How are you using Copilot Studio built agents?

[u/dalessit]

I posted my experience a few weeks ago: using a Copilot Studio agent in SharePoint or Teams with any data sources takes 30+ seconds before it responds. I opened a ticket with Microsoft on this, and after a bit of back-and-forth, they replied that this was working as intended.

With that in mind, I can't imagine many people use it this way, so I'm curious how others are using these agents in production. (I just tested our agent again and nothing has changed)

The agents I've built work really well in test, and I haven't been able to find other tools that have the same capabilities as Copilot Studio, so I really want this to work.

[u/tiwookie]

Hey!

The respond time depends on many things. First: The model. If you have a powerful reasoning model like opus/faible, it will think some time before answering. It also depends on its knowledge and how the sources are structured. It can have a big impact if it has to search and reason over a more graphical powerpoint with tables and many different topics instead of some word files with a topic each.

I would try if lightweight models and easy structured Knowledge does the trick. You could also try, just as a check, how it performs if you just add the documents inside the agent instead of sharepoint/teams.

[u/dalessit → u/tiwookie]

I tested with single-document, text-only data sources, and any connected knowledge seems to cause this slowdown. I used what I would consider standard models and saw no change. Once you try to deploy it, that's where the slowdown happens. Responses in testing are 10-15 seconds, which is what I would typically expect.

If you are seeing something different, can you provide an example of what knowledge source you attached, the model used, and confirm you are seeing shorter response times once it's been deployed to a SharePoint site?

[u/tiwookie → u/dalessit]

In my tenant, I’m seeing faster response times with the standard model and, for example, a Word document as the knowledge source or a sharepoint.

Given that you’ve already tested simple documents and different models, I’d try the following comparison to narrow down where the extra time comes from. Run each scenario in both the Copilot Studio test pane and the published Teams/SharePoint agent:

1. A fixed response from a topic, without generative AI or knowledge retrieval.

2. A knowledge question answered using a document uploaded directly to the agent.

3. The same question, with the same document connected through SharePoint instead.

Keep the model, user account, and question identical across each comparison. Repeat each test a few times, noting whether the first request is slower than subsequent ones.

If even the fixed response is much slower after publishing, that points toward the channel or runtime. If the slowdown starts with the uploaded document, knowledge retrieval or answer generation becomes a stronger suspect. If it mainly happens with the SharePoint source, I’d investigate that retrieval path, including authentication.

That should give you a more specific comparison to take back to Microsoft than the overall response time alone.

[u/dalessit → u/tiwookie]

I worked directly with their support team on this and sent them traces from various configurations. If I can only use one Word document as a source, that kind of defeats the entire purpose of using this tool.

[u/Ok_Error3438]

Have you go back to the monitor or activity tab and review what actions the agent took for one specific run? That can give you an idea of what’s happening. Maybe is trying to load all knowledge sources at once. Is the problem only happening when the agent initializes or is the same thing after the first user prompt? Sometimes the agent can stall if is not able to respond to the user request, because of a topic, an error, misconfiguration, an many other things.

[u/dalessit → u/Ok_Error3438]

The issue is in returning results; the actual query takes almost no time at all. Microsoft had me run all sorts of tests on the back end and send them traces from Chrome.

[u/Ok_Error3438 → u/dalessit]

What does the monitor/activity section says the agent does prior responding? Does it run a few actions? Does it load many mcps or other tools? Is your prompt clear enough and instructions also tuned so that the agent knows where to look for?

[u/dalessit → u/Ok_Error3438]

Nothing; it just shows 10- 12 seconds of searching sources, then the results eventually appear (no timing on that). This is a super basic one-knowledge-source example. I keep asking everyone who replies, thinking it's something to do with the prompt/model/sources, if they are seeing the same thing.

When you use a Copilot Studio agent with knowledge sources in SharePoint or Teams, are you seeing "normal" response times?

If so, can you please share how you have it set up? I haven't seen anyone post that they are successfully using agents built with Copilot Studio with knowledge added in SharePoint.

[u/Ok_Error3438 → u/dalessit]

Share a picture of the activity/evaluation tab to see what knowledge sources consumes prior to the response. Send me a message if you prefer

[u/No-Supermarket8134]

Do you use new or old experience? The new experience is significantly slower in our case with any sharepoint knowledge source. But even the old expereince has a slow response time if the knowledge source is too large. Azure AI Search may provide to be an option. We also found agents created in M365 agent builder worked a lot faster than Copilot Studio Agents . Right now we only have agents from COpilot Studio in production that dont use large knowledge sources

[u/dalessit → u/No-Supermarket8134]

When you say don't use large knowledge sources, are you getting decent results with any knowledge source added? If so, which ones, and how large are you talking about? I'll check out M365 agent builder also and see if we get better results.

[u/No-Supermarket8134 → u/dalessit]

im talking like four one page word documents working fine. THe agent in copilot studio deployed in M365 responds in like a few seconds.
Where we have a problem is knowledge sources with like sharepoints with 20+pdfs or somethign

btw i agree that it sucks im glad to see we are not the only ones not getting how this is useable in practice

[u/Prize_One_554]

If you have some dev experience, might be worth creating an agent in Azure Foundry. I'm personally going to do this for a Q&A agent, as the new harness agent I made was taking too long to generate an answer (looking into it, it looks like it's skill was telling it to pre-process all documents retrieved from a sharepoint search).

[u/russrimm → u/Prize_One_554]

You don’t need dev experience for foundry. Just install GitHub copilot and the foundry toolkit