Publishing Your Agent

Overview

You have built an agent in Copilot Studio. It handles questions, routes conversations, and connects to data sources. But right now it only exists in the authoring canvas where you and your team can test it. Getting that agent into the hands of actual users requires publishing, and publishing in a government environment comes with considerations that commercial deployments do not always face.

This video walks you through the complete publishing process from pre-publishing checks through channel configuration and ongoing updates.

What You’ll Learn

• Pre-publishing checklist: What to verify before you click Publish, including government cloud connector availability
• Publishing process: Step-by-step walkthrough of publishing an agent from Copilot Studio
• Channel configuration: How to make your agent available in Teams, websites, and other channels
• Updating live agents: How to push changes to a published agent without disrupting users

Script

Hook: Your agent works—now what?

You have built your agent, tested it, and it handles every scenario you have thrown at it. But it is still sitting in the authoring canvas where nobody else can use it.

Publishing is how you move from prototype to production. In the next eight minutes, I will walk you through the complete publishing process—what to check before you publish, how to publish step by step, and how to push updates safely once your agent is live.

Pre-publishing checklist

Before you hit that Publish button, take a few minutes to run through a checklist. Skipping this step is one of the most common mistakes, and in government environments, the cost of publishing a broken agent is higher than in a sandbox.

Start with your topics and conversation paths. Open each topic and walk through every branch. Confirm that every path leads to a meaningful response or a proper handoff. Pay special attention to your system fallback topic—this is what fires when the agent does not understand a user’s input. If you have not customized it, users will get a generic error message, and that is a poor first impression.

Next, verify your error handling. What happens when a connector is temporarily unavailable? What happens when authentication fails? Build graceful fallback responses for these scenarios so users get helpful guidance instead of a dead end.

Test the agent thoroughly in the Test pane. Do not just test the happy paths. Try unexpected inputs, misspellings, and questions that are out of scope. Confirm that the agent escalates to a human when it should.

Check your authentication settings. If your agent requires users to sign in, confirm that the authentication configuration matches your deployment target. An agent that works perfectly with test authentication may fail when deployed to Teams if the OAuth settings are not aligned.

In GCC, GCC High, and DoD, verify that all connectors and data sources you reference are available in your government cloud. Not every connector that works in commercial is available in government environments—check the availability matrix before you publish. This is a step that commercial deployments rarely worry about, but it can block your agent from functioning in production if you skip it.

Finally, review your agent’s greeting message, its escalation behavior, and how it handles the end of a conversation. These are the moments users remember most.

Publishing step by step

With your checklist complete, navigate to the Publish page in Copilot Studio. You will find it in the left navigation pane.

Click Publish. Copilot Studio creates a snapshot of your current agent configuration—every topic, every entity, every connector reference, every setting. This snapshot becomes the published version of your agent.

Understanding what publishing actually does is important. It creates a published version that is separate from your authoring version. Once you publish, you can continue editing and testing in the authoring canvas without affecting the live agent. Your users interact with the published version while you work on improvements in the background.

The first time you publish, you are making the agent available for the first time. Subsequent publishes update the live version with your latest changes. This distinction matters because it means you always have a working live agent while you iterate.

After you click Publish, Copilot Studio validates your configuration. If there are errors—such as incomplete topics or invalid connector references—you will see them listed. Fix any errors before proceeding.

In government tenants, publishing follows the same process as commercial, but your environment policies and DLP rules are enforced at publish time. If a connector violates a DLP policy, the publish will succeed but the connector action will be blocked at runtime. This is an important distinction: a successful publish does not necessarily mean every feature works. Test your published agent in the actual channel to confirm.

Publishing to different channels

After publishing, you choose where users can access your agent. Copilot Studio supports several channels, and each one has its own setup process.

Microsoft Teams is the most common deployment channel for government agencies. To deploy to Teams, go to the Channels section in Copilot Studio and select Microsoft Teams. Copilot Studio generates a Teams app package for your agent. Submit this to your Teams admin for approval. In government clouds, your Teams admin controls which apps are allowed through the Teams admin center. Work with your admin to ensure your agent’s Teams app is approved before you tell users to look for it. Once approved, users can find and install the agent from the Teams app catalog.

For a custom website, Copilot Studio provides an embed code—either an iframe or a JavaScript snippet. Copy the code and add it to your website. This is useful for internal portals, SharePoint sites, or public-facing help pages. Confirm that the website’s domain is allowed in your agent’s authentication configuration.

Other channels include Outlook extensions, SharePoint integration, and mobile app embedding. Each channel has its own configuration requirements and may require additional admin approvals. Start with one channel, confirm it works, and then expand to others.

Updating a published agent

Your agent is live—but your work is not done. As you gather user feedback and identify improvements, you will need to push updates.

The update process is straightforward. Make your changes in the authoring canvas. Test them thoroughly in the Test pane. When you are satisfied, click Publish again. Copilot Studio updates the live agent with your latest changes. Updates are typically available within minutes.

The best part is that users do not need to do anything. They do not need to reinstall the Teams app or refresh a webpage. The published agent updates automatically, and the next conversation picks up the new version.

Copilot Studio maintains a version history of your published snapshots. This gives you a record of what changed and when—useful for audit trails and troubleshooting.

One practical tip: coordinate the timing of significant updates with your user community. If you are changing how the agent handles a common scenario, let users know so they are not surprised by different behavior.

Close: Publish with confidence

Let us recap the process. First, run through your pre-publishing checklist—topics, error handling, authentication, and government cloud connector availability. Second, click Publish to create a live snapshot. Third, configure your deployment channels, starting with Teams for most government scenarios. Fourth, push updates by publishing again whenever you improve the agent.

Publishing is not a one-time event—it is a repeatable process you will use every time you improve your agent. Start with a single channel, confirm everything works, and expand from there.

Next up, we will explore specific channel configurations in depth and the governance controls for managing published agents at scale.

Sources & References

• Publish your agent and configure channels — Core documentation on publishing agents and configuring deployment channels
• Connect your agent to Microsoft Teams — Step-by-step guide for deploying agents to Teams
• Copilot Studio documentation — Main documentation hub for Copilot Studio
• Build great agents — Best practices for building and publishing high-quality agents