Copilot Studio Knowledge Source Limitation When Iterating Over Multiple SharePoint Documents

Hi,

I’m looking for clarification on a limitation we’re currently encountering in Copilot Studio that is blocking some of our use case.

Example Scenario (Policy Agent)

• We have a SharePoint document library containing ~100 policy documents.

• A Copilot Studio agent is configured with this library as a knowledge source.

• The agent performs well for typical question-answering scenarios where responses can be derived from a subset of documents.

  • For example: “How much annual leave can I take?” correctly returns answers sourced from multiple relevant policies.

Issue

When the question requires the agent to evaluate all documents individually, the results are incomplete.

Example prompt:

“Review each policy document and return the review date.”

In this scenario:

• The agent only processes the first ~10 documents.

• It then stops, without indicating that the response is partial or that a limit has been reached.

• The remaining documents in the library are not evaluated.
  
  

During a recent Microsoft-led course, we were advised that this behaviour is expected due to platform limitations. Specifically:

• While it will reside over all documents to genereate the most suitable response, the agent is not designed to self‑iterate across all items in a large knowledge source for individual document responses.

• Asking it to “review each document” effectively requires iteration, which is constrained.

• The suggested workaround was to:

  • Create a trigger-based flow

  • Implement a loop to process the documents in batches

We were able to make this approach work, but it feels like a heavy and brittle workaround for what seems like a common enterprise requirement.


We’ve Tried

• Both available SharePoint knowledge source connection methods

• Allowing sufficient time for indexing and refresh

• Rephrasing prompts to encourage broader coverage

None of these approaches changed the outcome, the agent consistently returns results for only the first subset of documents.

• Is this behaviour a documented or known limitation of Copilot Studio knowledge sources?

• Are there recommended design patterns for scenarios that require document-by-document evaluation at scale?

• Is there a more native or supported approach planned to avoid custom looping logic for this kind of use case?

Any guidance or confirmation would be appreciated.

Thanks.