No, Copilot Studio can’t use a service account to bypass SharePoint permissions when you are using it as a "knowledge source".
If a user doesn’t have read access to the SharePoint site or library, the agent won’t return content from it. That’s expected and by design.
However, there are workarounds.
1. Use a Power Automate sync
Rather than querying SharePoint at runtime, you can use a Power Automate flow (running as a service account) to sync the restricted library into the agent’s knowledge. Once synced, the content behaves the same as if you’d uploaded the files directly to Copilot Studio.
This means:
- No need to grant broad SharePoint read access
- No per-user permission checks at runtime
- Fully manageable and scalable
This pattern is actually built into the Copilot Studio Kit (if you haven't heard of it google it), so you don’t have to build it from scratch yourself.
2. Use Azure AI Search
If you need a more advanced solution for large volumes of documents, metadata filtering, or more control over ingestion), you can index the SharePoint content into Azure Al Search using a service account. Copilot Studio can then query the search index instead of SharePoint directly.
This can be more expensive to run and operate, but typically gives better retrieval quality and more control compared to native knowledge sources.
Hope that helps 👍
