Connect a Gateway to Microsoft 365 Copilot
Use an Airia MCP Gateway from Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat through a declarative agent, with sign-in through Airia and no Copilot Studio license.
You can use an Airia MCP Gateway from Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat by packaging it as a declarative agent. The agent appears in the Agents list in Copilot Chat, each person signs in to Airia once, and every tool call runs through the Gateway with the credentials, tool choices, and policies you set in Airia.
This page covers connecting a Gateway you've already created. If you haven't set one up yet, start with Gateway/Deployment Creation. To add a Gateway to an agent built in Copilot Studio instead, see Connect a Gateway to Copilot Studio.
Before you start
- An Airia MCP Gateway with at least one app and tool selected.
- A Microsoft 365 work account that can use Copilot Chat. Microsoft's prerequisites page lists what agent features are available with and without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
- Custom app upload turned on for your account. A Teams administrator sets this under Teams admin center → Teams apps → Setup policies, with Upload custom apps on for the policy that applies to you.
- Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit version 6.12 or later in Visual Studio Code. Microsoft's walkthrough is Build a declarative agent with an MCP server.
Copilot connects to your Gateway from Microsoft's cloud, so it uses the same Gateway URL you copy below. The Gateway publishes the sign-in details Copilot needs, so there is no client ID or secret to create.
Get the Gateway URL from Airia
Go to Secure → Gateway → MCP Gateway and find the Gateway you want to connect.
Click Copy URL on the Gateway's card. If the Gateway has Radar turned on, the copied URL ends in /radar instead of /mcp; use it as is.
Build the agent in Agents Toolkit
In Visual Studio Code, open the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit pane and select Create a New Agent/App → Declarative Agent. Give it the name your users should see in Copilot, for example Airia Gateway.
Select Add an Action → Start with an MCP Server, paste the Gateway URL, and choose OAuth (with dynamic registration) as the authentication type. The toolkit reads the Gateway's tool list and registers the sign-in configuration for you.
In the toolkit's Accounts pane, sign in to Microsoft 365 with your work account. Then under Lifecycle, select Provision and confirm. The agent is uploaded to your account for testing.
To make the agent available to other people, select Publish under Lifecycle in Agents Toolkit. An administrator then approves it in the Microsoft 365 admin center, under Agents (or Integrated apps on older tenants), and chooses who sees it in the Agent Store.
Use the Gateway in Copilot Chat
Go to Copilot Chat and select your agent under Agents in the sidebar. A provisioned test copy shows your agent's name with local or dev appended.
Ask for something that needs one of the Gateway's tools. Copilot replies with Sign in to <agent name>. Select it and complete the Airia sign-in in the window that opens. You do this once; later chats reuse it.
Copilot shows the tool it is about to run and its parameters, with Confirm and Cancel. Select Confirm. The result comes back in the chat.
Check the connection
The agent answers with the tool's result, and each call is recorded in Airia under the Gateway's MCP monitoring with the signed-in user. To inspect what the Gateway's tools return to Copilot, apply a guardrail with the MCP Gateway traffic target. See Managing Policies.
Gateways with Radar enabled
With the Radar URL, the agent sees radar_search, radar_execute_tool, and radar_manage_cache, and uses them to find and run the Gateway's tools on demand. If the Gateway has instructions, get_tool_instructions appears as well. Ask in plain language, for example "find the weather tool and run it for Wichita"; Copilot searches first, then asks you to confirm the tool it found.