Find Out What’s Happening Inside Teams Channels

In September 2025, Microsoft announced the channel agent for Teams, describing the agent as “a dedicated agent created within a Teams channel that leverages channel conversations,Planner boards, and meeting content to act as an expert assistant.” In other words, just like Teams has the Facilitator agent to help chat participants understand what’s happening by noting important points and actions, the channel agent can analyze and report on the discussions in a channel.

Both agents are analogous to how Copilot processes the transcript generated during Teams meetings to create meeting notes and action items. AI processing usually does well when presented with a limited set of information to reason over, and that’s what happens here. The channel agent reasons over the channel contents to answer questions posed by channel members and report what it finds.

Given that some Teams channels have been around since late 2016, there’s likely to be more information for the agent to process than in a typical chat or meeting. However, I haven’t seen any problems with older or heavily trafficked channels.

According to message center notification MC1184429 (10 November 2025), roll out for the channel agent should be complete in all targeted tenants. MC1184429 also contains details of recent enhancements for the channel agent.

Adding the Channel Agent

As you might expect, Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses are required to use the channel agent. In addition, the tenant must permit access to the Channel agent app (Figure 1). If you don’t want to use the channel agent, the simplest way to stop people adding the agent is to edit the app availability to restrict it to no one or a restricted group.

If permitted, users can add the channel agent to a channel in the same way as adding any other app (Figure 2).

Any channel member with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can add the channel agent to a channel. The agent must be explicitly added to older channels, but once the agent is deployed into a channel, Teams automatically installs the channel agent into newly created channels. I’m unsure whether this is intended behavior because it’s not the case that every channel needs an agent or that tenants would want to have the channel agent installed automatically for all new channels. Fortunately, it’s easy to remove the agent from a channel where you don’t want it to be active.

Using the Channel Agent

Once the channel agent is added to a channel it joins the channel roster. The agent can be addressed using the format: @channel name agent. For instance, the agent’s address for a channel named “Office 365 News” is: @Office 365 News agent.  Only channel members with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses can interact with the agent, but the agent responses are visible to any channel member.

Figure 3 shows an example where a channel member asks the channel agent to generate a status report in a Loop component. After reasoning over the channel contents, the agent summarizes what it finds and generates a component that can be posted.

See the agent support documentation for more information about how the agent works and what it can generate.

One odd thing: the name of the agent shows up as “Project-Agent-Prod” in the Teams mobile client. This is probably an internal name that the mobile client hasn’t translated to be something like “Office 365 News Agent.” No doubt Microsoft will make the necessary change.

Unlicensed Accounts

Channel members without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can see the results of licensed users’ interactions with the agent but are informed that “You don’t have the right license to interact with this agent in the chat.” It might seem odd that everyone can see that the agent declined to interact with someone because they didn’t have the right license (Figure 4), but that’s because channel members share all conversations. Private conversations are in chat.

No Guests Please

Guest members have been in teams since the earliest days of Teams. The current biggest downside of the channel agent is that it does not work if guest members are present in channel membership. I hope this is a restriction that Microsoft will lift soon because the block removes a great deal of value from the channel agent for any organization that supports guest members in its teams (or external members of shared channels).

Figure 5 shows how the agent politely but disappointingly declines to interact once it detects the presence of external people. In this case, it’s a shared channel and the same failure to respond is seen in channels where guests are part of the team membership.

Good Idea with Big Limitation

The channel agent is a good idea but the limitation of only working when channel members all have tenant accounts is a real deal breaker. The tenants that are more likely to invest in Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses are the ones that usually have guest accounts or use shared channels, and blocking all interactions when external users are present is just silly. The root cause might be some form of permissions issue, but whatever it is, Microsoft needs to solve the problem to make the channel agent more useful and interesting.

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