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Use and collaborate with agents

Important

You need to be part of the Frontier preview program to get early access to Microsoft Agent 365. Frontier connects you directly with Microsoft’s latest AI innovations. Frontier previews are subject to the existing preview terms of your customer agreements. As these features are still in development, their availability and capabilities may change over time.

In this article, you learn how to use agents in Agent 365 to achieve your goals efficiently and optimize your time and effort.

Agent administrators can access several template agents designed to work with popular apps and services. Here are a few of the model context protocol (MCP) servers available as template agents in Microsoft Agent 365:

The following section shows you how to use the Sales Development agent, which is one of the available template agents.

Use the Sales Development agent

Important

  • The Sales Development agent is available available to customers who have opted into the Microsoft 365 Targeted release program. You can choose Targeted release for your entire organization, or just for selected users. See Standard or Targeted release options in Microsoft 365 for more information about opting into the program.
  • The Sales Development agent will be available to all customers on or before December 19, 2025.

The Sales Development agent automates sales outreach and prospect management within Microsoft Teams. This AI-powered agent helps sales teams scale prospecting while maintaining personalized communication.

Deploy and create the agent

Search for the Sales Development agent in the Teams Store or Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent store and follow the steps to deploy and create an instance of the agent.

After your agent is created, you can configure it through Teams chat.

Onboard the agent

Note

After the agent is created, it might take several hours before it's ready to go to work. The agent contacts you with a Teams chat message once it's ready to interact with you. Any interactions with the agent before it contacts you are ignored by the agent.

After the agent is created, it guides you through the configuration via Teams. You chat with the agent to configure four key areas: playbook, guidelines, product knowledge, and settings.

The agent asks you to confirm any change to the playbook and guidelines before they're applied to its configuration. You can test each change before you apply them to gain confidence in your changes.

Tip

When you make changes to the playbook and guidelines, the agent saves them as a draft that you can test before making them permanent. Your changes don't affect customer outreach until you tell the agent to apply them. When you're done suggesting and testing your playbook and guideline draft changes, make sure to tell the agent to "apply" your changes so they become permanent.

Configuration framework

Four key components shape your agent's behavior.

Component What it does How to manage it
Playbook Defines your prospect progression. Comes with defaults; customize through Teams chat.
Guidelines Sets the communication tone and defines acceptable and unacceptable behaviors when engaging with prospects. Modify through Teams chat as needed.
Product knowledge Documents and URLs that teach the agent about your products. Upload directly in Teams chat.
Settings Controls timing, disclaimers, and unsubscribe options. Modify language through Teams chat.

Tip

You can ask the agent anytime to see the currently configured (or draft) playbook and guidelines. Just ask!

Define the playbook

The playbook defines how a sales prospect progresses from one stage to another (outreach -> qualification -> handoff). The stages themselves are fixed, but you control the rules that move a prospect forward.

When you're prompted by the Sales Development agent, you can:

  • Use the default playbook (recommended for first time setup).
  • Provide your own rules. For example, "move to qualification after the prospect replies to one of your emails."

You must confirm changes to the playbook by asking the agent to apply your changes before they affect customer outreach.

Set guidelines

Guidelines define how the AI agent works and communicates at each stage. Guidelines cover things like phrasing outreach, responding to objections, and handling handoffs or escalations.

You can:

  • Accept the default guidelines.
  • Share sample outreach emails to help the agent learn your tone and voice.

For example, when you're given two sample outreach emails, the agent correctly identifies they represent the outreach stage, generates matching tone and behavior rules, and offers to apply similar rules to other stages like qualification or handoff.

You must confirm changes to the guidelines by asking the agent to apply your changes before they affect customer outreach.

Provide product knowledge

Provide content that helps the agent represent your offering accurately.

What you can share with the agent:

  • Product or service documentation (.docx, .pdf, .pptx, .txt).
  • SharePoint or OneDrive-hosted files.
  • Public web pages, like your product pages or case studies.

The agent supports URL crawling up to two link levels deep (maximum of 100 links per level).

After you upload a file, the agent provides status feedback in Teams chat to confirm whether it successfully ingested the content or encountered any issues.

  • Success: "Got it. I'll treat this page as product knowledge."
  • Can't process: "I can't view this file directly. Could you share a text summary or document version instead?"

Caution

Changes to knowledge take effect immediately. For example, as soon as a document is uploaded, the agent uses it for customer outreach. You can't test changes to knowledge before they're applied.

Warning

The content you share with an agent, such as files, chat history, or emails, might be summarized or included in the agent's responses to other users, even those individuals who don't originally have access to that content. This risk applies regardless of sensitivity labels or permissions placed on the content. For more information, go to Understand how content is shared with agents in Microsoft 365

Configure settings

Customize how the agent interacts with prospects through email. You can adjust:

  • Email cadence: Number and timing of follow-ups.
  • Signature: How the agent signs off messages.
  • Unsubscribe text: Standard opt-out language.

You can use the default settings and change them later.

Important

Complete the steps in the order described in this article. Type default at every step to demonstrate and customize later during coaching.

Test the agent in chat

Add the agent to a 1:1 Teams chat to test the agent, give feedback, and approve the behavior in a low-risk environment. Provide learning materials so that the agent can learn from them.

During testing you can provide feedback to the agent through chat messages. For example, ask the agent about what makes a good initial outreach email. After the agent replies, provide feedback about the tone, length of the email, and so on.

To further test the agent, you can provide a list of prospects as a CSV or Excel file to the agent to test interactions with prospects in chat. When you're confident that the agent is ready to work on real prospects, proceed to the next step.

Upload your prospect list

Provide your prospect list to the agent for validation. The list can be a CSV or Excel file with one row per contact and column headers included. The required fields are:

Field Description
Email Prospect's email address.
Company Name The organization the prospect works for.
Product What you're promoting (especially important if you're using the same agent to cover multiple product lines or campaigns).
First name For personalization.

If there are file issues, the agent tells you what's missing:

  • "No column named 'company name' found—please add before continuing."
  • "This file is empty or unreadable." (the agent might not have permissions)
  • "Some rows are missing key details. 92 out of 100 prospects are ready. I'll skip the remaining eight missing email or product data."

The agent handles issues such as:

  • Rows missing critical fields are skipped (you can observe which ones).
  • Malformed data, like invalid email formats, are ignored.

Run a test

Once your list is validated, the agent begins generating test email content in Teams chat:

  • Creates sample outreach emails using your configuration.
  • Applies your tone and guidelines.
  • Provides each draft in Teams for review.

For example, a generated test email references the company, highlights the value proposition, and ends with a clear call to action—aligning with the structure of a well-performing outreach sequence.

Note

Test emails shown in chat have unsubscribe links. The links in chat are placeholders and don't function. When emails are sent to customers, the unsubscribe placeholders are replaced with functional unsubscribe links.

Start role playing

To verify performance, test real-world cases:

  • Pricing questions: "How much does this cost?". The agent should acknowledge the question and either provide high-level pricing guidance (if configured) or escalate to a human for detailed quotes, respecting your guardrails.
  • Competitive comparisons: "How are you better than [competitor]?". The agent should highlight your differentiators without disparaging competitors, staying factual and focused on value.
  • Lack of interest: "I'm not interested right now." The agent should acknowledge the response, offer to reconnect at a better time, and mark the conversation appropriately.

When testing is complete, type I'm done with testing.

When you type this phrase, the agent prepares for live outreach.

Note

The agent doesn't automatically detect when testing is complete. You need to tell it.

Work with the agent

You can provide the list of prospects as a CSV or an Excel file to the agent and ask for the go-live plan. After you review and approve the plan, the agent starts working on the prospects and sends outreach emails to them. The agent also informs you of its progress and proactively escalates if it finds any issue.

You can also ask the agent about the status. For example, you can enter the following prompt: Give me a summary of the leads you've been working on.

Once the agent confirms, it's ready to go:

  1. Upload your final, approved prospect list.
  2. Confirm your playbooks, guidelines, and settings are finalized.
  3. Type Go live.

What happens when you go live?

  • The agent starts sending emails following your approved cadence.
  • It tracks replies and automatically classifies outcomes.
  • All guardrails and unsubscribe rules are respected.
  • You get progress updates via Teams messages.

While it's live, the agent provides summary updates in Teams:

  • Total prospects contacted.
  • Replies received.
  • Leads either handed off or escalated.

You can request real-time updates by asking:

  • Show me this week's outreach summary.
  • Which prospects haven't replied yet?

Note

When you go live, emails start sending immediately. The agent currently doesn't have configuration to prevent it from sending emails on the weekend, on holidays, or after work hours.

Scale the agent

Once your agent is validated, you can scale it across product lines, territories (English speaking and US only), or teams. Each instance can have its own configuration while still following organization-wide compliance rules.

Best practices for scaling:

  • Start small; test with fewer than 25 prospects before expanding.
  • Review engagement summaries and tweak your configuration regularly.
  • Keep playbooks and guidelines current as products and markets evolve.
  • Create additional instances for new products, regions, or campaigns.
  • Maintain separate CSV files for each outreach wave.
  • Review summaries weekly to ensure guardrails are followed and tone remains consistent.

Management capabilities:

  • Pause outreach: Immediately stops all active engagement.
  • Reassign leads: Forward hot leads or escalations to specific sellers (if defined in your prospect file).
  • Handle unsubscribes: Automatically records opt-outs and ensures no further contact.

When an outreach wave is completed, you get a summary message with the full status breakdown (sent, pending response, and unsubscribed).

Supported and unsupported content

When you interact with the Sales Development agent in Teams, here's what works and what doesn't:

Supported content:

  • Structured business data (CSV or Excel files).
  • Text-based documents and decks (.docx, .pptx, .pdf, .txt).
  • Public or internal web links (nonmedia content).
  • Conversations in 1:1 Teams chats.

Unsupported content:

  • Video or audio files.
  • Image-based content (.jpg, .png).
  • Group chats or Teams channels.
  • Outlook threads or forwarded emails.
  • Personal, confidential, or unrelated information not relevant to outreach configuration.

If you share unsupported content, such as a video file, the agent prompts: "I can't access video files. Please share a written summary or document."

Agent permissions

The Sales Development agent makes use of the following permissions to perform its work.

Agent 365 Tools

  • McpServers.Mail.All: Allows the application to access the Mail MCP server.
  • McpServers.OneDriveSharepoint.All: Allows the application to access the OneDrive and SharePoint MCP server.
  • McpServers.Word.All: Allows the application to access the Word MCP server.
  • McpServers.Excel.All: Allows the application to access the Excel MCP server.
  • McpServers.Knowledge.All: Allows the application to access the Knowledge MCP server.
  • McpServers.Teams.All: Allows the application to access the Teams MCP server.
  • McpServers.Dataverse.All: Allows the application to access the Dataverse MCP server.
  • McpServers.Sales.All: Allows the application to access the Sales MCP server.
  • McpServersMetadata.Read.All: Allows the application to read metadata of all MCP servers.
  • McpServers.SharepointLists.All: Allows the application to access the SharePoint Lists MCP server.
  • McpServers.Me.All: Allows the application to access the Me MCP server.
  • McpServers.CopilotMCP.All: Allows the application to access the Copilot MCP server.

Microsoft Graph

  • ChannelMessage.Read.All: Read all channel messages.
  • Chat.Read: Read user chat messages.
  • ChatMessage.Send: Send user chat messages.
  • Files.ReadWrite.All: Have full access to all files user can access.
  • Mail.ReadWrite.Shared: Read and write mail in shared folders.
  • Mail.Send.Shared: Send mail on behalf of others.
  • Mail.Send: Send mail.
  • Sites.ReadWrite.All: Have full control of all site collections.
  • User.Read.All: Read all users' full profiles.
  • Chat.Create: Create chats.
  • Presence.ReadWrite: Read and write your presence information.

Power Platform Environment Service

  • user_impersonation: Allows users to access all APIs.

Dataverse

  • user_impersonation: Allows the application to access Common Data Service.

Power Platform API

  • Connectivity.Connections.Read: Read connections.
  • CopilotStudio.Copilots.Invoke: Invoke Copilot Studio Copilots.

Messaging Bot API Application

  • AgentData.ReadWrite: Allows read/write of agent data.

Current limitations

The following table outlines current limitations of the Sales Development agent in Agent 365:

Area How it works
Teams chat Only 1:1 chats between the agent's creator and the agent are supported. Other people can't chat with the agent at this time.
Communication channels The agent only interacts with users via email and Teams chats. Conversations in Teams Channels, comments in documents, Teams meetings, and other channels aren't supported.
Email threads The agent only replies to email threads that it starts. The agent ignores email sent to it unless it has started the thread.
Renaming Once deployed, names of the agent are permanent.
Data ingestion Supports SharePoint, OneDrive, and web links, but not recursive crawling or media files.
Analytics No built-in visual reporting dashboards; progress shared via Teams chat.
Human oversight Once launched, runs autonomously until stopped.
Testing scope Validation limited to Teams 1:1 chat.
Automatic progression Doesn't auto switch from testing to pilot.
Email sending Sends emails at all hours, including weekends.

How to report concerns

If you come across any objectionable AI-generated content, please reach out to us at salesagentteam@microsoft.com.

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