4.3. Administering Agents

💡 First Principle: Agent administration is about lifecycle governance — controlling who can create agents, who must approve them before they're available to users, and monitoring them after deployment. Agents that go through proper governance are safe and scoped; ungoverned agents represent data exposure and compliance risks.

The agent lifecycle is more like a software deployment than a license assignment. There are distinct phases: creation, testing, approval, publishing, monitoring, and decommissioning. Admins who treat agent deployment like "assign and forget" create governance gaps.

⚠️ Common Misconception: Creating an agent in Copilot Studio immediately makes it available to all users. Agent creation is a personal or draft state — it must be tested, submitted for approval, approved by an admin, and then published before other users can access it.