Copilot Studio agent built. Hope the bill is OK!

Building a great agent is increasingly easy, but so is creating a solution which inadvertently runs up a huge bill and gets all the wrong kind of attention. This is the top agent governance challenge in many ways – as organisations move past POCs and seek to lay down (or optimise) their governance model, few things are likely to get agents shut down faster than landing on the CFO’s desk.

The factors can be complex – starting from usage levels of your agent of course, but also determined by level of paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing in place, use of autonomous capabilities, triggers, agent flows, AI prompts, the flavour of orchestration used, and more. Microsoft helpfully publish their agent usage estimator, but that in itself doesn’t give you the strategies you need to build optimised agents or put in the overall guardrails to help you identify and manage agent costs.

Those two perspectives – that of the agent maker and administrator – are two sides of the same coin in this context, so we’ll consider both. Makers will gain a solid understanding of agent capabilities which can burn Copilot credits in unexpected ways and how to architect around them (or at least understand the trade-offs). Those focused on governance will leave with a sense of how to monitor usage, spot runaway agents, consider organisational charge back models, and ultimately build cost guardrails that work as adoption grows. Whether you’re running a handful of internal agents or rolling out externally-facing solutions with Copilot Studio, this session will help you move from “hope I don’t get a tap on the shoulder” to optimised and controlled agent usage.