Earlier this year, we launched Agent Academy: Recruit, a foundational learning path designed to help makers and developers get started with building agents in Copilot Studio. The response exceeded our expectations.

Since launch, thousands of learners have worked through the Recruit curriculum, and through the Global AI Community we’ve issued 500+ badges to people who finished the path. More importantly, we’ve seen teams use Recruit as a shared baseline for learning how agents work, how to build them responsibly, and how to deploy them into real environments.

As people completed Recruit, the feedback was consistent:

“This helped me get started — now what?”

Today, we’re excited to introduce the next step.

Introducing Agent Academy: Operative

Agent Academy: Operative is the next level of training for people who already understand the basics of Copilot Studio and want to go deeper. We built Operative because there was a gap between introductory content that explains what agents are, and advanced documentation that assumes you already know how to design them well. Operative is meant to live in that middle ground: practical, opinionated, and grounded in real agent-building patterns.

What’s in the Operative curriculum

The Operative path walks you through building a complex multi-agent hiring process agent. It focuses on the skills you need after your first agent works:

• Writing clear, effective agent instructions

• Selecting and evaluating AI models

• Advanced prompt patterns, agent flow integration and MCP

• Integrating feedback loops, telemetry and AI safety

• Understanding how to build and architect mult-agent systems

Each module builds on the previous one, but the curriculum is intentionally self-paced. You can move through it on your own schedule, revisit sections as needed, and apply the concepts directly to agents you’re already building.

There’s no “watch this and forget it” content here, the goal is to help you make better decisions when you’re actually in Copilot Studio.

A refreshed experience, shaped by your feedback

Alongside the new Operative curriculum, we’ve also refreshed the Agent Academy experience itself.

Based directly on feedback from learners, we introduced a new UI that’s cleaner, easier to navigate, and designed to make it simpler to find and move between modules. We’ve also added a dark mode, making longer learning sessions easier on the eyes, especially for the builders who prefer it.

These changes aren’t cosmetic. As the curriculum grows, we wanted Agent Academy to feel less like a static set of pages and more like a learning environment you actually want to spend time in. This refresh is part of that ongoing evolution, and we’ll continue refining the experience as we hear from the community.

Badges, recognition, and what’s next

One of the most motivating parts of Recruit was seeing learners complete the path and earn a tangible credential. Thanks to our partnership with the Global AI Community, we now have the ability to issue unlimited digital badges for Agent Academy completions.

We’re excited to see how many builders continue the journey and how this more advanced training shows up in the agents you ship.

Who should take Operative?

Agent Academy: Operative is a good fit if you:

• Have already completed Recruit (or have equivalent experience)

• Are building agents beyond basic Q&A

• Want clearer guidance on design decisions

• Want structured, self-paced, hands-on learning based on real-world scenarios

If you’re brand new to Copilot Studio, we recommend starting with our Recruit curriculum first. Operative assumes you already know the basics of how to build and publish an agent.

Get started

Agent Academy: Operative is available now and free to take.

Start the curriculum here: 👉 https://aka.ms/agent-academy-operative

As always, we’d love your feedback. This curriculum will continue to evolve alongside Copilot Studio and like the agents you’re building, it will get better through iteration.