Copilot agent can't read PDF files

Hi Intranet AI, 

Good day! Thanks for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A forum.  

To confirm, you're building an agent using Copilot Studio Agent Builder, and you've added a knowledge base consisting of PDF files stored in a SharePoint folder. While Copilot Chat is able to extract and answer questions based on the content of these PDFs, the agent you've built is only able to reference the file titles and cannot access the actual content, particularly when the PDFs are image-based (i.e., scanned documents without selectable text). 

After reviewing the official Microsoft documentation on Use the Copilot Studio Agent Builder to Build Agents | Microsoft Learn, here are the key findings: 

• File Type Support 
  • The documentation does not list any image-based formats (e.g., JPG, PNG, TIFF) as supported file types for knowledge ingestion. 
  • While PDF is listed as a supported format, it is highly likely that only text-based PDFs are processed correctly by the Agent Builder. 

To address this limitation, you may consider the following steps: 

1. Convert image-based PDFs to text-based PDFs using OCR tools. 
2. Alternatively, convert the content into other supported text formats such as .txt, .docx, or .html. 

Before re-uploading or re-indexing the files, please ensure the following: 

• Permissions: Verify that Copilot has the appropriate access rights to the SharePoint folder and its contents. 
• File Availability: Confirm that the files are marked as available for Copilot knowledge ingestion. 
• Restricted SharePoint Search: As noted in the documentation:  “If Restricted SharePoint Search is enabled, you won't be able to use SharePoint as a knowledge source.” 

This setting can prevent the agent from accessing any SharePoint-based content, regardless of file format or permissions, so it’s important to verify that this restriction is not enabled. You can read more about this setting via https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/restricted-sharepoint-search  

I hope these suggestions help, and I sincerely wish you the best in resolving this issue quickly. Please let me know if there's anything else I can assist you with. 

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