You bought the Copilot licenses. Your team is using it. But the results feel underwhelming. Vague answers, irrelevant suggestions, responses that miss the point.
Here’s the truth: Copilot doesn’t filter out the mess. It reasons over everything in your SharePoint environment, including the outdated pages from 2021 nobody’s touched since, the document libraries full of files named “FINAL v2 this is the actual final”, the broken links, the content nobody can find because the metadata was never set up properly.
It’s a case of garbage in, garbage out, just faster.
The good news: there’s a tool already included in your Copilot license that addresses exactly this problem. It’s called the “Knowledge Agent” and most organizations that have Copilot don’t even know it exists.
Microsoft is already moving towards calling it AI in SharePoint, which is a more accurate description of what it does. For now, both names refer to the same capability, and it’s one of the most practical quick wins available to IT teams right now.
Meet the FAB button
Once the Knowledge Agent is enabled, a small icon appears in the bottom right corner of your SharePoint sites. This is the FAB, floating action button, and it’s your entry point into everything the Knowledge Agent can do.
Click it and you get a menu of actions. Not suggestions. Nor chat responses. Actions the agent can take on your behalf, right inside your SharePoint environment.
The menu is context-aware: it adapts depending on where you are and what role you have, surfacing the most relevant options for your current location.
Two of our favorites are “Improve This Site” and “Organize This Library” and between them, they cover most of the data hygiene problems that are quietly undermining your Copilot experience today.
Favorite #1: Improve This Site
“Improve This Site” runs an audit of your SharePoint content and surfaces three categories of problems: low-activity pages that should be retired, broken links, and content gaps — places where users are searching for something and coming up empty.
The retirement feature is worth noting. When the Knowledge Agent retires a page, it doesn’t delete it. It removes it from search results and, critically, from Copilot’s knowledge sources. Your 2019 open enrollment announcement stops being something Copilot reasons over. Your employees stop getting stale information when they ask a straightforward question. The page still exists on the site if you ever need it; it’s just no longer part of the active knowledge base.
Content owners can run this process regularly. It takes minutes. The compounding effect on Copilot’s accuracy is significant.
Favorite #2: Organize This Library*
Navigate to any document library, open the FAB button, and select “Organize This Library.” This is where things get genuinely impressive.
The agent reads the actual file contents, not just the names, but the contents, and reasons over what structure would help.
On a project site managing a storage assessment, for example, it might suggest columns for content area, recommended actions, and lifecycle risk. You choose what to keep; the agent populates the columns and metadata across the entire library.
"What I love about the Knowledge Agent is the scale. You can take a document library of thousands of files, apply your naming convention, extract metadata, retire stale content, all of it in minutes. That used to take a specialist engagement or a very patient team member. Now it's just the FAB button."
Why does this matter for Copilot?
Because metadata is how Copilot finds the right answer quickly and accurately. Instead of scanning through hundreds of unstructured documents to answer a question, it’s working with labeled, organized data. The difference in response quality is measurable.
It also changes what you can ask. “Show me all the project reports where the recommended action is still pending” becomes a real query, not a hope, because the relevant metadata has already been extracted and is ready to filter against.
From the same menu, the agent can also build AI-generated views that sort, filter, and group documents based on that metadata — so your team can look at the same library through multiple lenses without doing any manual configuration. And if you want to automate what happens next, you can set up rules in plain language: describe the trigger and the action, and the agent builds the workflow for you.
The document management tools go further still. The Knowledge Agent can enforce your file naming convention — point it at a library, give it a link to your naming policy, and it will review and propose renamed versions of files that don’t comply. It can even reason over file contents to rename files that were never given sensible names in the first place. At scale, across a library of thousands of files, that’s a governance win that would previously have required support from a technology specialist.
The case for getting your house in order
The Copilot license is a line item someone is watching. If it isn’t delivering, that conversation is coming.
AI experiences in SharePoint (the Knowledge Agent) is the answer to that conversation. When outdated content is retired, libraries are properly labeled, and file naming is consistent, Copilot performs best. That’s the proof of ROI. And it’s the difference between an organization that got value from its investment and one that lets the license lapse.
The FAB button is already there. It just needs to be turned on.
How to enable Knowledge Agent in your SharePoint environment
Enabling the Knowledge Agent is an IT admin task, but a straightforward one. Here’s what’s required.
Prerequisites
- An active Microsoft 365 Copilot license for each user who will access the feature
- A Global Administrator or SharePoint Administrator role to complete the setup
- Opt-in to AI in SharePoint Public Preview via PowerShell. The latest version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell (version 16.0.26615.12013 or later)
Optional but recommended
Enable Anthropic as an AI sub-processor in the Microsoft Admin Center. The Knowledge Agent will work without this step, but enabling it gives you access to the full advanced reasoning capabilities. If Anthropic isn’t enabled, the feature falls back to an alternative model and some capabilities may vary.
Enabling via PowerShell
The Knowledge Agent is off by default across all tenants. Your SharePoint admin enables it by setting the scope using PowerShell. There are three options: turn it on across all sites, enable it only on a defined list of sites, or enable it everywhere except a defined list of exclusions. For most organizations starting out, enabling it on a select group of high-value sites first is a sensible approach — it lets you test and build confidence before rolling out more broadly.
Full step-by-step setup instructions are available on Microsoft Learn.
*Please note: while the Knowledge Agent is included with your Microsoft 365 Copilot license at no additional cost, the autofill columns processing within “Organize This Library” operates on a separate pay-as-you-go metered model. Get in touch with Cloudwell for guidance on what this means for your organization before you get started.