Ansible playbook runs successfully when executed via terminal but fails in Gitlab CI/CD pipeline

I've written a ansible role to copy properties file of my application to a remote machine. I first check if the properties file exists locally and then copy the file to my remote machine. The command I used to run the playbook is as follows :-

 ansible-playbook -i ./playbooks/hosts ./playbooks/deploy.yml --tags copy --limit remote_machine_name --ask-become-pass

I can see that the playbooks ran fine and I'm able to verify that the file has been copied to the remote machine. Now when I try to achieve the same using Gitlab CI/CD, the pipeline fails saying that the file specified doesn't exist. The ansible-playbook command I use in the CI/CD pipeline is :-

ansible-playbook -i ./playbooks/hosts ./playbooks/deploy.yml --tags copy --limit remote_machine_name --extra-vars "ansible_user=${ANSIBLE_USER} ansible_become_pass=${ANSIBLE_USER_PASSWORD} ansible_sudo_pass=${ANSIBLE_USER_PASSWORD}"

Stack trace that I get when the pipeline fails :-

"item": {
        "ansible_loop_var": "item", 
        "changed": false, 
        "failed": false, 
        "invocation": {
            "module_args": {
                "checksum_algorithm": "sha1", 
                "follow": false, 
                "get_attributes": true, 
                "get_checksum": true, 
                "get_md5": false, 
                "get_mime": true, 
                "path": "../properties/application.properties"
            }
        }, 
        "item": "../properties/application.properties", 
        "stat": {
            "exists": false
        }
    }, 
    "msg": "file ../properties/application.properties does not exist"
}

What could be the reason behind this? I can verify that other stages of the gitlab pipeline works fine.