Support Skills in organization/enterprise-level custom Copilot Agents

[alexsiilvaa]

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General

Copilot Feature Area

Copilot Enterprise

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Summary

Organization/enterprise-level custom Copilot Agents currently do not support attaching or configuring Skills.
This issue proposes enabling Skills support at org/enterprise scope.

Problem

When creating custom agents at the organization or enterprise level, there is no way to add Skills, which limits reuse and standardization of tooling across teams.

Why this matters

• Prevents centralized governance of agent capabilities.
• Forces duplication of setup in lower scopes (repo/user) when org-wide behavior is desired.
• Reduces consistency in enterprise Copilot experiences.

Expected behavior

Allow organization/enterprise custom agents to:

1. Attach one or more Skills.
2. Configure skill permissions/policies centrally.
3. Inherit or override Skill configuration at lower scopes (optional, if applicable).

Actual behavior

No Skills support is available for organization/enterprise custom agents.

Proposed solution

Introduce Skills support for custom agents at org/enterprise level, with:

• Admin-level configuration UI/API.
• Clear precedence/inheritance rules.
• Auditability and policy controls suitable for enterprise governance.

References

• https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/coding-agent/about-custom-agents

Additional context

Use case: enterprises need standardized agent behavior with shared Skills across multiple repositories and teams.

[mrybson]

Is there any update on this one? I also need the same

[P-r-e-m-i-u-m]

Yo @alexsiilvaa — totally agree.
Configuring Skills at the repo level is a nightmare for enterprise governance. You end up duplicating the same setup across dozens of teams instead of managing it once at the top.
Hopefully, they prioritize this centralization soon.

[alexbadoi]

++1 up!
++ easy transfer skills between codex , claude etc

[andrewcavill]

Agreed. We have 200+ repositories in our organisation and many of them require the same skills, so it makes sense to configure these skills at the organisation-level, rather than replicating them across repositories. I presume the best way to do this would be to follow the pattern used for organisation-level agents, by adding a skills folder in the .github-private repo?

[giaotuancse]

Totally agree, this must be top priority, otherwise custom agent for organization would be useless as most of custom agents now using skills.

[cmpl-giedriusk]

+1

[netapp-bcammett]

This is the biggest gap we have in our team's AI architecture.

[matt-cook]

+1 on this. Our workaround is putting skills in a package and then telling custom agents to check that package is installed per-project.

[macalbert]

+♾️ This should be a must-have for Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise.

Claude already supports organization-wide skill provisioning for Team and Enterprise plans, allowing owners to distribute approved workflows and capabilities from one place. It also supports scoping skills to specific groups through plugins, member-to-member sharing controls, org-wide sharing, and audit log visibility for sharing events.

That is exactly the kind of governance model enterprises need for custom agents: centralized management, standardization, controlled rollout, auditability, and less duplication across teams.

Without organization/enterprise-level Skills support, GitHub custom agents are much harder to scale properly. Per-repository configuration creates duplication, drift, and inconsistent behavior, which is the opposite of what enterprise AI adoption needs.

Reference: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13119606-provision-and-manage-skills-for-your-organization

[koenwesselman]

+1 This is currently stopping us from making already proven agents accessible organisation wide - at the moment, they are limited to those that use Visual Studio Code on a daily basis.

[pedrogomes97]

I created this issue regarding the same problem:

microsoft/vscode#301181