Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast

Episode 402 – Declarative Agents with Andrew Connell

Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast

Show Notes

Welcome to Episode 402 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In today’s episode, we’re thrilled to have Andrew Connell (AC) joining us once again. If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll recognize AC as a repeat guest and one of the early voices who encouraged us to launch this podcast. In this episode, we’re diving deep into the world of Microsoft Copilot agents from a bit of a developer’s perspective . We expand on insights from Episode 400 and helping us understand some additional intricacies of how Copilot works under the hood. We’ll break down the different billing models and some limitations in what they provide and why having at least one $30 license is key to unlocking the semantic index. We’ll also explore how Copilot uses semantic indexing to ground responses in your organization’s data, and how it respects user permissions through access control lists. But it’s not all smooth sailing—AC also walks us through some of the current limitations, like missing metadata and large file indexing. He also shares a potential workaround using Azure AI Search for those needing more comprehensive coverage. Finally, we this weeks Microsoft Build Conference and tease a potential future episode where ACw will return to talk about custom Copilot development.

Andrew Connell

LinkedIn

YouTube

BlueSky

Newsletter: The Full Stack Dev’s Microsoft 365 Playbook

Podcast: Code. Deploy. Go Live. – codedeploygo.live

Code. Deploy. Go Live on YouTube

Show Notes

Episode 400 – Microsoft 365 Copilot Declarative Agents and Copilot Studio Agent Builder

Create Copilot agents in Microsoft 365 Business Chat and Teams

Grounding an agent to specific public websites

Semantic indexing for Microsoft 365 Copilot

Data, Privacy, and Security for Microsoft 365 Copilot

About the sponsors

Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource** for your organization? Let us know!

More from Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast

Oct 22, 2026

Welcome to Episode 439 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dig into two Azure agents with confusingly different names: the Azure Copilot Troubleshooting Agent and the Azure SRE Agent. Scott’s mental model is that the Troubleshooting Agent is the free, human-in-the-loop entry point built into the Azure portal. It runs as you, works one problem at a time, and opens a support request when it gets stuck. The SRE Agent is a paid operational platform with its own managed identity. It watches your logs, alerts, and repos, forms hypotheses, and can act in review or autonomous mode, much like a new member of your team.

Oct 8, 2026

Welcome to Episode 438 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Back in Episode 429, Ben and Scott introduced LLM wikis. In this episode, they come back a few months later to compare what those wikis turned into after real daily use: personalized work operating systems, or a WorkOS, that tie together tasks, meetings, research, communications, and recurring workflows. Scott walks through the skills that now run his day, from a 9:00 a.m. prioritization pass and meeting prep to meeting capture, end-of-day review, and clipping ingestion, all while keeping governed documents in Microsoft 365 where they belong.

Sep 24, 2026

Welcome to Episode 437 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Nick Burling, Chief Product Officer at Nasuni, joins Ben and Scott to talk about getting unstructured file data ready for AI. Nick digs into why 70 to 80 percent of enterprise data sits in file shares and object storage, how that data tends to end up ungoverned and risky to point AI at, and Nasuni’s PSYCHIC framework for making it proprietary, secure, current, indexed, hybrid, and continuous. The conversation covers Nasuni’s AI Activate, the MCP based service that enforces permissions before a query ever runs, and the recent DryvIQ acquisition, which adds content classification, redaction, and policy enforcement on top of that index.

Sep 11, 2026

Welcome to Episode 436 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dive into Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance. Almost nobody runs one Microsoft Entra tenant. Mergers, divestitures, dev and test environments, regional partitioning, that one AI proof-of-concept somebody spun up on a credit card. Organizations accumulate tenants the way they accumulate SharePoint sites. The difference is that nobody ever built an inventory of the tenants, and central IT frequently cannot name them, let alone say whether they are configured safely.

Aug 27, 2026

Welcome to Episode 435 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott take a lap around what’s new in Power BI, starting with the two MCP servers now in preview, one local and one remote, that can clean up your data model, write DAX for you, and turn a messy pile of tables into an actual usable semantic model. Ben shares how it helped him tame a 44 table QuickBooks Online mess, and why he had way better luck with it than with Copilot in Power BI.

See all episodes →