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Is Orchestration Broken? No Custom Topics are Triggered

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Posted on by JT-29071526-0

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I've spent the last few weeks trying to figure out custom topics. I can't seem to get any custom "triggered by agent" topics to trigger. Even when I try with something super simple - like a custom topic that is described as "This topic is for people who want to talk about dogs. If someone asks about dogs, trigger this topic". The only thing in the topic is a simple message Node. Then I start a conversation and say, "Tell me about dogs" and nothing happens at all. Custom topics that are pre-created by Microsoft seem to work.

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Topic creation & management

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sandeepstw 312 Moderator on at

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Microsoft Copilot Studio uses AI-driven orchestration, which means:
   1. Custom topics do not always trigger just because you add trigger phrases. The AI model decides which topic to trigger based on confidence scores.
   2. If a pre-built topic has a higher confidence score, it will override your custom topic.
   3. AI matching is not strict keyword-based, so "Tell me about dogs" may not match exactly as you expect

Solution 1: Force Your Topic to Trigger with Manual Invocation
Since AI-driven matching sometimes overrides custom topics, you can manually invoke your topic:
Create a new system topic (like the Greeting topic).
Add a "Trigger a Topic" action inside it.
Select your custom topic.
This forces the bot to enter your topic instead of relying on AI matching.

Solution 2: Increase AI Matching Confidence for Your Topic
If you want your topic to trigger automatically, but it’s getting ignored:
Go to Settings > AI Capabilities
Look for the Topic Matching Sensitivity
Increase sensitivity so that your custom topic gets recognized better.

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JT-29071526-0 136 on at

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I think I've found the culprit. It seems that whenever I make an edit to any of my custom topics, activation of any topic I've created becomes disabled for 5 to 10 minutes. This does not seem to affect premade topics that MIcrosoft provides.

If I'm patient, the issues seems to mostly fix itself. Although it still does behave oddly. Often I will ask an initial question, and the agent doesn't seem to respond. But if I follow up with a period or similar, then the agent is capable of finding the appropriate topic to answer my initial question.

I tried to implement the second solution you mentioned, but I don't see an option for that in Settings. Is this where I should be looking?

My use case is finding information that relates to specific assessments. Ideally, I'd like to start each conversation by having the user choose one of 7 assessments. Each assessment will have 5-20 topics, each one covering a resource or document that is relevant to the given assessment. At the time a user chooses one of the 7 assessments, by desired behavior is to force the agent to activate the "best match" topic amongst topics related to that particular assessment. If you happen to have any advice for achieving that outcome, I would be grateful!

I can force the user to choose an assessment and save their choice as a variable. But if I add a topic management node, I can only explicitly choose a single topic - I don't see a way to specify "choose from this defined group based on these criteria". I thought that I might be able to enforce this type of behavior through the trigger of a given topic; unfortunately, it looks like I can't actually choose any variables to use when building a condition, even if my conversation start topic establishes a global variable. Not sure if this is normal, a bug, or user error on my part? Note that switching to "System" or "Environment" still leads to the same "No available variables" message.

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