SharePoint Agents: Overview, Functionality, and Configuration
Please note that this feature is currently only available from SharePoint on the web.
What Are SharePoint Agents?
SharePoint agents are AI-powered assistants designed to help users quickly find information, summarize content, and support informed decision-making within SharePoint sites. These agents use natural language processing to deliver relevant, trusted responses based on the site's content. Agents enhance collaboration by allowing users to ask questions, summarize documents, and analyze content efficiently. They adhere to SharePoint permissions and security policies, ensuring that responses are based on the user's access level. Any agents you create will reside in the SharePoint site only and will only intake information from the files and folders where it has been created, along with other URLs and SharePoint sites you give it permission to.
What Do SharePoint Agents Do?
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Provide AI-Assisted Responses: Offer precise answers based on SharePoint site content.
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Summarize Documents: Extract key insights from site materials.
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Enhance Collaboration: Enable employees to ask questions and interact with site content efficiently.
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Streamline Information Discovery: Help users quickly locate essential data.
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Follow Permissions and Security Policies: Ensure responses are limited to authorized users.
How Are SharePoint Agents Configured?
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Prebuilt Agents: Every SharePoint site includes a ready-made agent that automatically scopes responses to the site's content.
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Custom Agents: Users with editing permissions can create custom-built agents tailored to specific tasks and expand their scope beyond a single site.
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Quick Setup: Agents can be enabled with a single click and configured to access select information.
How to create SharePoint Agents
Start by going to SharePoint on the web and selecting the site where you’d like to create the agent.
Once you are in the SharePoint site, navigate to the document library and find the folder where you’d like the Agent to reside and have its knowledge from. You’ll notice there are two different buttons that you can use to create an agent, both accomplish the same thing.
Selecting “Create an agent” will create an agent that resides in the location you’ve navigated to in the file hierarchy, and that agent is now immediately available to use as-is with default configuration for its behavior. To customize the agent (change the name of the agent, edit or add other files, folders or SharePoint sites) click the edit button on the agent creation prompt. You can also do this later by right clicking or selecting the menu button of the agent file and selecting edit.
Here are a examples of the agent customization options where you can update the name, icon and description for the agent, edit and add sources from other SharePoint sites, and adjust the behavior of the agents responses, as well as adding starter prompts.
Your agent is now ready to use and has been saved to the folder where you started the creation process:
Clicking the agent file will open the agent for use:
In this example, the agent is in a folder with one large PDF that I'd like the agent to analyze, so a prompt is given asking for a detailed overview of the program that the document is about:
Depending on how much information is in the referenced file or folder, or how deep the agent will have to search if it is located at the top of a file hierarchy, it may take a few seconds to begin generating a response. Remember, the agent only knows its base programming, and the information within the SharePoint folder where it resides, so it has to learn and index the contents. This may provide slower results that you would experience with an AI assistant using a web search, but the results are private, secure, and specific to the SharePoint files it is referencing.
After just a few seconds, the response is generated, along with the source(s) the answer was generated from.
For additional information, please refer to this FAQ article from Microsoft: Frequently asked questions about Copilot in SharePoint - Microsoft Support
This article contains information directly from Microsoft Support and Microsoft Copilot was used in the creation of this document.