MC1518233 says Copilot Chat agents (declarative agents) built in Copilot Studio will gain topics for deterministic conversational flows. Alongside them come connected agents, evaluations, monitoring, a native Copilot Chat preview and lifecycle management across development, test and production. General availability is October 26.
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Until now, the value of Copilot Studio for a Copilot Chat agent has mostly been the upgrade path. When an agent outgrew Agent Builder, you copied it to Copilot Studio as a custom agent. This update changes that. The Copilot Chat agent itself gets capabilities that go beyond Agent Builder, and seemingly beyond building the agent in code too. Connected agents are already available in the declarative agent manifest (in preview), but the current manifest (v1.8) has no property for topics at all.
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Topics are one of Copilot Studio's longest-standing features, going back to the days of Power Virtual Agents. When the GitHub Copilot harness arrived this summer, the direction of travel seemed to be model-led conversations. Hooks, announced in preview on October 7, add deterministic control to those agents, but it's control over execution at runtime events, not a scripted conversation.
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Bringing topics to Copilot Chat agents puts tightly controlled conversations back in the picture. For an HR policy answer, or anything that has to follow approved wording, that matters. Having it available alongside a harness built for agentic reasoning makes a lot of sense.
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Are the Copilot Chat agents you're building ones where the answer has to stay on script? Or has the move to model-led conversations suited what you need?
First posted on Linkedin on 10/22/2026 → View Linkedin Post Here
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