This blog post is focused on those experienced with Azure/Entra who are less familiar with Power Platform. For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume you have an M365 tenant and Azure subscription already set up. I’ll break this down into two sections – licensing and configuring the Power Platform environment.

Licensing:

I recommend using the 30 day trial that is offered by Microsoft for Copilot Studio – Copilot Studio Trial Sign-Up. Once it expires, it can be extended by another 30 days.

Once the trial period ends, you’ll need to have a billing configuration in place. Copilot Studio has two main modes of billing/licensing.

1. Standard tenant/user licensing. This is what you want to avoid doing for a lab setup, as you can easily earn yourself a $200 bill per user license when the trial expires. There are other licenses that include Copilot Studio, but they do not all have the same feature set, and will not be relevant for our lab.
2. Pay-As-You-Go billed through an Azure subscription – this is what we’ll be configuring today. This is obviously not cost-efficient for an enterprise deployment, but will suit our needs for sporadic testing of agents just perfectly.

Power Platform:

First, we’ll create a billing plan, associated to a PAYG subscription we already have in Azure.

Second, we’ll create an environment.

You’ll want to select Sandbox as your Environment type (necessary for PAYG billing), enable Dataverse (required for Copilot Studio), and associate the billing plan we created.

In the demonstration, no access restrictions via Security Groups were enforced in the interest of keeping things simple. The user used to create this environment is automatically granted the System Administrator role (the highest privilege), so no changes are required in order to start working in Copilot Studio after this. In a true enterprise environment, it is a necessity to have granular permission assignment based on Security Groups (or Group Teams in Power), in addition to things like a managed environment & DLP policy.

More information is available in the official documentation – Microsoft Learn: Secure your Copilot Studio projects

However, as far as a simple lab setup to begin learning, this is all there is! You should now be able to access Copilot Studio via the portal and start building!