Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

Did you know? In Copilot Studio, you’re not limited to building a single, monolithic agent. You can create multi-agent systems, where Copilot Studio allows you to enhance your agent by connecting it to other agents.

To add other agents to your existing Copilot Studio agent:

• Sign in to Copilot Studio and open your existing agent.
• Go to Agents > Add agent

• You will find following options:
  • Child agents : Child agents are lightweight agents within your existing agent.
  • Connected agents within your environment.
  • External agents

In this article, I am going to explain the basics of Child vs Connected agents and when to use each option.

Child Agents:

Child agents live within the parent agent and have a single configuration page.

• Tools and Knowledge are stored at the parent agent, but configured to be “Available to” the child agent.
• Child agents share the topics of their parent agent. Topics can be referenced by the child agent instructions.
• Child agents don’t need separate publishing

Use child agents when:

• A single team manages the entire solution
• You want to logically organize tools and knowledge into sub-agents
• You don’t need separate authentication or deployment for each agent
• The agents won’t be published separately or used independently

Connected agents:

Connected agents are full-fledged, independent agents that your main agent can collaborate with.

• Connected agents have their own topics and conversation flows.
• Connected agents must be published before they can be added to and used by other agents.

Use connected agents when:

• Multiple teams develop and maintain different agents independently
• Agents need their own settings, authentication, and deployment channels
• You want to publish and maintain agents separately with independent application lifecycle management (ALM) for each agent.

If you want to go deeper into multi-agent architecture, I highly recommend reviewing Agent Academy documentation here: Copilot Studio Multi Agent

🙂