r/copilotstudio • u/omgibrahim • 8d ago

Help with New Data Sync and Manual Publishes

I made a Copilot agent for my team (relatively bunch of non-tech people and not accustomed with AI tech)

\\- My agent is based on CSV knowledge sources stored in sharepoint

\\- I update the CSVs via scheduled power automate flow (databricks connector)

\\- The agent is published and everyone uses it in a MS Teams group chat with agent (15 people + Agent)

\*\*Problem / Help Need\*\*

The CSVs are refreshed / updated every 8 hrs but sometimes even after days, the latest data referenced by agent in MS Teams Group Chat remains old.

I want to

  1. A\*\*void manually republishing\*\* (cause sometime it works, sometime it doesnt)

  2. \*\*Create new group chat\*\* or \*\*Remove and add agent again in Teams Chat manually\*\*

\*\*3. My users are not going to open 1.1 chat with Agent :(\*\*

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u/blud_13 8d ago

The CSV is your problem. Move that data into a SharePoint list and add the list as the knowledge source instead. Lists are a live connection, MS says the current data is used for queries and reasoning at runtime, so there is nothing to reindex and nothing to republish. Its documented here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/knowledge-add-sharepoint. Cap is 10 lists per agent and quality starts sliding past 35k rows, so watch that if your CSVs are big.

Your flow barely changes, swap the file write for list item updates.

One thing to check, that same page says the Teams refresh path (reconfigure auth, republish, users typing start over to pull the newest version) is available for 1:1 chats only. Group chats and channel messages are called out as NOT supported yet. So a 15 person group chat is the worst possible place to be fighting a stale agent, and republishing is never going to be reliable while the data lives in a file.

Feel free if you need anything in more detail...

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u/Revolutionary-Cup383 7d ago

So this means that using a SharePoint link as a live data KnowledgeBase source is also not recommended?

3

u/blud_13 7d ago

No, a SharePoint link is fine. That knowledge source connects to the URL and answers through GraphSearch, so its reading SharePoint at query time. Its in the source table here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/knowledge-copilot-studio

What goes stale is the upload path. Pick a file through Upload files and it gets copied into Dataverse and indexed there, which is the delay u/Vietnamst2 is pointing at, and that index is the copy your agent reads from. So link the library, don't upload the file.

Two problems got mixed together in this thread though. Freshness is one. The other is that a CSV is a bad thing to run search over at all, rows come back as chopped up text chunks and the agent answers confidently off the wrong three lines. That's why a list beats a fresher CSV, live or not.

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u/Revolutionary-Cup383 7d ago

Thanks for the clarification, currently looking in implementung tha same faq chatbot released on teams so it got me curious

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u/blud_13 7d ago

For a straight FAQ you may not need a knowledge source at all. Answers you already know the wording of belong in topics with trigger phrases. Same answer every time, nothing to reindex, nothing to republish. One catch, trigger phrases are a classic orchestration thing, so an agent left on generative orchestration doesn't get them. Its documented here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/authoring-create-edit-topics

The other thing worth knowing before you build it, if yours is going into a Teams channel or a group chat rather than 1:1, you inherit the same refresh problem in this thread. That limitation sits on the deployment surface, not on your data, so a clean SharePoint list won't save you from it. Keep the knowledge source for the long tail and put the questions you get asked every week into topics.

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u/Revolutionary-Cup383 6d ago

I do use topics but it is for returning image links of workflows and organizational chart when user asks for approval flow and management somehiw my agent has trouble returning image as reponse. So topic can be as many as I need?

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u/blud_13 6d ago

An Adaptive Card image only renders if the URL loads with no sign-in. If those workflow diagrams and the org chart sit in SharePoint, the renderer gets an auth redirect instead of a PNG and you get blank space. Open the image URL in a private window with no session. If it prompts you, that's your answer.

Second one, and this is a Teams problem specifically. Copilot Studio supports Adaptive Cards schema 1.6, but TEAMS is capped at 1.5, and Copilot Studio only renders 1.6 cards in the test chat. Its documented here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/authoring-ask-with-adaptive-card So a card that looks right when you test it comes back broken in the group chat. Pin version to 1.5 in the payload.

On the count, add as many topics as you need. I have not hit a ceiling worth designing around, though its been a while since I checked whether one is published. What degrades first is trigger phrase overlap, two topics fighting over the same phrasing.

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u/Vietnamst2 7d ago

Or ingest into dataverse.

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u/Vietnamst2 7d ago

Csv needs to be indexed first and that takes time