Using the AI Agent in Microsoft Teams

Overview

The AI Knowledge Agent works inside Microsoft Teams, letting your team ask questions and receive answers from the knowledge base without switching applications. Interactions happen through the Kowiki bot in chats and channels.

Before using the agent in Teams, your workspace admin must install the Kowiki Teams app. See Microsoft Teams Integration Setup for installation instructions.

Asking questions in a chat

1. Open a chat with the Kowiki bot in Microsoft Teams.
2. Type your question in natural language and send it.
3. The agent processes your question and replies with an adaptive card containing the answer and citation links.

Chat conversations with the bot are private to you.

Example interaction

You: What are the steps to onboard a new vendor?

Kowiki:

To onboard a new vendor:

1. Submit a vendor request form in the Procurement portal.
2. Compliance reviews the vendor's security questionnaire (5-7 business days).
3. Once approved, Finance sets up the vendor in the payment system.
4. The requesting team receives confirmation and vendor contact details.

📄 Sources: Procurement → Vendor Onboarding, Compliance → Third-Party Reviews

Invoking the agent in a channel

You can interact with the Kowiki bot in any Teams channel where the app is installed:

1. Type @Kowiki followed by your question in the channel.
2. The agent replies in the channel thread with an adaptive card.
3. Team members in the channel can view the question and answer.

Channel interactions are visible to all members of that channel.

Example interaction

You (in General): @Kowiki What's our SLA for P1 incidents?

Kowiki (reply):

P1 (Critical) incidents have a 15-minute response time SLA and a 4-hour resolution target. The on-call engineer is paged immediately via PagerDuty. Escalation to the Engineering Director occurs if unresolved after 2 hours.

📄 Sources: Engineering → Incident Response Playbook, SLA Definitions → Support Tiers

Adaptive card responses

Responses in Microsoft Teams appear as adaptive cards — structured message blocks that include:

• The answer text with formatting (bold, lists, paragraphs)
• Clickable citation links that open the source pages in your browser
• A footer showing the number of sources referenced

Adaptive cards provide a clean, readable format that works on desktop, mobile, and the Teams web client.

Follow-up conversations

To ask follow-up questions, continue the conversation in the same chat or reply in the channel thread:

1. After receiving an answer, type your next question in the same chat window or thread.
2. The agent uses the conversation history to understand context from earlier messages.
3. You can reference information from previous answers without restating it.

To reset context, start a new chat with the bot or a new thread in the channel.

Permissions

Your Teams identity is linked to your Kowiki account. The agent enforces section-level permissions on every query — you only receive answers from content you are authorized to view.

Two users asking the same question in the same channel may receive different answers if their Kowiki permissions differ. Each user's response is generated based on their own access level.

For details on how permissions work, see Section-Level Permissions.

Troubleshooting

• Bot does not respond — Confirm the Kowiki app is installed in your Teams environment and that the AI Knowledge Agent is enabled in your Kowiki workspace settings.
• "This feature is not available" card — Your workspace plan may not include the AI agent. See Plans Overview for plan details.
• Adaptive card not rendering — Ensure your Teams client is up to date. Older versions may not support all card features.
• Missing expected content — Verify you have access to the relevant sections in Kowiki.