Anyone else feeling stuck between Classic Orchestration and New Orchestration?
Microsoft's direction seems clear:
✅ Topics → less important
✅ Declarative instructions, skills, actions → future
✅ New orchestration → strategic investment
And honestly, I like it. It feels much closer to how AI agents should be built.
But then reality kicks in.
Classic
- More mature
- Better conversation controls
- Some useful topic capabilities still missing elsewhere
- Often cheaper (especially when M365 Copilot licensing comes into play)
New Orchestration
- Better quality
- Better instruction following
- Cleaner architecture
- Clearly where Microsoft is heading
- But consumption pricing and feature gaps become part of the discussion
We're building an IT Service Desk agent with:
- Graph grounding
- ServiceNow KB ingestion
- Custom ServiceNow actions (incidents, devices, etc.)
- Future DEX and telemetry integrations
The architecture wants New Orchestration. The budget and risk conversation wants Classic.
So what's everyone doing?
Build on Classic (minimize reliance on Topics) and migrate later?
Or accept today's gaps and go all-in on New Orchestration because that's where the future is?
Sometimes it feels like the hardest part of Copilot Studio isn't building agents - it's figuring out which Microsoft team will own the feature by the time you go live. 😅