What is the SharePoint Knowledge and what does it do?

The responses and workflows you get back from AI is only as good as the content it can reason over or leverage. If your content (data) is not in good shape and healthy (relevant, up-to-date etc) then it “isn’t ready” meaning your experience of AI will be “sub optimal” at best.

This is where Microsoft’s upcoming SharePoint’s Knowledge Agent comes it. It is designed to bridge that gap — enriching, organising, and structuring organisational content so Microsoft 365 Copilot and enterprise agents can drive real business impact, not just deliver answers.

SharePoint Knowledge Agents’ “role” is to help you turn fragmented content into structured, governed, AI‑ready knowledge – so your AI doesn’t just answer, it understands, compares, summarises, and automate by having optimally organised, labelled and meta data rich content at its virtual fingertips!


What is SharePoint knowledge agent ?

If your organisations’ SharePoint intranet is cluttered with old, irrelevant pages or files that simply are not labelled properly (inconsistent metadata), Search and AI tools like Copilot can’t easily find or understand the information your people need when they search. This limits the value you get from AI, because it can’t surface the best answers or automate tasks reliably.

The SharePoint Knowledge Agent is a Microsoft native, AI-driven capability in SharePoint that systematically improves content quality, discoverability, and governance, which are the foundations Copilot needs to reason well. SharePoint Knowledge agent adds intelligent metadata, builds useful views, aligns labels and policies, and even generates workflows from plain language.

SharePoint Knowledge Agent

Microsoft say that the result should be “cleaner, richer knowledge fabric” across your business that raises the “fidelity of AI answers”, reduces manual effort, and makes content immediately actionable.

Knowledge Agent is designed to solve this problem by:

  • Curating content intelligently (helping keep only what’s useful and relevant),
  • Automating site maintenance (removing or updating outdated pages and files),
  • Enabling natural-language workflow creation (letting users build processes just by describing what they want, in plain English).

All of this happens inside SharePoint, making your intranet/knowledge libraries smarter, cleaner, and ready for AI-powered productivity without leaving your SharePoint page. Once enabled by your admin (since it is in preview right now), content admins see a floating button in the bottom‑right corner of every SharePoint page which serves as your entry point into SharePoint’s Knowledge Agent.

TIP:

You will know that a site has the SharePoint knowledge agent enabled as you will see the little SharePoint icon on the bottom left of the screen.

What can SharePoint Knowledge Agent do?

The SharePoint Knowledge agent has several key uses:

  • Context for AI with auto metadata: Copilot can suggests new columns and tags, and then auto classifies files with more meaningful, auto-filled metadata. Copilot and Agents can reason over this data to better distinguish similar documents and deliver higher‑quality answers.
SharePoint Knowledge agent – adding suggested Columns and meta tags
  • Confident, compliant experiences: Keeps metadata clean and aligned to policy with smart suggestions, labeling, and admin controls.
  • an create optimised “AI” views: Generates views that sort, filter, and group documents by metadata (e.g., “policies expiring in 2026” or “contracts grouped by client”) so teams find what matters fast.
  • Plain‑language automation: The Knowledge agent can help with “simple” automation tasks too. For example, users can describe what they need (e.g., “When the document changes or is updated, send an email to the owner”), and the agent builds the workflow.

This is quite simple automation but no technical expertise is required. For more advanced users, this can (still) be done with Power Automate which provides much more control and capability. Worth noting that the automations done via the Knowledge agent “currently” relay on meta data contents only and not file contents.

  • Answers and insights in context: You can ask the Knowledge Agent quick questions about site content and get grounded answers that leverage this new metadata.
  • Dynamic, multi‑turn web creation: Helps “owners” build and master SharePoint pages with natural language prompts, templates, and intelligent section suggestions – turning web content creation and SharePoint pages into a guided, iterative experience.

Knowledge Agent helps improve Copilot and agents accuracy

  • Better grounding with richer signals:
    Copilot relies on context to reason well. Structured metadata gives it the disambiguation and granularity needed to separate look‑alike documents, trace policy lineage, and surface authoritative sources.
  • Higher signal‑to‑noise across the tenant:
    Clean metadata and policy alignment reduces clutter in retrieval, improving ranking, semantic matching, and prompt grounding. Your AI spends less time guessing and more time knowing.
  • Actionable content, not just answers:
    AI-generated views, file comparison, and audio summaries make content instantly usable helping people move from “find” to “decide” to “do” in one flow.

Enabling the SharePoint Knowledge Agent?

  • Availability: Knowledge Agent is now available in Public Preview via “tenant‑level opt‑in” for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.It can be enabled at site level or across all sites. This is only via PowerShell today, but I expect a UI to come soon.

Common Questions

  • Do we need Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses? Yes – Users need a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license to use this feature.
  • Is this only about metadata? No — this is about creating AI‑ready content end to end: intelligent metadata, compliant labeling, actionable views, guided page creation, and plain‑language automation.
  • How to I enable the Knowledge Agent? Microsoft have provided a guide and instructions on how to enable the agent via PowerShell. You can access this here: https://aka.ms/KnowledgeAgentOptIn
  • Will this reduce manual tagging? Yes — the agent suggests and autofills columns based on content and user input, cutting manual effort dramatically.
  • How does this improve Copilot answers? Cleaner, richer metadata gives Copilot the context to distinguish similar documents and ground responses to authoritative content.