Is there a 100-item limit when returning SharePoint Get Items results to a Copilot Agent?

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Posted on by HC-08110621-0

Hi everyone,
I built a tool for a Copilot Agent using a workflow that includes the Get Items action on a SharePoint list.
My SharePoint list contains approximately 200 items. I enabled pagination on the Get Items action and set the threshold to 200. The workflow itself appears to retrieve all 200 items successfully, and the action output contains all rows.
However, when the agent uses the tool and I ask a question such as "How many items can you see?", the agent returns an error.

I performed several tests:

Pagination disabled → only 100 items are returned, and the agent works normally.
Pagination enabled with threshold = 100 → agent works normally.
Pagination enabled with threshold = 101 (or higher) → agent returns the same error.

Based on these results, it seems that the agent may only be able to consume up to 100 items from the tool response, even though the workflow can retrieve more.
I would like to confirm:

Is there a 100-item limit for data returned from a workflow tool to a Copilot Agent?
Has anyone successfully returned and used more than 100 SharePoint list items in an agent?
Are there any recommended approaches for handling larger datasets?

Any insights or official documentation would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

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Calling actions from Copilot Studio

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ldecuba1974 10 on at

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Hi,

it's not a 100-item limit. It's a 500 KB response size limit.

Copilot Studio has a 500 KB limit for workflow tool responses. In your case, each list item includes enough data, such as extra columns and metadata, that the response grows beyond 500 KB at around 100 to 101 items. Once that happens, the response is rejected. So the limit isn't the number of items. It's the total response size.

Fix Connector Request Failure in Copilot Studio - Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn

A few things you can do:

Use $select in Get Items so only the columns you actually need are returned. This usually makes the biggest difference.

Use $filter to let SharePoint do the filtering. That way, you only get the items the agent needs instead of the entire list.

Regards,
Lisandro

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Prasad-MSFT Microsoft Employee on at

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Thanks for sharing your findings. There doesn't appear to be a documented hard limit of 100 items that a workflow tool can return to a Copilot Agent. However, there are limits around connector payload size and the amount of data an agent can process from an action response. Microsoft documents a connector payload limit of up to 5 MB, and large action outputs can trigger processing/payload-related errors.

Ref: Quotas and limits - Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn

Since your flow successfully retrieves 200 items but the agent fails once the response exceeds 100 items, it looks more like a payload/token consumption limitation (or a current product limitation) rather than a SharePoint Get Items limitation.

A few approaches that tend to work better are:

Filter the SharePoint data in the flow and return only relevant records.

Return aggregations (counts, summaries, grouped results) instead of the full dataset.

Implement paging/batching and retrieve additional records only when needed.

Perform the heavy processing in Power Automate and return a concise result to the agent.

It would be interesting to test whether 101 records containing only minimal fields still fail. If they do, that may indicate a record-count limitation somewhere in the agent/tool chain. If they succeed, the issue is likely related to payload size rather than the number of items.

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Haque 3,836 on at

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Hi @HC-08110621-0,

Let's make sure exceeding 500KB or 5M payalod will throw an HTTP 400 Bad Request error. If we see this error we can say that its payload error. Let's narrow down it if we see the error. Reference is here.

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11manish 3,610 on at

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Your testing provides strong evidence that the limitation is not in SharePoint or the Get items action, but in the amount of data that a Copilot Studio workflow tool can successfully pass back to the agent. While there is currently no official Microsoft documentation confirming a strict 100-item limit, the observed behavior suggests an internal response-size or serialization constraint.

For production solutions, it's recommended to:

Filter data as early as possible.

Return only the fields the agent needs.

Perform counting, grouping, and aggregation within the workflow instead of sending raw datasets.

Use paging or follow-up retrieval for larger result sets.

If this behavior is reproducible across environments, it's also worth opening a Microsoft support ticket, as your tests (100 works, 101 fails) provide a clear reproduction case that could help determine whether this is an undocumented platform limit or a product defect.

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Haque 3,836 on at

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Hi @HC-08110621-0,

I was just following up, did you get any resolution or any further assistance ?

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HC-08110621-0 12 on at

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Hi All,

Thank you for your response and useful information.

My initial assumption was that there might be an item-count restriction, as I was also able to retrieve 100 items successfully even after significantly increasing the amount of data stored in each item. I carried out a quick test using a simple list with only one column and approximately 200 items. The agent was able to retrieve all 200 records successfully, which indicates that the limitation is likely not related to the number of items but perhaps to the overall payload size.

However, regardless of whether the constraint is driven by item count, payload size, or another platform limitation, the underlying challenge remains the same: we need the agent to perform a comprehensive analysis across a large dataset, and the content stored in each item has already been minimized to only the essential information.

Could you share any recommended approaches or best practices for handling this type of use case? In particular, I would like to understand how others address situations where an agent must analyze all available records without further reducing the data volume.

BR,

Hilary

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