Tag: SharePoint

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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  • Automating site maintenance (removing or updating outdated pages and files),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.
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Creating a Copilot Agent from a SharePoint Library

The new Agent Builder in SharePoint is designed to help people use and share Copilot Agents to query sibsets of data within your organistion using a simple click, point, create and tweak approach. Out of the box every SharePoint site (assuming you have a Copilot license) brings a Copilot sidebar allowing you to ask questions about the content, but you can also replace this with a custom Copilot Agent which we will walk through here.

The goal is to enable business users to easily empower their employees use Copilot to reason over specific information sources or across discrete repositories. Microsoft provide a handful of “use cases” as why a Copilot agent might be useful and what’s great is that “anyone” can create one!

Image – Microsoft Copilot Adoption Hub

Once created and tested, these custom Copilot Agents can be easily shared via a simple hyperlink that can be embedded in SharePoint pages or used in Teams.

In this how to blog, I walk you through the setup and customisation of a Copilot Agent using Agent Builder in SharePoint, customising of the agent, and sharing of the agent. Free to follow along and create your own agent.

Copilot agents are specialised AI assistants designed to enhance the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot by connecting to your organisation’s knowledge and data sources. They are custom tools embedded in Copilot Extensions, providing additional functionalities tailored to specific needs. In SharePoint, Copilot agents are natural language AI assistants that give trusted, precise answers and insights. Agents are expert systems that operate autonomously on behalf of a process or company.

Building your First Copilot Agent

Step 1 – Choose your starting point.

First, you need to navigate to a SharePoint site, library or document library you want to create an “agent” from. You will of couse need to have access to that Library and also need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to create the agent.

From here, you can select the three dots and choose “Create a Copilot agent“

Step 2 – Click and you are done!

Done (well – you will probably want to customise it and test it), but once you do this, your Copilot Agent is created for you. Click “Edit” to make changes, such as change the name, and then of course test it out.

Step 3 – Edit and Customise

Here I have clicked “Edit” to take me to the customisation pages. From here you can toggle across different options to customise your Copilot agent.

The customisation pages are split into three sections – Idenitity, Sources and Bebaviour – each of these allow you to tweak the way the agent works. There’s also the ability to edit for advanced customisation through Copilot Studio but this feature is not available at time of writing…

In the Identity Section – you can change the name, icon and description (who the agent introduces itself to the user)

In the Sources Section – you can modify the sources that the Copilot Agent uses. You can add additonal SharePoint sites, individual files or extenal sources such as websites.

In most cases, I suspect you will want to use a single library or a discrete set of files, but you can add up to 20 different information sources. These 20 information sources can be mean sites, libraries, folders, or documents. What’s more, you can have a combination of these as long as the total is 20 sources – for example, you could add 20 sites or 20 documents, or 3 sites, 5 document libraries, 2 libraries and 10 descrete files as long the total sources totals 20.

Note: You of course need to ensure that the intended users of the agent have access to the sources your specify as agents run under the security context of the user using the agent.

In the Behaviour Section, you can customise the welcome message which will help your users to understand the purpose of this Copilot agent and can also edit or change the starter prompts to help users get some tips on some of the things the agent can do for them. You can also give the agent specific instructions on how it should respond and behave based on the user input.

As you update the behviour, you will see the changes in real-time.

Testing your Copilot Agent

Once you are ready, you can test your agent, simply writing a prompt in the chat dialog as you would with any other Copilot – feel free to try one of the templates or create your own.

Be sure to test a few things, you might find you need to update the user instructions and review the sources before you share it with other people to test further.

Once you are happy with your agent, click save. The agent is saved a “file” with a .copilot extension in the root of the SharePoint folder you started creating your agent in.

Using your Copilot agent

Once saved, your new Copilot Agent launches automatically for any user accessing the SharePoint library that has a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. This replaces the default copilot interface that opens when you visit a SharePoint library.

Sharing your Copilot agent

Since the Agent is encapsulated as a manifest “.copilot” file, you can simply share the file like you would any other file, or click the three dots and select share.

Once shared, they click on the file and open it and it displays like a standalone app or can of course access it from the SharePoint library directly.

[Current] Limitations

  1. Currently Custom agents do not appear on the main Copilot Business Chat pages, though this is coming I beleive. On the FAQ on Microsoft’s support page it clearly states that “You can access a Copilot agent from a SharePoint site, page, or document library. You can also use it in Teams if added. We plan to make it available across Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Copilot.” https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-copilot-agents-in-sharepoint-69e2faf9-2c1e-4baa-8305-23e625021bcf.
  2. Advanced editing with Copilot Studio is not currently available, but is also coming soon.
  3. It’s not possible to “hide” the .copilot file (that I can see anyway), so make sure to change permissions on the file.

Let me know how you get on….

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Can you restrict what Copilot can search across for in SharePoint?

Starting later this month (April 2024) , Microsoft will rollout an configuration setting called Restricted SharePoint Search (RSS) that will allow Global/Tenant and SharePoint Admins to disable organisation-wide search and instead select a set of curated/specific  SharePoint sites.

“YES YOU CAN”

This feature will work by allowing admins disable organisation-wide search, and instead to enable/restrict both specific sites impacting the scope of what Enterprise Search and Copilot can seek out and index when using search or Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365.

With this configuration in place, only these specific libraries along with the users’ OneDrive files and content, will be accessible in search and within the Copilot experiences.

This means that whether your organisation has Enterprise Search or Restricted SharePoint Search enabled, users in your organisation will still be able to interact with their OneDrive information in Copilot but there will be more control over excluding old/legacy or restricted SharePoint areas.

Why do we need to Restrict Search?

Is this not against the pricipals of Copilot and Microsoft Search?

Well.. Kinda. Restricted SharePoint Search has been provided to give organisations time to review and audit their data and SharePoint site permissions. Microsoft say that…

“It is designed to help you maintain momentum with your Copilot deployment while you implement robust data security solutions from Microsoft Purview and manage content lifecycle with SharePoint Advanced Management. Combined, these two solutions offer a complete solution for data discovery, protection, and governance. “

Restricted SharePoint Search capability

Once Enterprise Search is disabled, Admins are the able be to tune which content will be indexed for search from an allowed list of up to 100 SharePoint sites. This will honor sites’ existing permissions.

Once configured, content from these areas will be searchable and accessible by Copilot as well as…

  • Content stored in the the curated list of SharePoint sites as specific by the admin.
  • Other frequently accessed SharePoint sites that the user accesses.
  • Content from users OneDrive, Teams chat, email, calendars.
  • Files directly shared with the user.

Copilot users in your organisation will see this message in their Copilot experiences.


“Your organization’s admin has restricted Copilot from accessing certain SharePoint sites. This limits the content Copilot can search and reference when responding to your prompts“

For more information and rollout timeline check out Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: MC726119

Does this mean Copilot can’t access files outside of the search scope?

No… Users can still directly reference a file in Copilot and access the file via manual search or navigation. This is because, restrictive search does not alter the permissions for user access, it just instead, is designed to help minimise the risk of overexposure of overshared content by reducing what they can discover in search and Copilot.

With Restricted Search configured, search results and Copilot search results will be limited but users will still able to navigate (as before) or directly link to a file to open or to “use Copilot” with.

Configuring Restricted Search

Restricted SharePoint Search is off by default.

Whilst this will be coming to the SharePoint admin pages soon… It will, at release be configurable via Power Shell only and will of course require admin privileges.

There is also an ‘allow’ limit of just 100 sites initially though I hear this will soon be expanded following early feedback from customer… Phew!

More information can be found here.

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