What's New¶

Updates to the Copilot Ramp Playbook — new walkthroughs, improvements, and structural changes.

July 2026¶

Credit Estimator gains three modes — Quick, Detailed, and Solution package¶

July 29, 2026

The Copilot Credit Estimator now offers three ways to estimate, chosen from a dropdown, so it fits wherever you are in the journey:

Quick (low-effort) — describe what you want the agent to do in plain language and get an instant read on how it'd be built in Copilot Studio, a T-shirt size, and a rough credit/cost range. Built for early ideas, or anyone who doesn't yet know how to size an agent.
Detailed (default) — the original feature-by-feature calculator, unchanged. For people who know the tooling and want to model an agent they haven't built yet.
Solution package (complex) — export a finished Copilot Studio agent as a solution .zip and upload it; the estimator inventories topics, triggers, knowledge, actions, flows, and AI tools entirely in your browser (nothing leaves the page) to produce a grounded estimate. For agents that are built and close to production.

All three run 100% client-side, and the Quick and Solution modes can feed their assumptions into the Detailed calculator so you can fine-tune from any starting point.

August 2026¶

GitHub Copilot harness — refresh across walkthroughs, use cases, and the estimator¶

August 14, 2026

Copilot Studio agents run on one of three harnesses (engines): the standard harness (authored topics/rules), the Copilot chat harness (extend Microsoft 365 Copilot), and the newer GitHub Copilot harness (autonomous, generative orchestration). This release makes that choice — and its real cost — first-class:

Pick the engine now shows a "Covered by your M365 Copilot license?" row and a factual "where it's heading" note. The standard and chat harnesses are covered in Microsoft 365 channels; the GitHub Copilot harness is never covered — it bills Copilot Credits for all usage.
A new flagship, Build a generative agent on the GitHub Copilot harness, is now Stage 6's Week-1 habit — plus 9 GitHub-harness "twin" walkthroughs of the multi-step functional use cases, each kept alongside its standard-harness version and cross-linked.
Every Studio walkthrough and solution template is now tagged with its harness, with a benefit-forward callout and the honest cost/coverage tradeoff.
The Credit Estimator gained a harness selector and now shows gross consumption vs. net billable side by side — modelling exactly what a Microsoft 365 Copilot license does and doesn't cover.

Credit Estimator — GitHub harness re-grounded to Microsoft's published tiers¶

August 18, 2026

Follow-up to the harness refresh: the GitHub Copilot harness estimate is now grounded only in what Microsoft publishes. Microsoft prices this harness per task by complexity and publishes credit ranges — not a per-action rate card — so the estimator was reworked to match:

The per-action grid is hidden on the GitHub harness (it has no published basis there). A task is priced at an editable credits-per-task anchor seeded from a complexity tier: Simple → Light (100–300) · Medium (300–500) · Complex → Heavy (>500). Anchors sit toward the high end of each band to lean slightly conservative, and Heavy is open-ended (editable upward, no cap).
The earlier "reasoning steps / reasoning tokens per task" knobs — which borrowed the standard harness rate card Microsoft never published for this engine — are removed.
The one-time build & test cost is retained (Microsoft confirms building/testing/evaluating consume credits), now expressed as build runs × credits-per-task.
Quick mode adds a Basic / Standard / Premium picker for AI content-tool metering, and the Solution-package reasoning-model premium assumption was tuned to lean conservative.

Content-ops automation pipeline¶

August 2, 2026

The cookbook now has a four-stage content intelligence pipeline that keeps the site accurate and growing without manual monitoring:

Watcher (daily) — monitors 8 official Microsoft sources (Learn, Tech Community, Roadmap, etc.) and files structured backlog issues when new docs, features, or changes are detected.
Reconciler (daily) — picks up accuracy-risk and new-resource issues, re-verifies claims against live Microsoft URLs, and opens surgical PRs with full source citations.
Author (daily) — selects one work item from the backlog and writes a full CONTENT-MODEL-compliant walkthrough or solution template, wired into nav and CATALOG.
Auditor (weekly) — governance checks: voice consistency, orphan pages, stale counts, dead links, and accessibility. Files issues and compounds learnings.

All automation PRs are labeled needs-human-review and never auto-merge — a human always approves. See automation/README.md for the full architecture.

New cross-journey resources¶

June–August 2026

Added Copilot Camp — hands-on labs from no-code to pro-code agent building.
Added Generative AI for Beginners — free 21-lesson course on the fundamentals behind Copilot.

Journey page visual improvements¶

June 2026

Pioneer/Destination badges added below the journey strip for clearer stage context.
Stage 5 (Autopilots) cross-linking with solutions and walkthroughs polished.

June 2026¶

New Stage 5 · Autopilots — always-on agents (Scout), with a skills lens¶

June 12, 2026

The journey now runs seven stages: a new Stage 5 · Autopilots slots in between Agent Builder and Copilot Studio, covering Microsoft's new category of always-on, autonomous agents — with Microsoft Scout as the first one (introduced June 2, 2026). Copilot Studio moves to Stage 6 and Microsoft Foundry to Stage 7; the journey ribbon, role matrix, and right-sizing guide all reflect the new shape.

Autopilots is an emerging, gated capability — the page stays honest about available-but-gated framing and points at the Microsoft Scout Learn page as the source of truth.
The Skills Catalog gains an Autopilots (Scout) skills lens: the same reusable-capability instinct, equipped onto an always-on agent so it works in the background.
The Glossary Skill entry now spans Cowork recipes, Autopilots/Scout, and Studio tools.

Stage 5 · Autopilots reframed — Microsoft Scout as the hero, four new walkthroughs¶

June 11, 2026

Stage 5 now draws the hierarchy cleanly: Autopilots is the category of always-on, autonomous agents Microsoft introduced on June 2, 2026, and Microsoft Scout is the first one. Every claim is grounded in Microsoft's own sources — the announcement blog and the Microsoft Scout Learn page.

Four new walkthroughs: Meet Microsoft Scout (the field guide), Find out if you can get Scout, Let Scout coordinate your meetings, and Have Scout watch your deliverables.
Honest about availability: Scout is in Frontier private preview, so the pages mark it as gated and point to the Learn page as the source of truth for setup and current availability.
The home ribbon, the journey overview, the glossary, and the Skills Catalog all use the same category→product wording.

A new "Skills Catalog" collects reusable Cowork and Studio skills¶

June 9, 2026

"Skill" was an overloaded word — it could mean the first-party Skills agent, your personal skill level, or a reusable capability. The new Skills Catalog pins down the third meaning and lists the reusable skills worth building first:

Cowork skills — saved, reusable recipes the team can rerun (weekly digest, QBR prep cycle, …).
Studio skills — framed realistically for today: in Copilot Studio a skill is one specific kind of tool (an embedded pro-code Bot Framework / Microsoft 365 Agents SDK agent). Connector actions, flows, and MCP tools are tools, not skills — so those stay in Stage 5 and the catalog keeps the Studio skill entry scoped to what exists today.
Stage 3 carries a "Useful skills" list alongside its walkthroughs, and the Glossary has a matching Skill entry.
A disambiguation callout separates "skill" (a reusable capability) from the Skills agent and from the new / some / experienced skill level slider on the role paths.

Six more Stage 1 chat walkthroughs now show real in-product screenshots¶

June 5, 2026

We captured authentic, live Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat screenshots for six more Stage 1 walkthroughs and published them — every step now shows exactly what the product does:

Summarize meeting follow-ups (4 shots)
Adapt content for a different audience (5 shots)
Build a meeting agenda (5 shots)
Write an executive briefing (5 shots)
Summarize a long email chain (5 shots)
Catch up on a thread and draft a reply (4 shots)

That's 28 new screenshots, taken from a signed-in Copilot session against a demo tenant. Stage 1 chat now has 12 of 14 walkthroughs fully illustrated; the remaining two depend on calendar and colleague data and are staged for a future capture.

Stage pages redesigned: cards, filters, and a clear "first three things"¶

June 5, 2026

Every stage page (1–6) was rebuilt around how people actually choose what to try next:

Job-to-be-done buckets — walkthroughs are now grouped by the outcome you want (e.g. Stage 1's Catch up faster, Communicate sharper, Plan and decide) instead of one long alphabetical list.
Walkthrough cards — each entry is a card with a one-line value, a ⏱ time estimate, a 👤 role, and a ★ marker on the best starting point.
Role + time filters — a chip bar at the top of each stage filters the cards by role (End user, Manager, Champion, Maker, Developer, IT) and by time, with a live count.
"If you only do three things" — a pinned block at the top of every stage highlights the three highest-leverage walkthroughs, sequenced as Day 1 / Week 1 / Month 1.
Know when to climb — each stage ends with a card that tells you when you're ready for the next one.

"Build something deployable" template galleries on Stages 5 & 6¶

June 5, 2026

Stages 5 and 6 now end with a dedicated template gallery so makers and developers can go straight from reading to building. Each card shows ⏱ time to build and ⚙️ what it adapts to — 14 low-code Studio templates (HR, IT, Finance, Sales, Legal, Marketing, Support, Procurement, Field Service, Engineering, Workplace) and 9 pro-code Foundry blueprints (grounded Q&A, orchestration, document processing, support, NL-to-SQL, computer-use, voice/IVR, code review, and document classification).

Library expansion: 95 walkthroughs and 23 solution templates¶

June 5, 2026

Functional Studio agents — 16 new function-specific walkthroughs, each paired with a copy-and-adapt solution template, spanning HR, IT, Finance, Sales, Legal & Compliance, Marketing, Customer Support, Procurement, Field Service, Engineering, and Workplace operations.
Foundry production engineering — new developer walkthroughs for operating an agent as software: fine-tune and serve a domain model, A/B and shadow-deploy a model swap, token-budgeting and cost optimization, and a red-team / safety eval harness.
Where it stands — the playbook now spans 95 walkthroughs and 23 ready-to-adapt solution templates across the six-stage ramp.

Real product screenshots across the ramp¶

June 4, 2026

Walkthroughs are no longer text-only. We captured authentic, in-product screenshots from Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Agent Builder and wired them into galleries across Stages 1–5 — chat prompts and results, the agent store, Cowork plans, Agent Builder configuration, and Studio authoring and publishing. More than two dozen walkthroughs now show exactly what each step looks like, so you can match the product as you follow along.

AI Empowerment hub, capacity estimator, and expanded solution templates¶

June 4, 2026

AI Empowerment — a new section to help you pick the right tool: a process-led decision tree, an interactive Path Finder, and a Security & Governance page covering the native layer and the Agent 365 control plane.
Capacity & credit estimator — an interactive worksheet to model Copilot Studio message consumption by users, interactions, and scenario.
Solution templates restructured — templates now group under Studio and Foundry parents, with new functional templates spanning HR, IT, Finance, Sales, and Legal.
Site polish — nested navigation dropdowns now open by default (and stay collapsible), plus new Glossary and Licensing & Prerequisites pages, role filter chips on the Use-Case Catalog, and automatic "last updated" dates on every page.

Stage 7 · Microsoft Foundry added, plus a site-wide accuracy pass¶

June 4, 2026

Sixth stage — the ramp now ends at Microsoft Foundry, the pro-code frontier beyond Copilot Studio (the low-code maker destination). New Foundry walkthroughs cover the Agent Service, MCP tools, evaluation and monitoring, orchestration, and production governance.
Solution templates — nine ready-to-adapt templates now span Copilot Studio and Foundry.
Accuracy cleanup — refreshed stage counts and framing across the site so every page tells one story: a six-stage ramp across six roles.

Added 21 new walkthroughs across all 5 stages¶

June 3, 2026

The playbook grew from 35 to 56 walkthroughs. New additions:

Stage 1 · Chat (6 new)

Stage 2 · First-Party Agents (3 new)

Stage 3 · Cowork (4 new)

Stage 4 · Agent Builder (3 new)

Stage 6 · Copilot Studio (5 new)

Added site improvements¶

June 3, 2026

Start by Role — role-based entry page for end users, managers, champions, makers, and IT admins
Quick Wins — reference card with the top 15 copy-paste prompts organized by scenario
Tags — browse all walkthroughs by topic or theme via the Tags index
RSS feed — subscribe to new walkthrough additions at /feed_rss_created.xml
Feedback link — every page now has a "found an issue?" link to GitHub Issues
Time savings — Stage 1 walkthroughs now show estimated time saved vs. doing the task manually

May 2026¶

Initial launch: 35 walkthroughs across 5 stages¶

May 2026

First public release of the Copilot Ramp Playbook on GitHub Pages.

Stage 1 · Chat (8 walkthroughs) — meeting follow-ups, weekly status, 1:1 prep, document catch-up, thread catch-up, project plan, email rewrite, prompt of the day

Stage 2 · First-Party Agents (11 walkthroughs) — agents roster overview, Facilitator, Researcher, Analyst, Interpreter, Employee Self-Service, Project Manager, Learning agent, Agents in Channels, Agents in Communities, Workforce insights

Stage 3 · Cowork (5 walkthroughs) — end-to-end task handoff, recurring weekly digest, multi-doc synthesis, deck from notes, recipe library

Stage 4 · Agent Builder (5 walkthroughs) — team knowledge agent, persona & instructions, starter prompts, share & feedback, Agent Builder vs. Studio

Stage 6 · Copilot Studio (6 walkthroughs) — first Studio agent, connector action, MCP tool integration, publish, govern & monitor, ROI business case

Want to be notified of new walkthroughs? Subscribe via RSS at /feed_rss_created.xml or watch the GitHub repository.

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