Copilot Studio Agent doesn't work when share with a user

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Posted on by Gustavo Cruz 9

I have developed a Copilot Studio Agent that its knowledge source are 2 Excel tables and 1 Word doc. These sources are in a folder in a SharePoint site. I have shared the agent to a user to test the agent out. This user has a Copilot Premium license and it is the admin for this SharePoint site. When the user tries the same prompt as me, the agent gets confused and it can't retrieve the information from its knowledge base, meanwhile I am able to use the same prompt and have no issue.

I do know what to do to fix this.

Does anyone have a suggestion, please and thank you?

Gustavo

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Publish & channel management

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CU15051649-0 10 on at

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Hi @Gustavo Cruz 9,

Please try to debug using the following steps:

Republish and reindex the agent's knowledge sources in Copilot Studio.

Verify file-level permissions on the SharePoint folder and each Excel/Word file (not just site-level access).

Confirm the user is testing the latest published version of the agent.

Review conversation diagnostics/citations for both users to see whether the agent is actually retrieving content from the knowledge sources.

Validate that the Excel files are structured as proper tables with clear headers, as Excel retrieval can be less reliable than Word documents.

If using SharePoint knowledge, check whether user-specific security trimming is affecting retrieval.

Does the other user's response include citations from the SharePoint files? If not, the issue is almost certainly with retrieval/indexing or permissions rather than the prompt itself.

Hope this helps you!

Thanks,
Gurdeep.

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Valantis 5,971 on at

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Hi @Gustavo Cruz 9,

Microsoft docs confirm the knowledge retrieval runs under the user's own identity when they chat with the agent. So if your colleague's token has any issue accessing the SharePoint files, they'll get different results even as a site admin.
Two quick checks:
1. Ask the colleague to open the SharePoint Excel and Word files directly in the browser while testing. If they open fine, the issue is in how Copilot retrieves under their specific token.
2. Check how you added the knowledge. If you used the Featured SharePoint connector (not file upload), retrieval is user-specific. If you used file upload, files go to Dataverse and should be consistent for all users.
Also make sure Work IQ is enabled (Settings > Generative AI > Work IQ) Microsoft confirms it significantly improves SharePoint knowledge retrieval quality.

Best regards,

Valantis

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Sajeda_Sultana 166 on at

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Hi @Gustavo Cruz 9,

What you’re seeing is actually quite common and usually comes down to permissions on the data, not an issue with the agent itself
Even though you shared the Copilot Studio agent, it doesn’t share access to the files automatically. The agent always uses each user’s own permissions to retrieve information.
So in simple terms:

It works for you

It doesn’t work for the other user

This likely means the agent is fine, but the user can’t properly access the source files behind the scenes.

What to check:

Make sure the user can open the files directly. Ask them to open the Excel and Word files from SharePoint. If they can’t access them easily, the agent won’t either.

Give clear access to the files/folder. Even if they’re an admin, it’s best to: Share the folder/files explicitly with them and avoid relying only on inherited or group permissions

Give it a bit of time. Sometimes permissions and indexing take a little while to sync.

Double-check your data sources. In Copilot Studio, confirm that your files are still properly connected.

Copilot Studio only shows what the user is allowed to see- it doesn’t bypass security.

✅ If this helped solve your issue, please Accept as Solution so others can find it quickly.

❤️ If it didn’t fully solve it but was still useful, please click “Yes” on “Was this reply helpful?” or leave a Like :).

🏷️ For follow-ups @Sajeda_Sultana

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