Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

We are building a Copilot Studio agent and need to obtain the currently authenticated user's identifier (for example, SSO ID, UPN, employee ID, or another unique user key) so that we can pass it to downstream systems and retrieve user-specific information.

Our goal is to leverage the user's existing authentication context and avoid creating or maintaining any custom/new connectors solely for identity retrieval.

Has anyone implemented this pattern in Copilot Studio? Specifically:

What user identity attributes are available out of the box?

Can the authenticated user's SSO ID or UPN be accessed directly within a topic, variable, Power Fx expression, or agent flow?

What is the recommended approach for passing the user's identity to external APIs without introducing new custom connectors?

Categories:

Building Copilot Studio chatbots in Microsoft Teams

If the Copilot Studio agent uses Authenticate with Microsoft/Microsoft Entra ID, you can use built-in user variables in topics.

For UPN/email use System.User.PrincipalName or System.User.Email;
for a stable unique key use System.User.Id;
you can also use display name, first name, last name, language, and login status. Copilot Studio has system variables for user/conversation context, and authentication exposes signed-in user values such as user ID/display name.

so recommended patter is to pass System.User.Id or System.User.PrincipalName from the topic into your existing Power Automate flow, tool, or API call. Avoid using email as the primary key if possible because it can change. Employee ID is usually not available directly out of the box, so if you need it, look it up downstream using Entra ID/UPN through an existing system or Graph-enabled flow/tool. Copilot Studio also supports user authentication for tools when the downstream call must run with the user’s own permissions