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Microsoft’s SharePoint document libraries redesign looks like a routine interface update. However, the redesign appears less about making work easier and more about testing a broader strategy to reshape Microsoft's productivity suite and who controls those workflows.
The SharePoint update was first announced by Microsoft Lists product leader Lincoln DeMaris in November 2025. It includes a refreshed user interface, AI-powered actions through Microsoft 365 Copilot and integrated forms for document collection. The stated intention of the features is to make libraries "more user-friendly, powerful and intelligent.”
The changes are "a shift toward knowledge-centric collaboration," said Chris McNulty, vice chair of AIIM and former Microsoft product leader, suggesting SharePoint is evolving beyond storage into "a decision-making engine." Capabilities such as triggering intelligent workflows from libraries and capturing metadata during document upload rather than retrospectively will improve how Copilot retrieves relevant documents, he said.
But as with many enterprise AI deployments, the question isn't whether the features exist but whether they'll streamline work or create complexity. With the interface changes now rolling out across organizations, IT teams must prepare users to once again adjust how they interact with a popular workplace platform.
Is SharePoint's Redesign About Usability or Control?
The SharePoint redesign is part of a larger competitive land grab, said Thomas Randall, research director at Info-Tech Research Group. Platform providers are racing to position themselves as the dominant "agent orchestration plane" within organizations, with conversational interfaces serving as the primary way employees interact with business applications, whether users want this or not.
"We see it with ServiceNow, Salesforce with Slack and of course Microsoft with Copilot," Randall said.
Microsoft is already pushing Dynamics 365 into the background, with users increasingly forced to interact with the application through Copilot's conversational interface. The pattern emerging in SharePoint suggests a similar trajectory for other Microsoft productivity tools.
Under Microsoft's emerging architecture, users express intent through Copilot while agents orchestrate tasks and gather context from various applications.
"Unless there is worker pushback and slow adoption (Microsoft has already lowered Copilot sales quotas), workers are gradually being shifted into Microsoft's vision for the future of work: namely, a conversational AI interface, with agents operating in the background," Randall said.
Microsoft is redesigning its user interface to put AI front and center across its productivity tools, said Brian Zander, chief strategy architect at Bloomfire. The motivation appears to be establishing Copilot as inevitable while potentially locking out consumer AI alternatives that users might prefer.
"Microsoft has bet big on Copilot,” Zander said. “The goal here is clearly making sure that you can't get away from it, meaning that you're more likely to use the AI that's right in front of you rather than open up another tab to use a different consumer tool.”
The risk is that standardization optimizes for platform consistency rather than how teams use information to make decisions, especially if enterprise Copilot tools don't keep pace with consumer AI alternatives.
When Microsoft Starts Deciding How Work Gets Done
The redesigned SharePoint library experience solves some problems, with improved view options, faster performance and better integration with OneDrive, said Gianluca Ferruggia, general manager B2B marketplace and media growth at DesignRush. However, the biggest change isn't visual but one of perspective.
"The trend that Microsoft is promoting is to remove end-users from the idea of having explicit control over workflows (automations, integrations, customized workflows) and instead to provide end-users with implicitly managed experiences and decision-making by way of AI and Copilot-driven experiences," Ferruggia said.
Rather than designing workflows and controlling processes, users are being retrained to look to the system for direction. The strategic motivation establishes continuous usage habits that reinforce Microsoft's pricing model and ecosystem lock-in.
"The use of Copilot helps support and reinforce Microsoft's pricing and licensing model, which will ultimately help keep customers locked into Microsoft's ecosystem," Ferruggia said.
This is a fundamental shift from usability to behavioral engineering, said Ana Magana, communications consultant. "These changes don't just make work 'easier.' They subtly redefine how work is expected to happen: more AI-mediated, more automated and less optional," she said.
When AI features are embedded into core workflows, opting out becomes more work, even when organizations aren't ready. The design philosophy being tested in SharePoint libraries could reshape how employees interact with the productivity suite, regardless of whether that transformation serves their needs.
AI Summaries Replace Human Judgment
The implications extend beyond interface preferences. Magana points to cases where AI-generated summaries or auto-organized libraries become the de facto record of work, raising questions about what gets valued and seen.
"The nuance lives in comments, chats or people's heads, but leadership reacts to the summary because it's clean, fast and visible," she said.
This shifts whose work is seen and whose judgment carries weight, creating what Magana identifies as invisible work such as judgment calls, tradeoffs and stopping bad ideas happening inside tools instead of through shared decision-making.
Usability improvements in enterprise tools are typically measured by ease of deployment rather than whether users do their jobs better, Zander said.
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"When interfaces are redesigned around a single operating model, users often are forced to adapt their behavior to the tool rather than the tool adapting to the work," Zander said. That gap drives shadow tools and workarounds, the problems Microsoft claims to be solving.
New Features Won't Fix Old SharePoint Problems
Even with the new interface, issues remain unaddressed. SharePoint still hasn't solved its search problem, Zander said. Rather than building intent and context graphs, Microsoft is hoping views and filters might help users navigate complexity.
But this has a critical flaw. "The real problem users face isn't finding a document but knowing which information is current, accurate and appropriate for the decision they're trying to make," Zander said. Filtering alone shifts that burden back onto the employee.
When automation options are de-emphasized in favor of agents, teams lose visibility into how work is being done. This creates either a trust problem where agents are avoided or the opposite where they're trusted too much, introducing governance challenges that organizations will likely discover only after deployment.
Minimizing visibility of automation capabilities while promoting agents creates simplified workflows containing "the lowest common denominator," a pattern that could extend beyond SharePoint and erode power user capabilities across Microsoft's suite, Ferruggia said.
Design choices themselves carry implications Microsoft seems reluctant to acknowledge. The growing reliance on icons creates a modern aesthetic, but potentially makes interfaces less accessible for neurodiverse users or people without technical expertise. So how much choice will organizations realistically have in avoiding Copilot-driven experiences? Not much, according to Zander.
"When AI is embedded into core productivity workflows by the platform provider, opting out becomes difficult without creating inconsistency or control gaps," Zander said.
The Cost of Ignoring How People Really Work
Yet if sanctioned tools don't meet user needs, employees will seek alternatives independently, creating the fragmentation that enterprise IT departments spend millions trying to prevent. Ferruggia is even more direct: productivity tools will increasingly be developed with Copilot integration as the assumed default, making alternative approaches progressively harder to maintain.
Whether the new experiences benefit users depends on how success is measured.
"If the experience prioritizes engagement with AI over effectiveness of outcomes, the value will skew more toward the roadmap than the user," Zander warned.
"The real question isn't whether SharePoint is better designed,” Magana said. “It's whether Microsoft is reshaping work habits faster than organizations can define guardrails for how AI should actually be used."
With the interface changes now rolling out and potentially serving as a blueprint for transformations across Microsoft's productivity suite, many organizations are being handed the answer before they've had the chance to ask.
Editor's Note: What's the difference between collaboration tools designed for employees and those that aren't?
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