# Copy an Agent

# Overview

Transfer copies everything that makes an agent answer the way it does (its settings, its instructions, and its whole knowledge base) into another agent of your subscription. Use it to promote an agent you built and tested into the agent your users already have, or to rebuild an agent from a reference one.

The copy replaces the destination agent's content. The destination is emptied first, then filled from the source, so whatever it held before is permanently gone.

A transfer cannot be undone, and there is no rollback. Before you start one, make sure the destination agent holds nothing you still need.

Not yet available
Transfer is in preview and is not deployed to the Admin Center yet, so Setup > Transfer does not appear for any agent today. This page documents the feature ahead of its release. Contact our support team if you need to know when it will reach your subscription.

# Before you start

To run a transfer you need to be an administrator of both agents: holding only the source is not enough, since the destination is the one being overwritten. Both agents must also belong to the same tenant, and neither may be in the middle of a deployment.

Your subscription also needs enough document credits to hold the source agent's documents. The count takes into account the credits the destination gives back when it is emptied, so the question is whether the subscription can hold the source's documents once the destination has released its own. See Subscription Management for your plan's allowance.

# Opening the Transfer section

Select the agent you want to copy from, then open Setup > Transfer in the left-hand menu of the Admin Center. The page lists every copy this agent has taken part in, as source or as destination, with:

The date of the copy.
The source agent and the destination agent, with the agent you are looking at marked as This agent in whichever column it sits.
Who started it.
Its status: In progress, Completed, or Failed.

Agent names are snapshotted into the history when the copy runs, so a past transfer stays readable after an agent is renamed or deleted.

# What is transferred

Transferred	Not transferred
Agent instructions and acronym prompt	Conversation history
Agent settings: model, match thresholds, enabled features, and privacy options	Tickets
Webchat configuration	Statistics
Cockpit design, draft included, with the logo and background	The agent's name, description, and icons
Cockpit content: banners, resources, and starter questions	Configuration lists
Welcome cards	Web search: allowed domains
Suggested prompts
Tags
Plugins
API providers
Image gallery
Feedback configuration
SharePoint libraries and pages
Documents and their indexing
Questions and answers, drafts included, and their indexing

The destination agent keeps its identity: only its content is replaced. Users who already have the agent in Microsoft Teams keep the same agent, under the same name, and simply start getting the source agent's answers.

Web search is a copied setting, but the list of allowed domains is not. If the source agent has web search enabled, the destination ends up with web search on and its own allow list. Check both after the copy.

# Starting a transfer

From Setup > Transfer, select New transfer. The source agent is the one you opened the page from.
Pick the destination in the Destination agent list, then select Continue. Only other agents of your tenant are offered; if there are none, the page says so.
A confirmation step opens, titled Confirm replacing the agent. It names both agents in full and spells out that the current content of the destination will be permanently replaced, documents, QnAs, prompts, plugins, and settings included.
Select the checkbox confirming you understand that the destination's current content will be permanently replaced, then select Confirm and copy.

The confirmation is the last gate. As soon as you select Confirm and copy, the pre-flight check runs and, if it passes, the destination agent starts being emptied.

# The pre-flight check

Nothing is written, and nothing is deleted, until the pre-flight check has passed. It runs on the server when you confirm, so it cannot be skipped from the browser. It refuses a copy when:

The source and the destination are the same agent. Copying an agent into itself would empty it and then read it back empty.
One of the agents is not yours to overwrite. You must administer both, and both must be in your tenant.
One of the agents is being deployed. The message reads "Copy temporarily unavailable. One of the agents is being updated. Try again once that has finished."
The subscription does not have enough document credits. The message names the shortfall: "Not enough credits. N more document credits are needed to copy this agent."

If a copy involving either agent is already running, that is not treated as an error: you are taken to that copy's progress page instead of starting a second one.

# Following the copy

Once the copy starts, you land on its progress page. The copy itself runs in the background, so you do not have to keep the page open.

The progress bar reflects how much work is actually done, not how many steps have gone by. The phases that take the longest (indexing the documents and the questions and answers) account for the largest share of the bar.
The current step is named in plain words: emptying the target agent, copying the agent settings, copying the documents, indexing the documents, copying the questions and answers, relinking the dialogs, and so on.
For the long phases, an item counter shows the batch being handled, in the form "X to Y of Z items transferred".
The page states that the copy continues on its own and that you can leave and come back later. Its URL is stable, so you can bookmark it or reopen it from the banner described below.
A short network interruption does not stop the page from following the copy: it takes three consecutive failed refreshes before the page reports a problem.

While a copy is running, a banner appears on both agents in the Admin Center, naming the colleague who started it and linking back to the progress page with Follow the copy:

On the destination: "This agent is being overwritten." Anything you change there will be deleted when the copy reaches it.
On the source: "This agent is being copied." Anything you change there from now on will not be in the copy.

Whoever started the transfer also receives an email when it ends, whether it finished or failed, naming both agents and linking to that transfer's page. On a large agent the copy can run for a long time, and the email means nobody has to sit and watch it.

# If the copy fails

If something goes wrong partway through, the copy does not leave a half-filled agent behind: the destination is emptied instead. The page then reads "The copy could not be completed", and warns that the destination agent no longer holds its previous content.

The page also shows a reference to give to support. Quote it when you contact us: it identifies that specific copy, and it is the fastest way for support to find what happened. You can also simply start the copy again.

# After a successful copy

The progress page confirms the transfer, and the history row moves to Completed. Before handing the destination agent back to your users, check:

The knowledge base. Open Documents and the Knowledge Base editor on the destination and confirm the document count and the questions and answers match the source. Documents and QnAs are re-indexed as part of the copy, so allow indexing to finish before judging the answers.
The agent settings. Confirm the model, the match thresholds, and the enabled features are the ones you expect, and that the instructions came across.
Web search. If it is enabled, review the allowed domains on the destination: they are the destination's own, not the source's.
Configuration lists, which are not copied and stay as the destination had them.
The agent's identity. The name, description, and icons are deliberately left untouched. Update them yourself if the destination should now present itself differently.
Plugins and API providers. They are copied, but any credentials or endpoints that are specific to the source environment are worth reviewing before your users hit them.

Ask the destination agent a handful of questions you know the source answers well. That is the quickest confirmation that both the content and the settings that shape the answers came across.

← Agent Maker Knowledge Base →