Meeting Actions: Let Declarative Agents Run the Calendar

Finding a 30-minute slot for six people across three time zones is the kind of task that eats a morning and produces nothing but a thread of “does Tuesday work?” replies. Your agent can already read your calendar and tell you when you are busy. What it could not do, until now, is actually book the thing. The MeetingActions capability, new in the declarative agent manifest v1.8, closes that gap: it lets an agent schedule events, run time-finding polls, and surface time insights, all from a conversation.

What Is the MeetingActions Capability?

MeetingActions is a declarative agent capability that lets the agent perform calendar and meeting actions on the user’s behalf. It is the write side of the calendar, and it pairs naturally with the read-only Meetings capability that lets an agent search existing meetings. Where Meetings answers “what is on my calendar,” MeetingActions answers “put something on my calendar.”

At launch, it covers the actions that actually cause the scheduling doom-loop:

Action	What it does
Schedule events	Create calendar events and meetings directly from chat
Time-finding polls	Create a poll to collect availability across attendees
Time insights	Surface insights about when to meet and where the free time is

Enabling MeetingActions

There is nothing to configure. The capability takes a single property, name, and no scoping:

{
  "capabilities": [
    {
      "name": "MeetingActions"
    }
  ]
}

Set name to MeetingActions and you are done. No URLs, no meeting IDs, no arrays. The agent can now act on the signed-in user’s calendar within the permissions that user already holds.

Read and Write: Meetings and MeetingActions

The pattern here mirrors email exactly. Meetings is search: point it at specific meetings by ID, or leave it open to search the whole calendar. MeetingActions is the verbs: schedule, poll, and surface time insights. This is the same split as the read-only Email capability and its write counterpart, the EmailActions capability.

Here is a scheduling assistant for Zava Insurance that can both look up existing meetings and create new ones:

{
  "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/copilot/declarative-agent/v1.8/schema.json",
  "version": "v1.8",
  "name": "Calendar Concierge",
  "description": "Schedules meetings and finds time for the Zava Insurance claims team.",
  "instructions": "$[file('instructions.txt')]",
  "capabilities": [
    {
      "name": "Meetings"
    },
    {
      "name": "MeetingActions"
    }
  ]
}

The Meetings capability handles “when did we last sync on the Contoso claim?” MeetingActions handles “book us a follow-up for Thursday.” One agent, both halves of the calendar.

What This Looks Like in Chat

The payoff is the death of the scheduling thread. A claims lead needs to get five people in a room:

Two MeetingActions behaviors in one answer: the agent surfaced a time insight (where the free time actually is) and offered to either create a poll or schedule the event outright. The user picks; the agent books. No thread, no “does Tuesday work,” no morning lost.

Permissions Stay the User’s

Letting an agent create calendar events raises the same question email write access does: what can it actually touch? The same answer applies. MeetingActions acts as the signed-in user, inside the permissions that user already has.

• The agent schedules on calendars the user can already write to.
• It can only invite and view availability the way the user could in Outlook.
• There is no service account, no elevated calendar access, no admin backdoor.

If the user cannot book a room or see a colleague’s free/busy in Outlook, the agent cannot either. The capability inherits the boundary; it does not widen it.

The Value You Just Unlocked

One capability declaration, a single name property, and your agent went from reading the calendar to running it:

• Scheduling in chat: create events and meetings from a conversation instead of a calendar grid.
• Time-finding polls: collect availability across attendees without a back-and-forth email thread.
• Time insights: let the agent surface where the genuinely free slots are, not just report conflicts.
• Future-proof by design: the action set can grow over time without any manifest change on your side.
• Permissions by inheritance: every action runs as the user, scoped to the calendars and free/busy they can already access.

Pair it with the read-only Meetings capability and you get an agent that understands your calendar and acts on it: the difference between an assistant that tells you that you are busy and one that fixes it.

Resources

• Declarative agent schema 1.8 for Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Declarative agent manifest v1.8 JSON schema
• Declarative agent manifest schema
• Declarative agents overview
• Declarative agent permissions
• Writing effective agent instructions
• Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility overview