SharePoint Agents: Enhancing Your Microsoft 365 Copilot Experience

Intro

If you use Microsoft 365 Copilot, you'll likely agree that one of its key benefits is Microsoft Graph grounding, which enables you to leverage organizational data. In simpler terms, Copilot can use data from EXO mailboxes, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online (SPO) sites, or Teams for AI responses. This is fantastic, but sometimes the results might not be as accurate as expected.

Let's consider an example: a newly hired employee wants to use Copilot to get information about company benefits. However, one of their teammates downloaded a copy of the original HR document five years ago to their team's SPO site. As a result, when the new employee asks Copilot about company benefits, it might use that outdated document instead of the authoritative one. This is where agents capable of focusing on specific and authoritative content come into play.

There are several types of agents – overview is accessible here – but in this article, I'll describe the simplest one: the SharePoint Online (SPO) Agent.

The SPO agent is a super simple AI experience embedded in SPO sites, requiring no admin or developer assistance. You can find the SPO agent in the upper right corner of the site.

One site agent is always created automatically. This auto-created agent can't be modified, but its value lies in its design, which focuses on information within the given site. In other words, if a newly onboarded user uses the SPO agent on the HR site to ask about company benefits, it will only search for information within that site, likely improving the quality of the results. This can also be true for many other scenarios, such as questions about specific team or project documentation.

It is also possible to create new SPO agents with one these two options:

These created agents can be edited and deleted. They can also be shared with teammates, and site owners can approve agents for a given site, enabling all site visitors can use them directly within the site experience.

You might be wondering how these agents operation relates with SPO permissions - I tried to summarize it below:

Use case

Let’s use a simple example to demonstrate SPO agent value: assume we have contract documents, and we would like to extract contract parties and their postal addresses from the contracts and present it in table format.

Try that with Copilot BizChat

First, we can try fulfil the request in Copilot BizChat – the result is shown below:

It is all right, but what if I wanted to use it repeatedly and share this prompt easily with other users that have access to the given SPO site?

Try that in SPO agents

Let’s now try to achieve the same with SharePoint agents.

Here is definition of a contract – I modified the instructions and one of the starter prompts:

Here are the complete instructions:

**Task:** Provide accurate information about the content in the selected files.
**Instructions:**
1. Use only the information from the selected file with high precision.
2. Reply in a formal tone.
3. If the requested information is not found, respond with: "NotFound".        

and here is the prompt:

**Task:** Extract the names and addresses of the parties from the selected contracts and present them in a table format.  
**Instructions:** 
1. Create a table with two columns: one for each party. 
2. In the first line of the table, fill parties company names. 
3. Ensure that each part of the address (street, city, state, country) is listed on a separate row within the table.        

Now I can just select file and click on the starter prompt and the result is delivered.

No prompt crafting or file finding are needed in BizChat – we simply reuse what works. And after the site owner approves this agent, any site user can use it.

This is a good example of an SPO agent benefit – one team/project member defines rules for an agent and any user in given site can very simply reuse it.

Try this automatically

To finish the story: what if we want to extract certain information from an uploaded document automatically with minimal effort? Let's try it with Syntex Autofill column.

Create a new column in SPO and select Autofill (this assumes that Syntex is enabled in tenant).

I can now define the prompt to extract information I want:

And this is how it looks after processing data for multiple documents:

Note that Syntex is not part of Microsoft 365 Copilot usage. It is billed separately via Azure subscription.

In this blog I tried to cover some basic features of SharePoint agents and how it cover basic use case.

If you have more than 50 Microsoft 365 Copilot paid licenses in your tenant you can use SPO agents promo.

Disclaimer

"The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of Microsoft Corporation. Although the author is an employee of Microsoft, this blog is intended to convey personal statements and is not in any way associated with or endorsed by Microsoft Corporation. While the information provided herein is shared with the best intentions, the author does not guarantee its absolute correctness. Readers are advised to exercise their own judgment and conduct thorough testing before applying any information to a production environment. The author disclaims any responsibility for any consequences resulting from the use of the information provided in this blog."