Unanswered

Generative Answer Node - No longer searching for SharePoint Knowledge Sources?

(1) Share

Report

Posted on by CU13041447-0

Hi guys,

I have a Copilot Studio Agent which is designed to analyse the correct document sourced in its Knowledge against a question the user presents, and provide feedback on the user's own answer to that question.

It has orchestrator AI is off (using only grounded Knowledge within the Topic)
The Topic:
Ask the user for 2 inputs
1st being the document name which I want the agent to source/reference.
2nd being the question which it should analyse the document against.

The agent has 1 knowledge source - a SharePoint site which contains PDF documents, with easy to understand file name.

Once the agent has stored these 2 inputs as variables.
I call a Generative Answer node - which the input is: the document name input variable
and its custom variable prompt info asks to find the correct document using variable A, and analyse Variable B, and create an Evidence Pack of information in form of bullet points, etc.
This generative answer gets stored as a record to be called later.

Now I ask the user to upload their answer to this question in a PDF file attachment. (stored as a file variable)
Then a Prompt action Node is called and input is the Evidence Pack from the generative Answer node, The uploaded answer, and I request the prompt to analyse the user's response against the evidence it has, to provide feedback and summary of how good their answer is.

Before this weekend - it was working perfectly. received answer every time, correctly, in the format I've laid out.

However from this morning, every time I test it, I get an error to advice that the parameter of the variable Evidence Pack is required, before the prompt can be called, and its value cannot be empty.
OR I receive a fallback message I created advising there was no relevant SharePoint Knowledge found to be used.

So somehow from the weekend, something has changed with the copilot itself to no longer search its Knowledge Sources accurately to locate the correct document to use.

I've tried multiple solutions: like putting in a direct URL to the SharePoint, only having 1 direct file as the knowledge. None of these have worked.

I've tried to use a power automate flow to locate the correct document using a partial file name, but failed many times to output the file URL.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? Or has there been a Microsoft Copilot update which has affected Generative Answer logic and retrieval?

Categories:

Topic creation & management

General topics

Autonomous agents

I have the same question (0)

All responses (3)

Answers (0)

Sort by

Nivedipa-MSFT Microsoft Employee on at

Like (1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!
Hello CU13041447-0
Copilot Studio agent is currently unable to retrieve SharePoint knowledge—Evidence Pack variable is returning empty, which affects the downstream Prompt action. The issue appears to be a service-side SharePoint retrieval regression impacting several tenants since this weekend. The topic logic itself is correct.
Workarounds include:

Uploading PDFs directly into the agent's knowledge base instead of referencing SharePoint (this method is confirmed to work)

Using Dataverse as an alternative knowledge source, as it uses a different retrieval pipeline and is not affected

Adding a condition to check the Evidence Pack variable before the Prompt action to prevent the "required parameter" error

Recommended actions:

Check M365 Service Health for any SharePoint or Microsoft Search advisories

Verify that the knowledge source index status in Copilot Studio is set to "Ready"

Re-add SharePoint knowledge using a direct document library URL instead of site-level URL

If the answer above was helpful, could you please provide your feedback?
Your feedback is important to us. Please rate us:

🤩 Excellent 🙂 Good 😐 Average 🙁 Needs Improvement 😠 Poor

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
CU13041447-0 4 on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi, thank you for the response.

Is there any timeframe or word on when the service sided SharePoint retrieval is being looked into and fixed?

And thank you for the suggested actions, will try these out to see if can workaround the current issue.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Vish WR 804 on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

@Nivedipa-MSFT

Thanks for the update.

Is this issue mentioned in the message center or service health. I have seen few similar problems reported by others.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No