Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio workflow returns gzip-compressed binary output

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Posted on by EP-25081443-0

I believe I have found a bug in Copilot Studio.

Edit: I'm rewriting this post as I've carried out some additional testing.

Environment:

- New Agent Builder inside new experience

- New Worlflow inside new experience

Behaviour:

A workflow tool containing only:

When an agent calls the flow

↓

Respond to the agent

Text = "Hello World"

works correctly.

However, if I add any type of query action, such as "Run a query against a dataset", "List rows present in a table", or "Search for users", it breaks when interacting with the Agent. The flow still works correctly when tested directly within the Workflow, but when the Agent attempts to use it, it returns unreadable gzip-compressed binary data instead of the expected text output.

Categories:

Copilot Studio pre-built agents/templates

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Mohsin Ali 845 on at

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Hello @EP-25081443-0 - the expected result should be a json response rather a binary file. can you try to run same DAX query directly in Power automate and see what it actually returning. This is just to debug your DAX through Power Automate.
EP-25081443-0 4 on at

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nothing errors inside the workflow. The DAX query is valid and it returns a valid result when looking into the history/activity of the workflow. However the agent does not recive the correct output from the workflow.
EP-25081443-0 4 on at

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Also, I'm skiping the output from the "run query" I'm just making sure that it doesn't error. As you can see on the screenshoot from my first message, the "respond" is just a number, to remove any variants about how the output of the query looks. But by only executing the query something is getting corrupted and the Agent is not able to read the number response.
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sannavajjala87 1,109 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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Hi,

Based on your additional testing, this does not look like a DAX or query problem. You've already demonstrated that:

A workflow containing only Respond to the agent works correctly.

The same workflow runs successfully when tested directly in Workflow.

Adding actions such as Run a query against a dataset, List rows present in a table, or Search for users causes the agent invocation to return compressed/binary-looking output.

The binary output is returned even when the response sent back to the agent is a simple hard-coded value and does not contain the query results.

That points more toward an issue in the handoff between the Workflow runtime and Copilot Studio's tool execution layer than a problem with the query action itself.

As a troubleshooting step, I'd try adding a Compose action and returning only the Compose output, or creating a brand-new workflow with a single query action and a hard-coded response to keep the repro as small as possible. If the behavior is reproducible across different query actions, I would consider opening a Microsoft support ticket, as this looks more like a product issue than a configuration issue.

Thanks & Regards,

Manoj Annavajjala

www.powerplatformengineer.com