The Teams FAQ bot in 2026: what replaced QnA Maker
Most Teams FAQ bots were built on QnA Maker, often with Microsoft's FAQ Plus template. QnA Maker was retired on 31 March 2025, and FAQ Plus is no longer maintained. If you still need a bot that answers the same HR and IT questions in Teams, here are your options now.
Why old Teams FAQ bots stopped working
QnA Maker let you turn an FAQ page into question and answer pairs, and the Bot Framework or the FAQ Plus template put it in Teams. Microsoft stopped new QnA Maker resources in October 2022 and retired the service on 31 March 2025. Its successor is custom question answering in Azure AI Language. Power Virtual Agents, the no-code option many teams used, became Copilot Studio.
So a Teams FAQ bot built before 2023 is either migrated, broken, or about to be. And the old model, a hand-maintained list of Q and A pairs, is no longer the only way to do it.
Three ways to run a Teams FAQ bot today
| Ready app (e.g. ChatGridAI) | Copilot Studio | Azure custom question answering | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starts from | Your documents as they are | Documents, sites or topics | Q and A pairs or FAQ pages |
| Build effort | Under 30 minutes | Days, plus publishing to Teams | Developer project with Bot Framework |
| Works in Google Chat too | Yes | No | Only if you build it |
| Answers questions you did not write | Yes, from the documents | Yes, with generative answers | Only close matches to pairs |
| Cites the source | Yes | Yes | Shows the matched answer |
| Pricing model | $5 per seat plus your OpenAI usage | Copilot Credits per message | Azure Language usage plus hosting |
How to migrate from QnA Maker or FAQ Plus
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1
Export what you have
Export the knowledge base from QnA Maker or custom question answering as a file. If the service is gone, use the source FAQ pages or documents it was built from.
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2
Keep the source documents, not just the pairs
A modern bot does better with the full handbook or runbook than with 200 short answers, because employees ask questions nobody wrote down.
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3
Upload to one group per department
In ChatGridAI, create an HR group and an IT group, each with its own documents and members. The exported Q and A file can be uploaded as a document too.
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4
Test with your top 20 questions
Use your old FAQ's most common questions as the test set. Check that each answer cites the right document.
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5
Replace the old bot in Teams
Install the new app, pin it for the people who used the old one, and remove the old bot from the Teams admin center.
From FAQ lists to answers from the source
QnA Maker matched a question to the closest stored pair. That worked for "How do I reset my password?" and failed for "Can I carry over PTO if I started in November?" because nobody wrote that pair. Someone also had to update the pairs every time a policy changed.
Retrieval-based bots search the current documents on every question and write the answer from what they find. You update the document, not a list of pairs. See how answering from your documents works.
Common questions
Replace your Teams FAQ bot in an afternoon
Upload the documents your old FAQ came from. Employees get cited answers in Teams the same day.
$5/seat/month - 14-day free trial with 10 seats - no credit card required