Learn how to build and connect a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to your Copilot Studio agent to enhance its capabilities. This video covers setup, integration with Power Platform, and a live demo showing how MCP servers streamline complex tasks and boost agent performance.
Hey everyone, welcome back. Today I have a super fun topic to cover. Building custom model context protocol servers or MCPs for your Copilot Studio agents. I've had a lot of fun playing around with these. You're probably wondering what is an MCP server? Well, in short, an MCP server is your agent's mission control, handling tools, logic, and helping your co-pilot go from smart to brilliant. Some describe it as the universal language to communicate with AI or the USBC. So, let's go check these out.
First off, I wanted to cover all the different components of an MCP server and how this all relates back to a Copilot Studio agent. First off, we have the code behind for the MCP server, which defines all the different tools that help build the knowledge for this MCP server. In our demo, we're going to be connecting back to Rudder, our external time tracker that we use. In each tool, I've defined the different APIs to get the data needed for that tool. You'll see we get members, we get clients, we're able tobuild a project, we're able to get projects. Then we deployed our code to a container within Azure that produces a URL for us to communicate back to this server.
Once we have our URL and our container built, then we build a custom connector within Power Platform. All we need to do is reference that URL that we were given for our container. Once we've built our custom connector, we're able to add a new tool to our Copilot Studio agent using the tools navigator. Heading over to model context protocol and then adding our rudder MCP custom connector. Once that's added, we're then able to communicate with that MCP server within our Copilot Studio agent. Okay, now that we have our MCP server hooked up to our agent, let's go ahead and test this out. I'm going to request a project get created within Rudder. The request that goes to Rudder involves some internal IDs be referenced in that request. The end user usually is not going to know what those internal IDs are, but they do know the names. So, this is where MCP servers really shine, and it's going to go and find those IDs for me based off of the names that I provide. We can see all the different requests that were made to the MCP server to execute that final request of creating a project. And we can see here that the project resume screening has been successfully created with all these different details that I provided. And we can actually see what it picked out of my original statement and the things that it actually found behind the scenes with all the tools that we provided in the MCP server to create that project. It's pretty awesome.
Okay, so we looked through all the different components of an MCP server and how that connects to a Copilot Studio agent. We look through how an MCP server can utilize all the knowledge that you've provided it to actually dissect a request and get the missing pieces from those tools that you're providing. Some pretty awesome stuff. We can see how MCPs are really going to upgrade Copilot Studio agents and make them quite a bit smarter by connecting them to external knowledge sources and actually being smart and utilizing the tools that you're providing it. Thanks for joining me today and catch you in my next video.