Copilot Studio Leaves the Teams App in 2027: What to Do Before February

Microsoft is retiring the Copilot Studio app inside Microsoft Teams. According to Message Center post MC1511056 (published October 16, 2026), you can no longer create agents in the app, editing existing agents there ends in January 2027, and the app is removed from Teams in February 2027. To prepare, move agent building to the Copilot Studio web app and, if your agents live in Dataverse for Teams environments, upgrade the environments you want to keep.

Who this is for and what you will have at the end

This guide is for Microsoft 365 and Power Platform admins, and for the people in a small company who built an agent from the Copilot Studio app in Teams and now own it. By the end you will know exactly what is changing and when, which of your agents and environments are affected, and have a short plan: a list of agents, an owner for each, an upgrade decision per environment, and updated instructions for your helpdesk.

Two different things are easy to confuse, so keep them apart from the start:

• The Copilot Studio app in Teams is the place where makers built and edited agents. This is what is being retired.
• An agent published to the Teams channel is a finished agent that colleagues chat with in Teams or Microsoft Copilot. The Message Center post says agents published to the Microsoft Teams channel are not part of this retirement.

The timeline

Two Message Center posts cover the sequence. The first, MC1315217, announced that classic agent creation moves from Teams to the web experience. The second, MC1511056, finishes the job.

As of 2026-11-13, February 1, 2027 is 80 days away, the date after which new Dataverse for Teams environments cannot be created is two days away, and the final decommission date is 351 days away. Plan around the first two now; the last is the hard stop for data.

Microsoft's guidance in the post is that classic-style chatbot agents are managed only in the web app, where users can still create, edit, publish and manage them. The post lists Copilot Studio, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot as affected platforms and identifies no compliance considerations.

Prerequisites

Before you start you need:

• Access to the Microsoft 365 admin center to read the Message Center posts for your own tenant. Dates in third-party summaries are secondary; your tenant's post is the reference.
• Power Platform admin (or Global admin) rights to see environments in the Power Platform admin center and to upgrade one.
• For each maker: a way to use the web app. Microsoft's upgrade article says that to access the Copilot Studio web app, users need a standalone subscription or an individual trial license for Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• If you plan to upgrade an environment: tenant Dataverse capacity at least as large as the environment being upgraded.

Step 1: Find the agents built in the Teams app

Agents created in the Teams app are stored in a Dataverse for Teams environment, one per team. Microsoft's upgrade article describes it this way: when a user creates a bot in the Copilot Studio for Teams app, a Dataverse for Teams environment gets created for the team the user selected.

To list those environments:

1. Sign in to the Power Platform admin center at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com.
2. In the navigation pane, select Manage, then Environments.
3. Look at the Type column. Environments marked Microsoft Teams are Dataverse for Teams environments.
4. The environment name is the same as the team name, so you can recognize which team each one belongs to.

Write down each environment, the team owner and the agents inside it. Ask the owners which agents are still used. Microsoft's CoE Starter Kit governance article notes that bots created with Copilot Studio in Teams environments are not discoverable in the CoE Starter Kit, so you will probably need to ask people or open the environments to see what is there.

Note that the same Learn page lists automatic deletion rules for unused environments. If an environment holds nothing but an unused agent, deciding not to upgrade it is a valid outcome.

Step 2: Decide what to do with each environment

Microsoft says Dataverse for Teams environments are deprecated and that upgrading to Dataverse is the supported way to keep the apps, flows, agents and data in them. The Learn page says to upgrade each environment you want to keep before October 30, 2027, and that Microsoft decommissions environments that are not upgraded on that date.

Use this simple decision table:

The last row comes from the lifecycle table: the environment lifetime is tied to its team, and it is deleted automatically if the team is deleted. After an upgrade, Microsoft says the environment's lifecycle is no longer tied to the team.

Step 3: Upgrade the environments you want to keep

Microsoft documents the upgrade as a tenant admin task done from the Power Platform admin center environments view. In the environment's settings page the action is labeled Upgrade to production.

Before you begin, check capacity. The Learn page states that the tenant must have at least as much available capacity as the size of the Dataverse for Teams environment being upgraded, and that if capacity is short the upgrade is blocked and an error message is displayed. Each Dataverse for Teams environment has up to 2 GB of combined database and file storage, so a tenant with several environments should check available Dataverse capacity first. You can view Teams environment consumption under Licensing, Capacity add-ons, then the Microsoft Teams tab on the Capacity page.

Then:

1. Warn the agent's users. Microsoft says that during the upgrade people cannot edit or create bots in the environment, and chatting with a bot might have issues, so notify users of expected downtime.
2. In the Power Platform admin center, open Manage, then Environments, and select the environment whose Type is Microsoft Teams.
3. Select the upgrade action and read the message about the implications. Microsoft says admins are asked to confirm the action.
4. Confirm. Notifications appear as the operation moves through its states.

What changes after the upgrade

The Learn pages list these effects:

• Bots continue to work as before without you taking action, and upgraded bots are marked with a diamond icon next to the name in the left pane of the Teams app.
• Makers edit apps and flows in the Power Apps portal; for agents they can use the web app at https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com.
• The upgraded environment's capacity starts counting against the tenant's Dataverse capacity.
• The Microsoft 365 group association becomes editable.
• Apps running in the environment require Power Apps or Power Automate licenses.
• Microsoft also warns that after an upgrade, qualified Copilot Studio sessions are considered billed even if they do not use premium features such as premium connectors or non-Teams channels.

That last point matters for small businesses: an upgraded environment can start generating billable sessions. Read the licensing guide before upgrading an environment with a busy agent.

One more limitation appears in the upgrade article: to share an agent with other authors after an upgrade, you must add them as team owners in the team where the environment was created. Microsoft says you cannot do that if the Teams Owner security group was removed from the environment in the Power Platform admin center. The page frames this as a bug that is expected to be resolved.

A note on conflicting guidance: the upgrade article says users can continue to edit upgraded bots in the Teams app. MC1511056, which is newer, says editing in the Teams app ends in January 2027. Treat the Message Center post as current and plan to edit in the web app.

Step 4: Move makers to the web app

For each maker:

1. Open https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com and sign in with the work account.
2. Confirm the agent appears in the list. If it does not, check that the maker has a license that lets them use the web app (standalone subscription or trial, per Microsoft's upgrade article) and that the correct environment is selected in the environment picker.
3. Open the agent, make a small edit such as a topic description, and save it.
4. Publish the agent and test it in Teams.

If the agent is not visible in the web app environment list, the environment is probably still a Dataverse for Teams environment that has not been upgraded. Check Type in the admin center and follow Step 3.

For the licensing side, MC1315217 says that if needed you can adjust access through license assignments for the Power Virtual Agents for Office 365 entitlement and lists E1, E3, E5 and F1 among the affected licenses. Check the post in your own Message Center before you change any license assignment.

Step 5: Re-test the published agent in Teams

Because the retirement concerns the app that manages agents, your published agents should keep working. Still, run a short test after you move an agent, because publishing from a different place can expose problems. Microsoft's publishing article documents these steps:

1. In Copilot Studio, open the agent and select Channels on the top menu bar.
2. Select the Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams tile to open the configuration panel.
3. Confirm Make agent available in Microsoft Copilot is set the way you want it, and select Add channel if the channel is not yet added.
4. Select See agent in Teams, then Add to install it for yourself.
5. Chat with it and confirm it answers.

If users see "Sorry, something unexpected happened. We're looking into it. Error code: SystemError" after you republish, Microsoft documents a workaround: in the Teams admin center turn the agent app off, wait a few seconds and turn it back on; in Copilot Studio turn the Teams channel off, save, and turn it back on; then republish. If it persists, Microsoft asks for the Conversation ID, Agent ID and the time of the error.

Admin approval and installation links

If your agent was approved by an admin and appears under Built for your org in the Teams app store, the approval is managed in the Teams admin center. Microsoft says only an admin can remove the agent from that section, and that you must submit a new approval request if you change the icon or descriptions. The installation link does not work in the Teams mobile app, so use the app store listing for mobile users.

Step 6: Update your internal guidance

The Message Center post recommends four admin actions. Turn them into a checklist:

• Tell affected users to manage agents in the Copilot Studio web app.
• Update documentation, training and support guidance that mention the Teams app.
• Check bookmarks, user communications and helpdesk scripts that send users to Teams for agent management.
• Point users to the web app for supported experiences.

Also consider the creation controls in Teams. The Power Platform article explains that the ability to create apps or agents with Copilot Studio in Teams is controlled in the Teams admin center under Microsoft Apps by using app permission policies. After the retirement that control is less important for agents, but it still matters for Power Apps sample apps that can create Dataverse for Teams environments. Microsoft notes that the Inspection, Employee Ideas and Issue Reporting apps can create such an environment, and that this stops being possible for new environments from November 15, 2026.

Verification

After the change window, check the following:

Troubleshooting

Checklist

• Read MC1511056 in your own Message Center and note your tenant's dates.
• List every environment with Type set to Microsoft Teams.
• Name an owner for each agent, and retire the ones nobody uses.
• Check Dataverse capacity, then upgrade the environments to keep.
• Move makers to the web app and confirm licenses.
• Re-test published agents in Teams.
• Update helpdesk and training material.

For the web app side, see Build your first Copilot Studio agent. For controlling where agents can be built and what they can connect to, see Copilot Studio data policies and environments.

What we checked

• Opened Message Center post MC1511056 (mirrored at mc.merill.net) on 2026-11-13; it was published October 16, 2026 and gives January 2027 for ending edits and February 2027 for removal of the app.
• Opened MC1315217 on 2026-11-13 and confirmed June 30, 2026 as the end of classic agent creation in the Teams app and that existing agents continue to function.
• Opened the Dataverse for Teams environment page on learn.microsoft.com on 2026-11-13 and read the lifecycle table: no new environments from November 15, 2026, upgrade before October 30, 2027, 2 GB per environment.
• Cross-checked the deprecation wording between the Power Platform admin page and the CoE governance article, both of which state that Dataverse for Teams environments are deprecated.
• Opened the Copilot Studio upgrade article (last updated 2026-07-21 per its metadata) and noted that it disagrees with the newer Message Center post on editing in the Teams app; this article follows the Message Center post.
• Recalculated dates from 2026-11-13: 2 days to November 15, 2026; 351 days to October 30, 2027; 80 days to February 1, 2027.
• Opened the Copilot Studio publishing article for Teams (updated 2026-10-29) and copied the menu labels used in Step 5.
• Not checked: no live tenant was used, so the upgrade action and web app steps follow Microsoft's documentation as of 2026-11-13, and exact on-screen wording may differ.

Last tested: 2026-11-13

References

• MC1511056: Microsoft Copilot Studio – Teams app retirement
• MC1315217: Classic agent creation moves from Teams to web experience
• About the Microsoft Dataverse for Teams environment
• Upgrade a Dataverse for Microsoft Teams environment (Copilot Studio)
• Dataverse for Teams environment management
• Connect and configure an agent for Teams and Microsoft Copilot

This guide was researched and drafted with AI assistance and checked against the vendor documentation listed in its References. Read the maintained version and related guides on EpiFive.