Knowledge Agent: Your SharePoint just hired a librarian that never sleeps

Your SharePoint environment could be costing your business more than you think. Not in licensing fees, but in lost productivity, duplicated work, and untapped knowledge; some of your most valuable information is technically stored but practically invisible. Microsoft’s Knowledge Agent changes that. It’s the first persistent AI designed to continuously organise, tag, and maintain your SharePoint content. It helps make your environment Copilot-ready and primed for future business automation.

Think of it as hiring a dedicated librarian who never sleeps – a digital steward ensuring your content estate remains structured, compliant, and accessible across departments.

For business and IT leaders, this release marks a turning point. With Knowledge Agent, SharePoint is altered. Once a static, manually governed document repository, SharePoint is now an intelligent platform that reduces operational friction, enhances workplace productivity, and prepares your data for use with Copilot.

In this article

1. What Knowledge Agent is
2. What problems it solves
3. What Knowledge Agent actually does
4. Expert insights from our team
   

What is Knowledge Agent and why has Microsoft built it?

In short, Microsoft’s Knowledge Agent is an AI-powered curator designed to make SharePoint intelligent as well as organised. Traditional governance models often rely on users to maintain SharePoint's structure: tagging documents, archiving old content, and managing ownership manually. Over time – as you may have experienced first-hand – this approach is hard to sustain. As content volumes and digital collaboration expand, the workload can becomes unmanageable, leading to inefficiency, data duplication and sprawl, and inconsistent policy compliance.

Microsoft built Knowledge Agent to change that dynamic by enabling Copilot to continuously classify, enrich, and manage content behind the scenes. For IT leaders, this represents a fundamental shift from reactive to proactive information management. Organisations can now rely on automation to keep content and storage healthy from the moment an asset is created.

The benefits reach far beyond IT operations:

• Productivity gains: Less time searching for documents, more time applying insights
• Business automation: Continuous content governance that runs without user input
• Copilot-readiness: Clean, structured data that directly enhances Copilot accuracy and reliability
• Resilience: Reduced risk of data decay, shadow systems, and compliance gaps

The outcome: a knowledge environment that doesn’t just store information, but actively works for the business, powering decisions, collaboration, and AI-driven innovation.

The problem everyone’s talking about

Has your organisation's SharePoint environment become a digital landfill, full of content that's outdated and lacking good metadata and ownership? Searches don't return what you need and nobody knows which 'Final_Version_v3_ACTUALLY_FINAL.docx' to trust. The intranet you invested in has quietly degraded into a waste basket filled with information that's not seen, used, or governed.

Traditional SharePoint governance relied on user discipline: tag your documents properly, archive old content, maintain site ownership, follow naming conventions. Predictably, humans find this kind of repetitive, itemised work challenging. Most employees don't have the time or incentive to be meticulous digital librarians whilst performing their work.

Everyone across the business feels this pain – you and the rest of the C-suite, team leaders, their teams, and even external parties – making Knowledge Agent ripe for widespread adoption. Microsoft's Knowledge Agent inverts the broken model organisations have been using for years.

What Knowledge Agent actually does

Copilot helps users interact with, and extract value from, information. Knowledge Agent helps you govern it – ensuring your data remains clean, structured, and compliant long-term. Operating quietly in the background, it automates the kind of work that has traditionally relied on human diligence and time - keeping SharePoint usable, trustworthy, and ready for intelligent search and automation.

Core capabilities and features:

• Automatic metadata generation and tagging: The AI analyses document content and applies relevant tags automatically, ensuring that every file is categorised consistently and accurately.
• Intelligent content summarisation: Instead of opening long documents, users can instantly request summaries or key points, improving productivity across departments.
• Conversational search with Copilot integration: Each SharePoint site now features a Copilot icon in the lower-right corner, enabling natural-language questions with responses grounded in site-specific content.
• Proactive identification of stale and orphaned content: The agent flags outdated files, inactive sites, or documents that breach governance policies, helping teams maintain compliance effortlessly.
• Automated workflows via ‘site skills’: Knowledge Agent triggers contextual actions such as archiving inactive content, notifying owners about compliance risks, or suggesting metadata improvements.

Think of it as hiring a dedicated librarian for every SharePoint site – one that never stops.

The expert perspective: Chris Freeman

Chris Freeman, Digital Workplace Consultant here at Ultima, explains the opportunity that Knowledge Agent presents in more detail:

‘For two decades, SharePoint’s success relied heavily on user discipline – file things properly, maintain them consistently, remember to clean up. The problem was never the technology; it was the human dependency. Even the most mature organisations struggled to sustain governance because it required constant manual effort.

‘Knowledge Agent changes that equation entirely. It recognises that user-driven governance simply doesn’t scale – and instead automates what should have been automated from the start. Unlike traditional Copilot tools that respond to prompts and then reset, the Knowledge Agent is persistent. It continuously monitors your content estate, learning patterns and maintaining structure – whether anyone is watching or not.

‘Think of it like the difference between having a personal assistant who helps when you ask, versus a facilities manager who quietly keeps the building running 24/7. The Knowledge Agent keeps your digital workplace in order automatically. ‘The strategic value is significant. When your SharePoint content is clean, tagged, and enriched with metadata, Copilot becomes dramatically more effective. Responses are faster, more accurate, and grounded in relevant data. High-quality content leads to high-quality Copilot outcomes. When your knowledge base is structured, your AI becomes more intelligent - and the ROI on your Copilot investment increases exponentially.

A new era for content management

Microsoft’s Knowledge Agent represents a major shift in how organisations manage and extract value from their SharePoint environments. Rather than relying on users to manually tag, archive, and govern content, it introduces continuous, AI-driven curation that keeps data clean, structured, and Copilot-ready. For business leaders, this means reduced operational friction, improved productivity, and a stronger foundation for automation and compliance. With Knowledge Agent, SharePoint evolves from a static document repository into a living, intelligent system that maintains itself, safeguards data integrity, and maximises the return on your investment in Microsoft’s AI ecosystem.