Some of the most useful Microsoft agent material does not come from a product page or a launch keynote. It comes from the engineering team - the people who build Copilot Studio and then go and stand it up inside large enterprises. That team has a name: the Copilot Acceleration Team, or CAT. This is a short introduction to who they are and what of theirs is worth bookmarking.
The short version: CAT is Microsoft's Copilot Acceleration Team, part of the Copilot Studio engineering group. They publish the tools, training and guidance we lean on for agent work - the agent resources hub, the Copilot Studio Kit, Agent-in-a-Day and more. We have worked alongside them and attended a lot of their workshops. Bookmark their two hubs and follow the team - they are about as close to the front line of enterprise agent work as it gets.
Who CAT is
In their own words:
"We are the Copilot Acceleration Team (CAT), part of the Copilot Studio engineering team at Microsoft. Our mission is to accelerate the adoption and success of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio."
That places them close to the product - not marketing, not a reseller, but the engineering group. What they publish tends to reflect how the tools actually behave and what actually works at scale, because they spend their time deploying with Microsoft's enterprise customers. Source: Microsoft Copilot Acceleration Team.
Two hubs worth bookmarking
CAT maintains two homes worth saving:
- The agent resources hub - a curated map of Microsoft's agent resources, organised by tool: Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, the agent development SDKs, and Agent 365 for managing agents at scale. It is the fastest way to find the right starting point for a given platform.
- The CAT site - the team's own home, where their tools, programs, guidance and customer stories sit together.
Save both. The agent resources hub is where you go to find something; the CAT site is where you go to see what the team is doing.
The resources we come back to
A curated set of the ones that earn their place in our own work:
| Resource | What it is |
|---|---|
| Copilot Studio Kit | Tooling to develop and test custom agents - agent testing, prompt optimisation, and aggregated KPI dashboards. |
| Agent-in-a-Day | Instructor-led, hands-on exercises to build an agent in Copilot Studio in a day. |
| Architecture Bootcamp | A three-day program to upskill architects on scalable Copilot Studio solutions. |
| Power Up | A low-code and AI curriculum for individuals and enterprises building talent. |
| The Custom Engine Blog | CAT's patterns and best practice for custom engine agents and extending Copilot. |
| Architecture Center | Established patterns and practices for Power Platform and Copilot Studio design. |
That is a curated set - there is more on the hubs, including the AI webinar series, monthly Agent Build-A-Thons, and the Kickstarter foundations workshops.
Why we point clients to them
We are not a neutral bystander here. We have worked alongside CAT and sat in a lot of their workshops, and their material has shaped how we build. We point clients to them for three reasons: they sit with the engineering team, so their guidance tracks how the tools actually behave; they deploy with Microsoft's largest customers, so it is shaped by real enterprise constraints, not demos; and they publish their tools and patterns openly, so you can use them without waiting for a formal engagement. When the people writing the guidance are also the people shipping at scale, the guidance is worth following.
Where this fits
On this site, Copilot Studio work sits under the Power Platform pillar of GIVE - the tools and platform decisions the rest of the agent build rests on. CAT's resources are the reference layer underneath a lot of that. When we help an organisation choose a platform, stand up governance, or run a two-week proof of concept, their kit and guidance are often what we build on. If you are early in that work, start with choosing the right Microsoft agent platform, then bookmark the CAT hubs and keep them close.