[Teams Chatbot] Explore adopting an agent harness #17491

Motivation

Our agent already has domain tools, skills, memory, and tenant-specific guidance. As workflows become longer and more complex, we should evaluate an existing agent harness instead of continuing to build planning, execution, context management, and approval logic ourselves.

Expected benefits

• Improve planning and reliable multi-step tool execution.
• Support longer workflows through session state and context compaction.
• Add reusable capabilities such as todo tracking, selective file access, approvals, and observability.
• Reduce custom orchestration so development can focus on Azure SDK knowledge, tools, and skills.

Evaluate the Microsoft Agent Framework Harness first because it works with our existing Foundry chat client and Agent Framework components. GitHub Copilot can be considered as an alternative backend where its coding-oriented capabilities provide additional value.

These benefits must be validated against the current agent for quality, latency, cost, security, and operational complexity.

• Agent Harness
• GitHub Copilot integration