r/copilotstudio

PLEASE start using agent toolkit. Microsoft has proven time and time again they do NOT care about Copilot Studio, its significantly inferior in every way to agent toolkit developed agentsm

I’m actually struggling with a task where I have around 60–70 unstructured files (PDF, DOCX, PPT, Excel) stored in SharePoint. I need to read all of them, extract the relevant information, and populate an Excel template.

I was trying to do this directly in Copilot Studio (newer experience), but I’m running into a few concerns:

1. It doesn’t seem to be able to read files larger than 5 MB.
2. I’m concerned about token/credit consumption if it has to process all 60–70 files for every request. We expect around 5–6 users/requests per week, so that could mean processing 350–400 files per week. I’m currently using Sonnet 5. I’ve tried standard version but it doesn’t seems to give good results.
3. I’m also not sure how well it would handle more complicated Excel files and extract the required information reliably.

Currently, I’ve envisioning a flow, where user will enter share point link in teams agent chat and agent will process all, fill template and generate that file in same chat. I haven’t tried workflow yet, not sure if that could be helpful.

Edit-
I was also considering going with Microsoft Foundry, but my team mentioned that they don’t currently have the budget for it. They are currently using the built-in Copilot in Microsoft Excel, where they can provide around 20 files at a time, and it’s giving them fairly accurate results without any additional cost/credit consumption since they have premium licenses.

So I’m a bit confused about which approach would make the most sense for our use case, especially when we scale this to 60–70 files per request.

I’m building a Copilot Studio agent that needs to answer questions using a local/on-premises SQL database containing more than 80,000 records.
In my current setup, I can only retrieve 2,048 records in one go. The concern is that the agent answers based on that subset, even when the relevant records could be elsewhere in the database.
Users should be able to ask questions in natural language, and the agent needs to filter across the full dataset to return an accurate answer. For example:
What is the oldest record for a particular machine?
Which records mention a specific fault or maintenance activity?
How many matching records are there within a given date range?
I don’t necessarily need to send all 80,000+ rows to the agent. I need the filtering, sorting, and counting to consider the entire database before returning the relevant results.
What’s the recommended approach for this in Copilot Studio?

As the title says

Hey everyone, I'm working on AI agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio, and today I ran into two major issues that I honestly don't know how to solve.

Issue 1: DLP errors in Standard Harness

I built a flow using a couple of connectors, mainly OneDrive for Business and Excel Online (Business).

The flow takes a file as input, runs some automation on the Excel spreadsheet, generates an output file using OneDrive, and returns that file to the agent.

I added this flow as a tool to my agent in Standard Harness, but it keeps throwing DLP (Data Loss Prevention) policy errors. The problem is that it doesn't clearly tell me which connectors or policies are causing the issue.

I even tried moving all the connectors (Copilot Studio, Excel Online (Business), and OneDrive for Business) into the same Business group in the data policy, but I'm still getting the same error.

Issue 2: Publishing issues with GitHub Copilot Harness

When I switched to GitHub Copilot Harness, the agent worked perfectly fine on my side. All the flows executed without any issues.

But when I tried publishing the agent to Microsoft 365 and Teams, things stopped working properly. It actually worked once, but other users are still unable to use it from their accounts.

So basically, the agent works fine for me in GitHub Copilot Harness but doesn't work for other users after publishing. And in Standard Harness, I'm stuck with DLP errors even though the connectors are in the same Business group.

Has anyone faced similar issues? Am I missing something in the DLP policies, connector permissions, or publishing settings?

Any suggestions would really help!

Edit: It finally worked! Huge thanks to u/brannonb111 you're a lifesaver!

I tried switching to the classic mode, and in that UI, the download button was working. I was able to download the DLP errors and figure out what was causing them.

Coming to the GitHub Copilot Harness issue, turns out it was also because of the same DLP policy. Microsoft 365 and Teams were in a different group, which was why the data wasn't being shared properly. Once I moved them to the correct group, that started working too!

So yeah, I was basically missing the Microsoft 365 and Teams connectors in the correct group in my DLP policy. Both issues are resolved now!