# Transfer an AI desk Pro 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 transfer 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.

Preview feature
Transfer is a Preview feature: the Setup > Transfer entry carries a Preview badge in the Admin Center, and the feature may still evolve. See Preview features for the supplemental terms of use.

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

The date of the transfer.
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 transfer 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
Welcome cards
Suggested prompts
Tags
Plugins
API providers
Image gallery
Feedback configuration
SharePoint libraries and pages
Configuration lists
Web search: allowed domains
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 travels as a whole: the setting and the allowed domains both come across, and a domain the source had switched off arrives switched off too.

# 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 Start the transfer.

The confirmation is the last gate. As soon as you select Start the transfer, 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 transfer when:

The source and the destination are the same agent. Transferring 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 "Transfer 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 transfer this agent."

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

# Following the transfer

Once the transfer starts, you land on its progress page. The transfer 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, transferring the agent settings, transferring the documents, indexing the documents, transferring 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 transfer 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 transfer: it takes three consecutive failed refreshes before the page reports a problem.

While a transfer 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 transfer:

On the destination: "This agent is being overwritten." Anything you change there will be deleted when the transfer reaches it.
On the source: "This agent's configuration is being transferred." Anything you change there from now on will not be part of that transfer.

That banner is not shown on the transfer history and progress pages themselves, since those pages already report the running transfer.

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 transfer can run for a long time, and the email means nobody has to sit and watch it.

# If the transfer fails

If something goes wrong partway through, the transfer does not leave a half-filled agent behind: the destination is emptied instead. The page then reads "The transfer 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 transfer, and it is the fastest way for support to find what happened. You can also simply start the transfer again.

# After a successful transfer

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 transfer, 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. The setting and the allowed domains both come across. Review the list on the destination for domains that only make sense in the source's environment.
Configuration lists. They come across too, and they replace whatever the destination held. Review them if the destination served a different audience.
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 transferred, 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 →