My Frustrating Journey to Create an Agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio for Applied Skills

I passed with a 96% score.

That’s not the headline.

The real story is how badly this Microsoft Copilot Applied Skills lab (also known as APL-7008) broke down as a user experience. I’m not talking about the concept of validating real-world skills—which is the good that I support—but about the way this thing was executed. The broken UI, the laggy performance, the mid-test interface changes. It was less “applied skills” and more “applied frustration.”

Trapped in a Tiny, Laggy Browser Box

You’re dropped into a locked-down virtual machine, hosted in-browser. Sounds fair enough in theory. In practice? The screen is so small you spend most of the test scrolling. And not the convenient kind of scrolling. No, I’m talking about hunting for buttons and menus that are half-rendered or positioned just out of view.

And that lag. Every click felt like I was tossing a signal into the void. Sometimes it responded. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it just made the entire interface vanish. It was like working inside a haunted emulator from the early 2000s.

The Disappearing Interface Trick

I hit a major wall on the very first assignment. It told me to use a specific trigger phrase in a new topic.

Problem was, the interface had changed.

Microsoft had updated Copilot Studio to use a new trigger method: “When the agent chooses.” It’s actually a smart update to use generative orchestration for new agents by default. But it completely replaced the old trigger phrase box. The one the lab instructions still referenced.

So I spent 45 minutes searching for something that no longer existed. I kept wondering if I was missing something. I wasn’t. The environment had moved on, and the lab hadn’t. If you want to use the classic way, here’s how to turn off generative orchestration.

Worse, when trying to zoom out of these massive input panels to click what I needed, the UI literally disappeared. Mouse scroll? Gone. Arrow keys? Also gone. The only workaround was holding Ctrl and using my middle mouse wheel to shrink everything to ant-size and blindly guess where to click.

The Irony of Applied Skills

This exam was supposed to be proof that I could use Microsoft Copilot Studio effectively.

But instead of testing whether I could design a flow or create an agent, it tested whether I could survive its broken environment. My real skill? Adaptability. Not with the platform, but with its bugs.

I’m glad Microsoft is moving away from multiple-choice memorization. The lab concept is solid. But it’s being undermined by poor execution.

Here’s what needs fixing:

• Let us expand the screen.
• Fix the UI interactions.
• Sync the training content with the live platform.
• Stop making usability the hardest part of the test.

Until then, Applied Skills will feel like a misnomer. Because right now, they aren’t testing what you can do with the product. They’re testing what you can tolerate.