u/Greedy-Ad-8380

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to implement a basic form of agent orchestration with multiple “child agents” in Copilot Pro, without using Copilot Studio, and I’m running into two major issues. Maybe someone here has experience with similar setups.

My setup:

• I have an agent chain of more than 3 Agents
• I start a new chat
• I add Agent 1 via @
  • Agent 1 summarizes a document based on fixed requirements
  • Output is plain text, using | as separators (machine-readable)
• Then I remove Agent 1 and I add Agent 2 via @
  • Agent 2 should:
    • Take the output from Agent 1
    • Search an Excel file
    • Compare the content
    • Return the top 5 matches in a table

Everything after Agent 2 is irrelevant here and works fine.

Problem 1: No recollection of previous agent output

Agent 2 does not recognize the output of Agent 1 at all.
It behaves as if the chat history doesn’t exist or as if the previous content was never provided.

Even though everything happens in the same chat, Agent 2 seems to:

• Have no memory of the previous interaction
• Not see the text produced by Agent 1

Is this expected behavior when switching agents via @ in Copilot Pro?

Problem 2: Excel file access issues (despite having access)

Agent 2 often claims it has no access to the Excel file, even though:

• The agent definitely has permissions
• The file is stored in a location Copilot can normally access
• Even when I attach the Excel file directly in the chat, I sometimes get the same error (“no access to the file”)

This makes the process very unreliable.

My questions:

• Is true agent chaining / orchestration realisticly possible in Copilot Pro without Copilot Studio?
• Is there a known limitation where switching agents resets context?
• Are there any workarounds or best practices (e.g. forcing context carryover, pinning files, using system prompts, etc.)?

Any insights, confirmations, or hard limitations would already help a lot.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to implement a basic form of agent orchestration with multiple “child agents” in Copilot Pro, without using Copilot Studio, and I’m running into two major issues. Maybe someone here has experience with similar setups.

My setup:

• I have an agent chain of more than 3 Agents
• I start a new chat
• I add Agent 1 via @
  • Agent 1 summarizes a document based on fixed requirements
  • Output is plain text, using | as separators (machine-readable)
• Then I remove Agent 1 and I add Agent 2 via @
  • Agent 2 should:
    • Take the output from Agent 1
    • Search an Excel file
    • Compare the content
    • Return the top 5 matches in a table

Everything after Agent 2 is irrelevant here and works fine.

Problem 1: No recollection of previous agent output

Agent 2 does not recognize the output of Agent 1 at all.
It behaves as if the chat history doesn’t exist or as if the previous content was never provided.

Even though everything happens in the same chat, Agent 2 seems to:

• Have no memory of the previous interaction
• Not see the text produced by Agent 1

Is this expected behavior when switching agents via @ in Copilot Pro?

Problem 2: Excel file access issues (despite having access)

Agent 2 often claims it has no access to the Excel file, even though:

• The agent definitely has permissions
• The file is stored in a location Copilot can normally access
• Even when I attach the Excel file directly in the chat, I sometimes get the same error (“no access to the file”)

This makes the process very unreliable.

My questions:

• Is true agent chaining / orchestration realisticly possible in Copilot Pro without Copilot Studio?
• Is there a known limitation where switching agents resets context?
• Are there any workarounds or best practices (e.g. forcing context carryover, pinning files, using system prompts, etc.)?

Any insights, confirmations, or hard limitations would already help a lot.

Thanks in advance!