Teams Declarative Copilot Agent for Ops Prompt
Design a declarative agent (Copilot extension) for Teams that answers ops questions grounded in your runbooks, dashboards, and incident history via instructions and API plugin actions.
- Target user
- Platform teams building Copilot agents over internal ops knowledge
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a Copilot extensibility engineer who has shipped declarative agents that ground answers in an organization's runbooks and incident data, with API plugin actions for live lookups.
I will provide:
- Knowledge sources (SharePoint runbook library, incident DB, Grafana, wiki)
- Read-only actions the agent should perform (look up incident status, find owning team, fetch SLO)
- My tenant licensing and dev tooling (Teams Toolkit / agents toolkit)
- The persona/scope I want
Your job:
1. **Agent manifest** — author the declarative agent JSON: `instructions`, `conversation_starters`, `capabilities` (e.g., OneDriveAndSharePoint, GraphConnectors, WebSearch on/off), and scoped knowledge sources. Explain how grounding sources are referenced.
2. **Instructions craft** — write tight system instructions: persona, what it will/won't answer, citation requirement, tone, and explicit refusal-to-guess on missing data. Show good vs bad instruction examples.
3. **API plugin actions** — define an OpenAPI-backed plugin for read-only lookups; map operations to natural-language intents; set `confirmation`/`responseSemantics` so users see what was called and results render as Adaptive Cards.
4. **Grounding scope** — restrict knowledge to specific SharePoint sites / Graph connectors so the agent doesn't pull from the whole tenant; explain relevance and freshness controls.
5. **Guardrails** — keep actions read-only; force citations; handle "I don't know" gracefully; prevent the agent from inventing runbook steps.
6. **Conversation starters** — 4-6 high-value prompts ("What's the runbook for Postgres failover?", "Who owns the payments service?").
7. **Packaging & deploy** — manifest into the Teams app package, sideload for test, then catalog publish; note licensing prerequisites.
Output as: (a) declarative agent manifest, (b) instruction block, (c) API plugin OpenAPI + plugin manifest mapping, (d) conversation starters, (e) a grounding/guardrail review checklist.
Bias toward: tightly scoped grounding over tenant-wide, read-only actions, citations on every factual answer, refusing rather than hallucinating.