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

Lets say you are the tenant admin and you noticed a bunch of orphan agents. Their makers left the organization and nobody owns those agents now. Did you know that you can reassign them to the previous owner’s manager in bulk?

That is exactly what the Reassign ownerless agents created with Agent Builder to manager rule does. Lets run it from the Microsoft 365 admin center and see how ownership moves.

What are Declarative Agents? Declarative agents are customized versions of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Agents built with Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Builder are declarative agents, and those are the ones this rule acts on.

What This Does

• Finds agents that no longer have a valid owner.
• Limits the scope to agents created with Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Builder.
• Shows you the matched agents for review before anything changes.
• Transfers ownership to the previous owner’s manager, based on the Microsoft Entra ID hierarchy.
• Applies the change to all selected agents in a single run.

Prerequisites

• You need admin rights on the tenant to open Agent settings in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
• The agents in scope must be created with Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Builder. Agents built elsewhere are not picked up by this rule.
• The previous owner needs a manager set in Microsoft Entra ID. Without a manager there is no target to reassign to.

Lets open the rules page first.

Open Agent management rules

• Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center.
• Select Agents > Settings in the left navigation.
• Open Agent management rules.
• Click Reassign ownerless agents created with Agent Builder to manager.

Review and Run

• Clicking the rule opens a pane with three tabs.
  • Pending agents lists the agents that match the rule conditions. My tenant shows Pending agents (8).
  • Processed agents lists the ones already reassigned by an earlier run.
  • Details shows the rule definition.

• Select the agents, click Run.

Verify the Result

• Reopen the rule after the run completes.
• The agents you selected move from Pending agents to the Processed agents tab.
• The Affected agents count on the rules list reflects the agents handled by the rule.
• Open Agents > All agents and check the owner on a reassigned agent. It now points to the manager of the previous owner.

For the full list of agent settings, refer the official documentation Agent settings in Microsoft 365 admin center.

🙂