AI Foundry finds no Azure bot service when trying to publish agent to Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot

Hello @C M ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A .Thank you for reaching out to us.

The behavior described is aligned with the current design of the Azure AI Foundry publishing workflow for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

During the “Publish to Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot” flow, the Azure Bot Service is not treated as a generic selectable resource. Instead, the publishing workflow is designed to create and configure the required Bot Service as part of the publishing process itself.

 Because of this design:

• The dropdown does not list all Bot Services in the subscription
• Only Bot Services that are created and configured through the Foundry publishing flow are detected
• Manually created Bot Services, even with matching settings and App ID, may not appear since they are not linked through the publishing workflow

This explains the:

• Inline-created Bot Services appear immediately and work
• Portal-created Bot Services are not shown in the dropdown

As asked-

1. If there are any specific requirements for bot services to appear - Based on current behavior, Bot Services used in this flow must be aligned with the configuration automatically applied during publishing. This configuration includes: Association with the publishing workflow and agent identity Required internal bindings created during provisioning Compatibility with the Bot Service resource expected by the publishing pipeline These aspects are handled automatically when selecting “Create a Bot Service” from the publishing dialog, but are not fully reproducible through manual creation.Are there specific requirements for Bot Services to appear Based on current behavior, Bot Services used in this flow must be aligned with the configuration automatically applied during publishing. This configuration includes:
   • Association with the publishing workflow and agent identity
   • Required internal bindings created during provisioning
   • Compatibility with the Bot Service resource expected by the publishing pipeline
   These aspects are handled automatically when selecting “Create a Bot Service” from the publishing dialog, but are not fully reproducible through manual creation.
2. If the global region enforced - The current publishing experience provisions Bot Services using the Global location, and there is no option in the UI to select a regional deployment. This indicates that:
   • Regional selection (for example, West Europe) is not supported in this workflow today
   • The Global location effectively behaves as a design limitation of the current experience

Please check if the following workarounds and suggestions help -

1. Supported Approach is to use the Bot Service created from the Foundry publishing dialog and control compliance at the workload level:
   • Keep all AI resources, data, and storage deployed in the required region (for example, West Europe)
   • Treat the Bot Service as a routing layer that connects client channels (Teams/Copilot) to backend services
   • Validate access and data flow paths to ensure compliance requirements are met
2. Alternative approach for strict regional Bot Service requirements is to
   • Create a Bot Service manually in the required region
   • Develop a custom backend (App Service, API, or function)
   • Connect this backend to the Foundry agent endpoint
   • Integrate with Teams using standard Bot Framework patterns
   Please note that the above approach provides regional control but does not use the native Foundry “publish” experience.

The following references might be helpful , please check them out

• Publish agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Foundry | Microsoft Learn
• What is the Bot Framework SDK? - Bot Service | Microsoft Learn
• Teams bots overview - Teams | Microsoft Learn

Thank you

The publishing experience for agents in Azure AI Foundry is designed to create and wire up the Azure Bot Service resource for the agent automatically. The documented flow assumes using the Create an Azure Bot Service option in the publishing dialog rather than selecting an existing, manually created bot.

From the current documentation:

• When publishing to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, the portal creates an Azure Bot Service resource for the agent when Create an Azure Bot Service is selected in the dropdown.
• The created resource is then immediately available in the dropdown and used for packaging and publishing the agent.
• There is no documented support for bringing an arbitrary, manually created Azure Bot Service into this picker or for customizing the region of the bot resource created by the Foundry UI.

Given what is documented:

1. Manually created Azure Bot Service resources are not part of the supported publishing path for Foundry agents to Teams/Microsoft 365 Copilot. The dropdown is intended to work with the resource that the Foundry publishing flow creates and manages.
2. The location/region of the Azure Bot Service created from the publishing dialog is currently controlled by the platform. The documentation does not expose any setting to change this behavior or to choose a different region, so the effective region behavior is by design for the current preview experience.

There is no documented workaround to:

• Force manually created bot resources to appear in the dropdown, or
• Override the region used when the publishing flow creates the Azure Bot Service.

For now, the supported approach is to:

• Use Create an Azure Bot Service from the Foundry publishing dialog when publishing to Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Ensure the required permissions and resource providers (such as Microsoft.BotService) are in place so that automatic creation succeeds.

If regional placement is a hard compliance requirement, the next step is to treat this as a platform limitation of the current preview and engage Microsoft support or the product feedback channels referenced in the Copilot extensibility documentation to track feature updates.

References:

• Publish agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams
• Frequently asked questions for Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility