Introduction
In November 2024, Microsoft launched SharePoint agents. SharePoint agents are AI assistants who are focused on answering questions and providing insights about specific topics or all content on a SharePoint site.
Each SharePoint site gets its own agent based on content on the site. In addition, you can create your own agents based on only the information you select on your SharePoint site.
What are Copilot Agents in SharePoint?
Each SharePoint site automatically gets its own agent. You can find this agent by clicking on the copilot icon that you will find on the upper right side of a SharePoint site.
If you don’t see this icon, it might be because you don’t have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. To access this agent on a SharePoint site, you must have this license. More on that later.
With the Microsoft 365 Copilot license in place, you can now use these SharePoint agents to work with content on that SharePoint site. You can now have a conversation with this agent about content on the site, ask questions related to content, summarize documents, get support for decisions, and so on.
Create your own SharePoint agents
If you have enough rights to edit content on a SharePoint site, typically this means that you are part of the Site Member group on the site, then you also have enough rights to create new or edit existing SharePoint agents. Note that this does not apply to the default agent that is available on each SharePoint site, this cannot be edited.
You can create a SharePoint agent from several places:
- Home page on a SharePoint site
- The toolbar in a document library
- The context menu on the selected file(s). (I didn’t find this at my place yet, but it will probably show up)
- Agent chat window
No matter where you create an agent, you can immediately use it or edit it.
When you choose to edit the agent, you can change elements such as name, icon, description, sources and behavior.
Under the “Behavior” tab, you can, among other things, give your agent a “personality”, i.e. what tone they should use when answering questions, you can also use this field to give instructions on how you want the answer formatted.
No matter how you create your agent, it will be stored on your SharePoint site as an .agent file. Where this file is stored depends on where you created it. If you create it from the homepage, it is stored in Site contents > Site Assets > Copilots.
If you create it from a document library, the file is stored in that document library.
You can share this agent with others just like you would any other file from SharePoint, or you can share the link in a Teams chat.
Security
- Agents automatically inherit rights and rules set up on SharePoint just like any other file.
- You must have enough rights on SharePoint to be able to create and edit documents in order to create and edit agents
- Agents follow all other rules on SharePoint, such as sensitivity labels and archive features
- SharePoint agent users can only access information they already have access to. If an agent has documents as a source that a user does not have access to, the user will not be able to access that information through the agent.
Requirements for SharePoint agents
As previously mentioned, you need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to use SharePoint agents. SharePoint agents will then automatically become available on all SharePoint sites.
An option for building agents on SharePoint would be Microsoft Copilot Studio licenses. You can then build your own agents with SharePoint content as a source.
More information
SharePoint agents – Microsoft Adoption
Customize Copilot and Create Agents | Microsoft Copilot Studio
Microsoft 365 Copilot features and subscribers | Microsoft 365