From Your Laptop to the Pipeline: Scaling Custom Agents with GitHub Copilot

Most teams build an agent once, on one laptop, and never share it. Here's how to take it from local to the whole org to the CI pipeline. Jose Palafox, who has spent six and a half years at GitHub and now works with companies on Copilot adoption, walks through the path from a local custom agent to agents that run unattended in your pipeline. He explains how Copilot works under the hood, the built-in agents in the Copilot CLI, and how to generate and edit a custom agent with the agent builder. Then he shows how to share agents across an organization with a marketplace, run agents across repositories with Orchestrate, and move them into CI with GitHub Agentic Workflows: headless Copilot CLI runs in GitHub Actions, triggered by slash commands in issues, plus a repo with about 200 agents running different parts of the pipeline and agents that investigate their own cost overruns. In this talk: • Local vs autonomous agents, and how Copilot works under the hood • Building custom agents and choosing models for them • Sharing agents across a company with a marketplace • Running agents in CI with GitHub Agentic Workflows SPEAKER Jose Palafox, Field Copilot Specialist, GitHub GitHub: https://github.com/josepalafox LINKS GitHub Agentic Workflows: https://github.github.com/gh-aw/ Copilot coding agent docs: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/coding-agent/about-coding-agent GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:52 Local vs autonomous agents 1:32 How Copilot works under the hood 3:32 Built-in agents in the CLI 5:32 Building a custom agent 7:37 Sharing agents with a marketplace 10:52 Agents across repositories 12:41 Agentic Workflows: agents in CI 14:21 Triggering agents from issues 14:56 Why pipeline agents scale 15:36 200 agents in one repo 18:16 Agents that watch their own cost 18:56 Wrap-up Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #GitHubCopilot #AIAgents #AIEngineer