News Analysis
Microsoft introduced the SharePoint Knowledge Agent on September 18 to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing SharePoint users: content governance.
Organizations over the years have introduced SharePoint into their digital workplaces with minimal governance only to experience rapid site sprawl, page proliferation and a growing mountain of duplicate, out of date and irrelevant content. The result? Poor findability, declining intranet adoption and dwindling trust in content.
The need for robust content governance has taken on renewed urgency in the last 18 months. Without it, organizations struggle to realize the full value of AI and Microsoft Copilot. It's the "garbage in, garbage out" principle in action. A SharePoint instance with erroneous and out of date content can result in Copilot giving you erroneous and out of date answers to questions.
SharePoint Knowledge Agent has the potential to solve the issue by simplifying content governance and improving organizational knowledge management as a result.
Table of Contents
- What Is the SharePoint Knowledge Agent?
- How Significant an Update Is SharePoint Knowledge Agent?
- Improving the Accuracy and Reliability of Copilot Responses
- Areas for Improvement for the Knowledge Agent
- Areas to Test Knowledge Agent's Capabilities
- Making a Difference to SharePoint Content Governance
What Is the SharePoint Knowledge Agent?
According to Microsoft, the Knowledge Agent “delivers a new wave of AI-powered features in SharePoint designed to streamline content and boost Copilot capabilities.” These capabilities include:
- Automating intelligent tagging for items with metadata to support knowledge management and aid Copilot’s ability to interpret the content.
- Automating various aspects of governance such as detecting content gaps from search behavior, fixing broken links and retiring inactive content.
- Providing intelligent answers to questions from users about the content, leveraging the new metadata that has been added.
- Auto-completion of suggested metadata columns across SharePoint libraries based on content and user input.
- Simplifying automation through natural language prompts, for example setting up an email workflow based on a simple condition.
- Supporting content creation through prompts, templates, intelligent suggestions and AI generation of sections of a page, for example FAQs.
How Significant an Update Is SharePoint Knowledge Agent?
SharePoint Knowledge Agents differs from previous releases by addressing the real needs of SharePoint site managers. Firstly, it fills a gap by bringing badly needed content governance features to SharePoint. Secondly, it automates many of the content governance tasks that site and content owners often lack the time or skills to complete, particularly in decentralized environments where site management is handled by busy professionals with little to no comms training. Even in cases where SharePoint intranets have a central intranet team driving central standards, content owners have a hard time managing their sites.
“This is one of the most significant updates for SharePoint in a very long time, especially for intranets and the content that grounds AI,” Microsoft MVP Susan Hanley told Reworked. “It addresses probably the most important content management concern that all intranet managers think about — keeping content fresh and accurate.”
Hanley cited the example of the agent’s “Improve my site” feature that automatically flags issues and opportunities for improvement for site owners. “If it only looked for broken links, it would be significant, but the fact that it effectively looks for broken (redundant, outdated, trivial) content is game-changing,” said Hanley.
Digital workplace consultant Andrew Pope also sees enormous potential, particularly in the field of knowledge management (KM). “The impact could be enormous. Tackling taxonomy and keeping content up-to-date and relevant has been the holy grail of KM,” said Pope. “We all know how important it is, yet for organizations with extensive libraries, it has been impossible to reach.”
The automatic tagging and classification of content are particularly useful in Pope's view, not only because it helps to get content in order, but also because it will identify gaps in organizational knowledge by highlighting what people were looking for but could not find.
SharePoint Knowledge Agent also brings value by delivering automation for site owners, said Luke Mepham, the Microsoft 365 product owner at a large UK financial services company.
“The introduction of this agentic feature for site managers is significant. I see its core value is in bringing a KM diagnostic tool into the hands of site owners,” said Mepham. "Historically, site owners in corporate SharePoint have been given very little in the way of tooling to manage and maintain what regularly and quickly become document dumping grounds.”
Mepham added that the major bottleneck for successful content and knowledge management in Microsoft 365 has always been the effort in manually tagging, organizing and housekeeping content, something which the agent overcomes by automating these hygiene tasks.
Improving the Accuracy and Reliability of Copilot Responses
A major catalyst for the new Knowledge Agent is to improve the value of Copilot or other AI tools by effectively reducing the impact of “garbage in, garbage out” that limits AI success. But will the agent deliver?
“If this helps us to clean up, structure and trust out content, existing AI tools will prove a lot more powerful, but that’s still a big if,” said Pope. "Certainly, this could lead to more trusted and powerful adoption of AI — with inactive pages being retired and better classification.”
The agent has the potential to increase Copilot accuracy, said Mepham. “When used strategically, first as a diagnostic tool and then to expose metadata to Copilot — providing context on data trustworthiness, intended audience, content structure and intent — Copilot responses are likely to be dramatically improved in terms of accuracy and reliability,” he said.
Copilot’s recent update to OpenAI’s GPT5 model will also significantly improve Copilot results if extensive and useful metadata is exposed, continued Mepham. This is another reason why Knowledge Agent’s automated metadata tagging assumes more importance.
“Using Copilot to create this metadata might seem circular or redundant, but it can be considered as pre-processing seeding your content to be copilot ready,” said Mepham. "I'm interested to see how much of an improvement this brings to the fullness, accuracy and value of Copilot responses.”
Knowledge Agent may bring value in other areas, such as the ability for site owners to automatically add a column of metadata across a library of documents based on a prompt, said Mepham. For example, the agent could identify a client named within files and add those automatically. "If used well, the ability to autofill a metadata column using a prompt could be a functional game changer that would enable unstructured data in document libraries to be queried at scale,” he said.
Areas for Improvement for the Knowledge Agent
The initial reaction to SharePoint Knowledge Agent has been mainly positive, but Microsoft will continue to take customer feedback during the public preview to improve the agent in advance of its general availability in early 2026. What sort of suggestions can we expect to see?
Location
The Knowledge Agent is currently accessed by clicking on the lower right corner of any page, where it presents users with a context-aware menu relating to the page and their level of access. Options include “Ask a question” for users or “Organize this library” for owners. Hanley said that she did not love this “floating” SharePoint button, and would prefer the ability to control where it appears, but suspects users and admins could ultimately get used to it.
No Aggregated View for Admins
A more substantial area for improvement would be providing an aggregated view for owners or admins of multiple sites or page areas. "If I am the SharePoint Admin or own multiple sites, I’d like to have a single place to go to see the entire scope of my remit — everything I’m responsible for so that I can prioritize where to focus,” said Hanley.
Per-Library Focus
The scope of the agent is another area for improvement, said Mepham. “As with many SharePoint features the agent has a bottom up, per-site/per-library focus,” he said. "While it offers the ability for local quality improvement if doesn’t provide a mechanism for org-wide taxonomy management improvement.” The agent will also miss spotting similar content across different libraries, a feature which might be very useful for intranet managers, he continued.
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Danger of Overreliance
Pope flags an issue that is already inherent in using generative AI for content generation, namely the lack of human oversight. "There is a risk with retiring inactive pages automatically that we risk removing something without properly considering the impact,” said Pope. "The automatic design of pages also worries me a little if we over-rely on this, rather than properly considering our audience for important pages.”
Need to Still Handle Information Architecture Debt
While the agent can help establish content governance, ultimately, it is still susceptible to the pitfalls of low-value content which can lead to inaccurate or misleading responses, continued Mepham. "Garbage in / garbage out will still be an issue — as the knowledge agent creates an explicit metadata and structure from the structure and content that is implicitly in the documents,” he said. Organizations may still have to face their technical information architecture debt before they can get full value from the agent, he suggested.
Uncertainties With Cost
One other issue was flagged by ClearPeople’s Gabriel Karawani in an in-depth post about how the agent may actually support KM in the enterprise. He flagged that the autofill processing of metadata — potentially one of the valuable capabilities of the agent — may come at an additional cost based on a pay-as-you-go model, which could be difficult to predict and control.
Areas to Test Knowledge Agent's Capabilities
With the SharePoint Knowledge Agent slated to become generally available early next year, what should SharePoint teams be doing now? The first obvious step is to try it out.
“My first recommendation is to try the preview,” advised Hanley. “You can run a very simple PowerShell script and apply it to the entire tenant or just one site.”
Pope also said teams should be actively testing the agent now, for example creating a few test scenarios to see how accurately the agent classifies data.
Digital workplace teams also need to think about how to train and support content owners using the Knowledge Agent, said Mepham. “Organizations need to be thoughtful about its introduction, being clear on the on the risks and limitations and guiding site owners through a structured and well supported process to get the best out of the agent’s abilities.”
Making a Difference to SharePoint Content Governance
SharePoint Knowledge Agent may still evolve before becoming generally available. More testing, reactions and ideas will follow, but the early reaction has been positive.
Content governance is critical for the success of knowledge management, intranets and Copilot. SharePoint Knowledge Agent's automated governance features have the potential to make a real difference in an area that has always been difficult. While the agent clearly won't solve all content governance issues or ensure content has value overnight, it could certainly make those goals more achievable and increase the quality of Copilot output. And that will be welcomed by many.
Editor's Note: What else has Microsoft been up to?
- Inside Microsoft's New AI Era: MAI-1, Voice-First Workplaces and the End of OpenAI Dependence — Microsoft's MAI-1 and MAI-Voice-1 models mark a major shift in its enterprise AI strategy and is yet another move away from its OpenAI dependence.
- What Competitors and IT Leaders Should Take Away From Microsoft's Unbundling of Teams — Microsoft avoided EU antitrust fines by separating Teams from Office 365. Learn how this ruling impacts businesses, IT leaders and competitors.
- How Microsoft's People Skills Makes Skills Management Dynamic — Microsoft's People Skills will start rolling out during the company's Build conference. Here's where talent experts see it helping business leaders.
