By 2026, most business scenarios can be handled with declarative agent design in Copilot Studio. But what happens when your agents need to reason across multiple turns, manage complex state, integrate with proprietary systems, or handle workflows too sophisticated for low-code design?

This session is for developers and architects ready to go beyond visual flows. You’ll learn how to use the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK to build custom engine agents and register them as reusable Copilot skills that can be invoked across your organisation with full governance and lifecycle control.

We’ll walk through SDK fundamentals and architecture, designing multi-turn stateful conversations, creating and validating skill manifests for enterprise use, securing agent identities with Microsoft Entra, and best practices for skill lifecycle management. Through code demonstrations, you’ll see working examples of custom agents, from core SDK patterns to skill manifest design and Copilot Studio registration. Whether you’re building a domain-specific reasoning engine or integrating with legacy systems, you’ll leave with production-ready patterns and a clear understanding of when and how to extend Copilot capabilities beyond declarative design.