale. The full experience provides richer configuration options, integration with enterprise systems, and governance features that are suitable for complex scenarios or organizational deployments.

For more information and a comparison of each experience, see Choose the right Copilot Studio experience.

Copying an agent to the full experience unlocks advanced capabilities beyond what's available in the lite experience, including:

• Enhanced lifecycle management: Gain full control over the agent's lifecycle, including versioning, staged deployments, rollback options, and structured release processes. This control ensures better stability and predictability as your agent evolves.

• Usage monitoring and analytics: Access detailed insights into agent performance, user engagement, and query trends. Built-in dashboards and reporting tools help you identify optimization opportunities and measure return on investment.

• Governance controls: Apply enterprise-grade governance policies such as role-based access, data policies, and compliance checks. These controls help maintain security and consistency across large-scale deployments.

Beyond the core benefits, the full experience provides:

• Advanced customization: Extended agent capabilities with richer prompts, conditional logic, and integration with external APIs or enterprise systems.

• Environment management: Support for multiple environments (development, test, production) to streamline testing and controlled rollouts.

• Connector and data integration: Broader integration options with Microsoft 365 services and Copilot connectors, providing deeper data access and richer responses.

• Audit and compliance features: Built-in audit trails and compliance reporting to meet organizational and regulatory requirements.

For example, agents copied to the full experience can be published to the Teams app store for admin review and organization-wide pinning. Admins can also apply data policies and advanced connector policies from the Power Platform admin center.

Copy your agent

If you start building an agent in the Copilot Studio lite experience and want to add more capabilities that are only available in the full experience, use the Copy to full experience button in the More options (…) menu. This option copies your agent to the full experience without a need to recreate it.

The following agent configurations are copied to the full experience:

• Static text fields for the agent's definition
• Name
• Description
• Instructions
• Suggested prompts
• Agent icon
• SharePoint files, folders, and sites added as knowledge
• Websites added as knowledge

The following table lists the configurations that aren't copied and how to handle them.

After you copy your agent:

• The original agent in the lite experience remains available.
• Copilot Studio creates a snapshot of the agent and uses it to define the agent in the full experience. Save the agent to ensure that the data is stored.
• Updates to the original agent don't affect the copied version.
• If another copy operation is underway, wait a few seconds before you start a new copy for the same agent. Every copy operation creates a new agent in Copilot Studio.
• If this is the first time you created an agent in the Copilot Studio full experience, the Create Agents screen appears after the first-run experience.
• The original agent remains accessible through Microsoft 365, while the copy becomes a Copilot Studio agent that you can publish to multiple channels.
• Test your agent in the full experience before you publish it. After you publish, decide whether to delete the original agent and communicate migration steps to users you shared the agent with.

Licensing requirements

To copy an agent to the full experience, you must have a Copilot Studio license. If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you might already be entitled to Copilot Studio. Check your eligibility in Copilot Studio or ask your admin.

If you don't have a Copilot Studio license, you might be eligible for a Copilot Studio trial, depending on the admin settings in your organization. Admins can block unauthorized sign-ups. Trial licenses allow for testing agents but not publishing agents outside personal use.

Copilot Studio environment requirements

The Copilot Studio full experience uses the concept of a Power Platform environment to store, manage, and share your organization's business data. When you copy an agent, select the environment in which to store the agent definition. The copy operation starts after you select an environment.

For you to copy an agent to the full experience:

• The environment must have applicable Dataverse data store.
• The environment must be located in a supported data location.
• You must have the appropriate security roles in the environment.

After you select an environment, the system checks for:

• Data policies that prevent publishing agents to the Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot channels.
• Sharing limits placed on the environment.

The following policies and limits are set up in the Power Platform admin center:

• Data policies
• Connector policies
• Sharing limits

Environment routing

Admins can turn on Environment routing to help makers select environments. When environment routing is turned on, the routed environment is preselected.

Environment troubleshooting

The following table lists common errors that can occur when you select an environment and describes the resolutions.

Admin management and data storage

Admins manage the Copilot Studio lite experience through the Microsoft 365 admin center. The full experience is managed through the Power Platform admin center.

Agents copied to the full experience are stored in Microsoft Dataverse and managed via a Power Platform solution. Admins can set up security roles for custom environments.

Related content

• Choose the right Copilot Studio experience
• Build agents with the Copilot Studio lite experience
• Build agents with the Copilot Studio full experience