Business skills are process notes stored in Dataverse so an agent follows your way of doing something instead of guessing. You write them on the Business skills page in Power Apps or through the Dataverse MCP server, share them with people or teams, and deactivate them while you edit. They are a preview feature.
The gap business skills fill
An agent grounded on your data still knows nothing about how you work. It can read the opportunity table and count the open ones. It has no way of knowing that a quote over ten thousand dollars goes past the owner before it is sent, or that a job stays open until the site photos are uploaded, or that the customer called Smith Bros in the CRM is the same one everyone in the office calls Dave.
That knowledge sits in someone's head, and when the agent guesses at it you get a confident answer that is wrong in a way nobody catches. A business skill is where you write the rule down, in a place the agent reads before it answers.
Where they live and what you need first
Two things have to be switched on for the environment before the page appears. The environment must be enabled and configured for the Dataverse MCP server, and it must be enabled for Dataverse intelligence. Both are administrator jobs.
After that, in Power Apps go to More in the left navigation and select Business skills (preview). It is worth pinning, because it is buried. That page is the hub for creating, editing, sharing and organising every skill in the environment.
A skill created through the MCP server is saved into whichever environment you connected to, which is an easy thing to get wrong when you have a development and a production environment open in two windows. The same two-windows confusion shows up when two people edit one canvas app at once, covered in coauthoring.
Sharing, visibility and switching one off
Skills are user-owned by default, which surprises people who expect them to behave like a shared knowledge base. You share a skill with named users or teams and give each one a level: Viewer can read it, Co-owner can read and edit it. Manage access shows who has it and lets you change or remove access, with invitations you have not sent yet sitting on a Pending invites tab.
Visibility is a separate setting. Viewable by is Individual by default, meaning the owner and the people it is shared with. Switch it to Organization and every user in the environment with at least basic user privileges can see it.
There is also a Deactivate action, which stops agents using a skill without deleting it. Use it while you are rewriting one, rather than leaving a half-finished process live for a day.
The MCP tools that manage them
Four Dataverse MCP server tools cover the lifecycle:
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
upsert_skill | Create a business skill or update an existing one |
delete_skill | Delete a skill from the environment |
search | Search table schemas, business skills and apps by keyword |
describe | Get the detail behind a search result |
Which means a skill can be authored from the same client you use to query the data, rather than only in the maker portal. If you have just spent twenty minutes teaching an agent your quoting rule in a chat window, you can have it write that rule into the environment instead of losing it when the session ends.
Writing one that ages well
One process per skill. A skill covering three processes gets edited by three people and ends up matching none of them.
Write the decisions, not the clicks. Screens move, ribbons get redesigned, and a skill full of button names goes stale within a release. The rule that quotes over ten thousand dollars go past the owner will still be true in two years.
Put the exceptions in. The exception is the part nobody remembers to mention and the part an agent gets wrong, because the happy path is obvious from the data and the exception never is.
Name the owner inside the text. A process note with no owner has nowhere for a correction to land, and six months later nobody is sure whether it still reflects how the team works.
Preview, so treat it that way
Microsoft labels business skills as prerelease and states plainly that preview features are not meant for production use, come with restricted functionality, and are covered by supplemental terms. The sensible read is that the concept is stable and the surface is not.
Write your skills somewhere you also control, even a document in the team's SharePoint, and treat the Dataverse copy as the deployed version rather than the only one. That costs you nothing and means a change to the feature does not take your process notes with it.
Common questions
What do I need before I can use Dataverse business skills?
The environment must be enabled and configured for the Dataverse MCP server, and enabled for Dataverse intelligence. Business skills are a preview feature and are not intended for production use.
Who can see a Dataverse business skill?
By default only the owner and the people it has been shared with, as Viewer or Co-owner. Setting Viewable by to Organization makes it visible to every user in the environment with at least basic user privileges.
Getting your process out of people's heads
Writing the rules down is the part that pays off whether or not an agent ever reads them, and it is usually the first thing I do on a build. If you want a hand turning how your team works into something a system can follow, book a free 30-minute call.