Skills within Copilot Studio: New Experience - a replacement for topics or child agents

The new Experience within Copilot Studio was announced in June and neither topics or child agents made the cut. We need to start embracing skills more. Skills within Copilot Studio is a core way to build agent behavior. With Skills, your agent can load rich logic on demand only the Skill name and description are preloaded into the context window, while the full skill is fetched only when it runs helping on performance and costs

Classic Experience

Architecture of agents within Classic Experience using child agents and topics

Child Agents

##E.g. Insurance Claims agent

Topics

New Experience

Child Agents transformed to skills

Within New Experience it’s possible to add agent flows (classic workflow) to an agent without rebuilding them from scratch. Those tools can be referenced easily from the skills

Topics transformed to skills

Why Skills matter

  • Skills can include markdown, scripts, references, and assets.
  • The orchestrator uses LLM routing to invoke Skills dynamically.
  • Only the Skill name and description are front loaded for routing and billing.
  • A Skill package may be a single SKILL.md or a zip bundle with extra files.
  • The entry filename must always be SKILL.md.

skill file structure