Agent Lifecycle

The agent lifecycle covers every stage an agent passes through: creation and configuration in Copilot Studio, publication to a channel or app, day-to-day monitoring and policy enforcement, and eventual decommissioning. Admins govern this lifecycle through the Copilot Control System, which provides tenant-level control over which agents run, who can access them, and how they are billed. A common exam confusion is treating lifecycle as only a deployment step. In practice, monitoring and retirement carry equal governance weight: an unused agent should be explicitly disabled or deleted so stale automations do not consume capacity or violate data-loss-prevention policies that evolve after publication.