SharePoint Knowledge Agent Deep Dive — How It Works, Setup, and Best Practices

Microsoft just released one of the most important AI updates for SharePoint — the Knowledge Agent. In this deep dive, you’ll learn what it does, how to turn it on or off, and how it helps you improve your SharePoint sites with AI-powered insights, broken-link detection, and automatic metadata creation.

I’ll show you everything from setup using PowerShell to best practices and permissions — plus a live demo of how it helps site owners and editors keep content fresh and Copilot-ready.

Video Summary

Metadata finally matters! Starting October 2025, Copilot in SharePoint uses metadata to deliver better results—and the Knowledge Agent can auto-tag your documents using AI, no manual effort needed.

Site owners get superpowers. With tools like Improve This Site, you can retire outdated pages, fix broken links, and identify content gaps based on user searches—making your site cleaner and more useful.

Autofill columns are magic. The agent scans your documents and suggests metadata like invoice numbers, client names, and due dates. You can tweak prompts, preview results, and even build views and rules based on that data.

Setup is PowerShell-only (for now). Admins need to enable the Knowledge Agent via PowerShell, with site-specific activation coming on November 1st. So yes, go treat your SharePoint admin to a coffee!

It’s additive, not disruptive. The Knowledge Agent doesn’t replace existing SharePoint agents—it enhances them. And while it’s still evolving, it’s already a huge leap forward for organizing content and boosting Copilot ROI.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

We all know that everything Microsoft focuses on these days seems to be Copilot. But behind the scenes, Microsoft just released one amazing functionality that is going to change the way you use SharePoint, and that is the Knowledge Agent in SharePoint. This is part of quite a few agents that Microsoft has released throughout Teams, in M365 Copilot Chat, in Viva Communities. So there are quite a few agents that Microsoft has been working on, but the one that has the most impact is the Knowledge Agent in SharePoint.

Why do I say that it has the biggest impact? Starting in October 2025, Microsoft will finally use metadata in your libraries for Copilot results. And now, I’m sure you have probably been hearing it forever that adding metadata to your files is a good practice, whether it’s for search or simply when looking at the library to make sure that you quickly find the document you’re looking for. But what if I tell you that the Knowledge Agent can make sure that you use AI to add metadata to your document? So no action required on your part, and that will make Copilot and your SharePoint experience better.

In this video, we are first going to learn what the Knowledge Agent is. I’ve seen so many things on LinkedIn, so many versions. I’ve been using it since the private preview. So it’s something that I’ve been working with for a while. So I really want to make sure we cover everything it does properly. We are going to cover how to turn it on or off, and we’re going to cover some of the upcoming features we have for governance. And then I’ll share some best practices and a few links and additional resources I want you to know about.

Let’s start with what the Knowledge Agent is in SharePoint. And to really better help you understand the Knowledge Agent in SharePoint, let me take a step back to before September 2025. So, not that far ago, if you had an M365 Copilot license or every tenant that had at least one Copilot license, every SharePoint site had a built-in agent that came with the site. Not something we could turn off. We couldn’t delete. We couldn’t manage it. And it was grounded on all of the content of the website. So that was there by default, and you could access the agent using the top bar with the Copilot logo.

But now Microsoft has introduced the Knowledge Agent in SharePoint. This is in addition to the default agent that’s there on the SharePoint site. So that agent is still there. We now have a bunch of additional tools that come with it that make it even more valuable. We have some tools for site owners, such as “Improve This Site,” which allows you to find outdated pages, find content gaps, and find broken links in your site, as well as a few library tools such as “Organize This Library,” “Create Rules,” and “Create New Views.”

Okay, that’s enough slides. Let’s go to the demo and check this out. So right here, I have just a SharePoint site here that I set up—Knowledge Agent Demo—and you access the Knowledge Agent by going to the bottom right. So you see, you have that floating SharePoint logo. That’s when you open the Knowledge Agent. Depending on what permissions you have, you’ll see different options. You see right now I’m a site owner, so I can summarize this page, ask a question. Because I’m a site owner, I see “Improve This Site.” I’m the only one who can see it. We’ll cover the permissions a bit later, but just so you know, the options you see will depend on your permissions.

So I’ll go and improve this site. And here I have, first of all, retired inactive pages. You know what? On this site over here, this is a brand new site, so I don’t have any. Let me go to another site that I have here. Go to “Improve This Site,” and you see this one here. I have five inactive pages. And by the way, if ever you can go change the inactivity time because inactive doesn’t mean the same thing for every single company. It can be 3 months, 6 months, all the way up to 36 months.

Now, what does retiring a page do? Retiring a page will deprioritize it from search results, Copilot, and agents, and it will add a banner notifying visitors that the content isn’t being maintained. You know what? Let me retire this page over here that I had. Great. And let me go to all my pages now so we can see it in action. Let me go to the site’s contents here. Let me go to my site pages. And I think it was—are we gonna see it? There we go. “Who We Are.” This is the page. You see, I have this banner that got added: “This page is not being maintained. The content may be out of date.” So this is one of the things it does for the user, but it also deprioritizes it from search and Copilot.

So, of course, it’s a good idea as a site owner to take a look at those pages and retire them if you think they’re not needed anymore. You can also, if ever you don’t want to deal with that today, snooze that suggestion for two weeks, or you can also never show it again for a specific page. It’s really up to you.

So that’s the retiring inactive pages. And now, let me go back to my Knowledge Agent demo here. I also have “Find Content Gaps.” Now, this one I don’t have anything in here, but what it does is it uses AI to analyze your search queries, and it will say, “Hey Vlad, there are 30 people that searched for your vacation policy on this site, but they couldn’t find anything.” That’s maybe some content you should create. So it’s really there to help you find what people are searching for on your website that they are not finding.

So that’s that. And then we have the broken links. So you see, here this link is not working. I can go, and you see, I can see where this link is. This is a simple page. You see it redirects to a 404 not found, and it found it in the quick link. So let me go back here to “Improve This Site.” And what I can do if I want, I can redirect it. So you can either redirect it by navigating to—for example, say I can navigate to a page, or I can go type a link. But it’s something interesting with the link. So let’s say I want to redirect it to vladalkst.com. Let’s say I go this—you see, I can only link it to files in my own organization. So I cannot link it to something external, even if it was an external link before. So just something to be aware.

Let me try and link it just to the homepage of my SharePoint site here. And let me go find a file there so it doesn’t complain anymore here. Let’s go to policies. Let’s copy the link here. Let’s go “Only people with existing access.” Let’s do this the right way, of course. Let’s type it in here. And you can only link to a page as well, so not a file. So let’s go here now. Let’s go to a page over here. Let’s type it in. And there we go. Now it works.

So a big limitation here—even if it’s an external link—we can only link to an internal link of type page. I do wish we could link to whatever, to be honest, and not only to a page, but that’s what Microsoft allows us to do. If you ever want to see your redirects, you can go on the three dots over here and click on “Show Redirected Links.” And you can see here the original URL and the destination URL over here.

Now I am curious about something. Let’s try to go to vladoxtech.sharepoint.com. Well, not that SharePoint. Let me try to see if I can hack it here and just save it here in the list. And no, it doesn’t let me. It still does the check. So we cannot hack it to go from the back end in order to go past that. So you are limited to redirecting to another page inside your tenant.

Now, something else I want to tell you—and I want to be completely honest with you on this. You see, this is the simple page it found. However, you see, I have this link here called “Just a Broken Link,” which is a 404. I have “Learn About a Team Site,” which brings me to another external site, which is another 404. I have a super broken link here, and I have a few others throughout the page here—even one that goes to SharePoint that is broken—and the Knowledge Agent was not able to find them.

So again, just want to be honest here. I think it’s a great start. I think it still has a lot of work to do to catch up to some of the vendors in this space that have been doing broken links forever. So just something to consider. It’s still, of course, way better than nothing, but don’t count on it just yet to find 100% of the broken links in your SharePoint tenant.

Okay, so we talked about “Improve This Site.” We can also summarize this page, which will basically use the default SharePoint agent that comes with every site. However, it’s able to be grounded just on the specific page we’re navigating, which is kind of cool. Of course, right now, I don’t have much in here, so it doesn’t give me much. But something that is cool is that from the Knowledge Agent, we can really ground it in the page we are navigating, which we weren’t really able to do before. And I can also ask a question, and when I ask a question, it just opens the default SharePoint agent, where I can ask any question about the content inside the site.

But now let’s go over to the documents. And you know what I’m going to do is let me go over and I’m going to go and drag and drop some invoices here. This way, I have some content in this document library. Let me just grab a bunch of them here so we have a bit of content. It’s important to have content because what I want to show you now is the ability to organize this library. Now, I know that a lot of you, if you start from a clean library, you’re going to make an effort to make it clean, organized from the start. But sometimes we just inherit libraries that are not set up properly. And nobody wants to go through old files, things like that, to fix it. And this is where “Organize This Library” comes in.

What I can do first of all is I can select a document here, and well, it looks like automatically what it did is it went and generated some columns for me. Let me do it again. I feel like it skipped a step that I wanted to show you. So let me go here, “Organize This Library.” And by default, you see it does here, “Organizing Your Content.” So, what this will do, which is really, really cool, it will look at the content you have in your library, and it will always suggest three columns that you can add. You see, I had invoices, so it gave me an invoice number, invoice total amount, and invoice due date. This uses autofill columns.

If ever I want to change the prompt, you see, I see the prompt over here. Let’s look for the invoice number. You see, they all have a zero at the start. I don’t like that. I can go edit, go to the prompt here, and here it says, “Format as a string with leading zeros if present.” I will say, “Always remove leading zero.” So whatever it suggests, you don’t have to take it as is. And if I want to, I can select one or two files here, for example, and then preview the results just on those two files. And you see it gave me the invoice number, but without the leading zero. So I can modify it. I’m starting to have metadata on my library.

I can continue asking it things. I can continue to ask it, for example, “Add a column for the client name.” So I now have this agent that can work with autofill columns. You see, it did a client name column. The autofill prompt is “Extract the name of the client associated with each document,” and it found the client names for me. That is pretty amazing. I can also, if I select some files over here, you see I can go and add a column manually or let’s say, you know what, I love that job it’s been doing. I want it to find me three more columns. And as long as you press that button, it will keep adding three more columns for you.

So now, what did it add? Let’s go towards the end here. Did it add any three new ones here? I’ll zoom out a bit. Not yet. You know what? Let me just unselect all of them. And I want to see more column ideas. Come on, give me more ideas. Looks like this time it decided not to work. It works most of the time. Worst case, we can always save it and then come back to it. Usually, it just adds three more ideas. You saw because we did it, it actually overwrote our invoice number prompt that we had, unfortunately.

But let me go back to “Organize This Library,” and hopefully soon we might have to leave it doing its thing. And then we’re going to see the different things it added. Why are you doing this to me? Once you go back to the main library, you’ll notice that autofill has started, and you can see the progress over here. What I’m going to do now is I’ll just pause it for a few seconds just to get the metadata in there before I show you some of the other features.

There we go. It got my metadata. That’s amazing. Now, what I can do if I want to is, instead of “Organize This Library,” I can ask my agent to create a new view. So I can do, for example, “View files created by specific person,” “Show recently updated files first,” or I can also ask—let’s see if this works, I haven’t tested it yet—“Group files by client name.” Let’s see if it’s able to do a grouping for me. I love that it adds that description in there: “You’d like to organize your files by client name. I can help you by creating a column, a client name,” which I already had. I didn’t need that new column.

So I do wish that it didn’t need to do that for me. I did wish that it recognized my client name column that I had, but it created a new one and created the view. So that worked. I can save that to a new view, for example, instead. So it’s able to modify views. I do wish that—it’s funny that it did it on the client name over here. So it did it in my column. However, it still added this “Client Name 1” column, but it’s not using it inside of the grouping, which is, well, it’s not the best thing.

Let me go edit. I do not need this column. Let’s delete it. And now we’re back to what I wanted originally. I wanted to have a view grouped by client name. So that worked as well. And I can also set up rules. So, for example, I can send a notification when content changes, when a new file is added, set a status to “Needs Review,” copy files between folders, and move files to another location. This is really just an agent for that rule agent in SharePoint.

Let me try something more difficult. “Send a notification to vladvadtalksteck.com when a new invoice is added with the client name Fabricam.” Let’s see if it’s able to do something a bit more complicated like tha,t because that’s the kind of, you know, that’s the kind of rules that we would use. And there we go. “When a new file is added, if the value of the client name is Fabricam, send an email to me.” And that worked awesome. That is really great. I’m super happy that that worked.

I’ll cancel it for now because I don’t want to get spammed for this test one, but it did work perfectly. So we have looked at “Organize This Library,” “Set Up Rules,” “Create a New View,” and if you click on “See More Agents,” this will bring you to the SharePoint agent list that you are used to. So you can see there are the agents on this site, or some other agents from other sites that you have access to.

If we summarize what the Knowledge Agent in SharePoint is, it’s your entry point for a bunch of different tools. Whether you are a site reader, you’re going to have “Summarize This Page” and “Ask a Question.” If you’re a site owner, you can use “Improve This Site.” And if you’re a site editor, you can automatically scan documents and create metadata on them just using AI. So in just five minutes, your libraries can be organized, you can create views, and you can create rules. That is pretty awesome. And we don’t lose any of the previous functionality that we had. All our agents that we had before—all the SharePoint agents—they are still there. So this doesn’t take away anything; it just adds a bunch of awesome functionality.

Now, how do we turn it on? Well, you need to buy a drink of your choice for your favorite SharePoint admin because this is PowerShell only. So, first thing—and feel free to send this to your SharePoint admin, by the way, so they can learn about it as well—and if you like the content so far, make sure you subscribe to the channel. This way, you get notified when I release new courses such as this one.

But the first thing you’ll need to do is update your SharePoint module because Microsoft only gave us the parameters in the latest PowerShell module. If not, you’re going to get an error like this: “I cannot find a parameter with the Knowledge Agent scope inside.” Then, again, you need to use PowerShell. You need to connect to your SharePoint Online tenant. If you want to see the current configuration, you can run the command on the screen right now: Get-SPOTenant and select the KnowledgeAgentScope and KnowledgeAgentSelectedSiteList.

If you want to enable it on all sites, you can do Set-SPOTenant so and set the KnowledgeAgentScope parameter to “AllSites.” So that will enable it on all the different sites in your tenant. If there are some sites that you want to exclude, you can run the Set-SPOTenant command and set the KnowledgeAgentScope to “ExcludeSelectedSites” and then give it a list of sites you want to exclude.

Now I know what you admins are thinking because I was thinking the same thing: “Vlad, I just want to turn it on on two or three sites so we can run a proof of concept and test things internally.” That’s only coming on November 1st. That’s what Microsoft said. So, starting November 1st, we’re going to be able to enable it in specific sites only rather than an exclude list. If you want to wait until then, you can wait another month until November 1st and only start using it then, because I know this is something that many administrators need before they turn on a brand-new feature like this one.

Now, let me talk about a few best practices and some thoughts I have. I’ll be honest—everything in the Knowledge Agent that we have makes it easier to improve your user experience in SharePoint. Whether it’s search, libraries, views, things like that, we’re going to have no more broken links on stale pages. You’re going to increase ROI on your Copilot deployment with metadata because Copilot is finally going to care about metadata.

And something else I want to say is that Microsoft always starts with an opt-in model in preview, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets turned on by default in the future. So start testing it today. Again, once it goes GA, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just on for everybody.

Now, who can use this agent? Probably I should have started with that. But to use this feature, users must have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license assigned to them and be site owners or members to see that agent button. Something that is cool is that all the usage you do with “Organize This Library,” with everything, is included with Microsoft 365 Copilot—at least during the preview. That’s what Microsoft said. So now’s the time to use it. Have fun with it, because we don’t know what licensing will be once it’s in general availability.

Now let’s talk a bit about permissions. Let me go to the support site over here. So, who should use this Knowledge Agent? Site managers, content managers, content creators, and content consumers. What I want to talk about—so you see here, content consumers are site owners, site members, and site visitors. So everybody—they can ask a question on pages, summarize this page, and see more agents. They can ask a question on a document library, and they can also make the list that you see over here on specific files.

A site manager is a site member. So people with edit permissions, site owners, and site collection admins—they can improve this site. So they’re going to have the ability to go and see the broken links, see the stale content, things like that. Content creators are site members. They can also create a page. And if you’re a content manager—so if you’re a site member with manage list permissions—you can organize this library, set up rules, create a new view, as well as do it either on the full document library or only on certain files.

Other things that are important: you won’t see the Knowledge Agent skills or the floating button on SharePoint lists. We all know that Microsoft didn’t really implement Copilot stuff or agent stuff yet. They’re really working on it. So this doesn’t work there. You won’t see it on the SharePoint homepage, on Viva Connections, or if you’re browsing a SharePoint site within Microsoft Teams.

I’ll make sure to include this support site in the description below. And the other resource that I wanted you to see—especially if you’re a dev—another MVP, Bill Cameron, an amazing developer, created a list of what are the hidden APIs that this Knowledge Agent uses. So if you want to see how it works in the back end, how you can do it, maybe do the same things through code—for example, how you can see the “Fix Broken Links” functionality and things like that—you have a list here of old APIs, sample responses, things like that. And this can be really useful, especially if you want to use code or you already have an application and you want to add those features to it. This can be very, very interesting.

Now that we have covered the Knowledge Agent, for me, one of the most valuable things that is included is the ability to organize the library and use autofill columns. So on the screen right now, you’re going to see a link to a video that deep dives into autofill columns. And if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below. It’s going to be my pleasure to answer. But for now, I’ll see you in the next video.