Microsoft is driving agentic AI deeper into the Teams collaboration platform so that developers can launch and direct collaborative sessions that include the ability to empower Copilot to make changes in their GitHub projects.
In so doing, Microsoft is positioning Teams to enable humans and agents to work together to accelerate GitHub development projects.
Users on Teams can transform a discussion into a collaborative AI agent session that participants can monitor and manage. Here’s how they’d do so: mention @GitHub in a Teams channel, thread, or direct message, and that will initiate a GitHub Copilot agent session.
Then anyone in the conversation can ask questions, add context, and help plan or steer the work. Participants with write access to the development repository can trigger Copilot to make changes.
Here’s how this might play out in an evolving project: The typical meeting produces action items; users can now hand off those items to Copilot during a discussion or in the meeting chat before it ends. For example, participants could instruct Copilot to investigate a bug while it’s being discussed and start a process of resolving it before the meeting ends. Everyone can see the agent’s investigation and direct it further if needed.
Copilot works asynchronously in a secure cloud sandbox . As that occurs, users can follow progress in the channel thread while continuing to work with the agent-generated outputs from the GitHub Copilot app or their preferred development environment.
“Teams is the command center for humans and agents to work together” on managing project, Microsoft MVP Josh Cook said in a LinkedIn post about the new features.
For compliance considerations, repository administrators can require an additional approval for any pull request attributed to Microsoft Teams Copilot. If a given repository requires two approvals, three will be required for pull requests created by Copilot. This ensures that a human remains in the loop before agent-authored work ships.
The public preview is available with paid GitHub Copilot plans. For organizations, cloud agent AI credit usage is governed by usage-based billing budgets. Cloud sandbox usage is billed separately.
More details on the new features from Microsoft.
More GitHub and Developer Insights:
- Copilot Studio Agents Gain Cowork-Level Functionality Through GitHub Harness
- GitHub Copilot, Claude Code Developers Gain Tools To Streamline Agent-Building for Dataverse
- Agentic Workflows Bring New Levels of Automation To GitHub
- Harness Advances Drive AI’s Evolution From Chatbot to Business Process Execution Layer
Tom Smith
Analyst
Cloud Wars, Agent and Copilot
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