SharePoint Knowledge Agent: Should You Use It?
Preview
In this blog post, learn what the SharePoint Knowledge Agent actually does, where it adds value, and the governance risks you should consider before adopting it. You learn:
How it streamlines content organization through automated metadata suggestions and workflows
Why local columns create governance challenges that impact consistency, search, and retention
What you need in place for safe adoption—from sandbox testing to training and metadata controls
What is the SharePoint Knowledge Agent?
The SharePoint Knowledge Agent:
"enriches, organizes, and structures your content so Copilot and agents can drive real business impact, not just deliver answers."
The agent offers a range of features to help analyze, clean up, and curate your organization's content.
For example, when organizing content within a SharePoint document library, the knowledge agent can suggest helpful columns, such as recommending the addition of a "Last Reviewed" column, which makes it easier to track when content was last updated.
It can answer user questions about site information, assist with creating custom views to display the most relevant documents, and set up rules to automate tasks. The agent also scans for broken links and helps identify outdated SharePoint pages to keep these pages current so that everyone has access to the latest information.
The Knowledge Agent allows you to preview columns that AI recommends for documents in a library.
Additionally, the Knowledge Agent helps you build rules or workflows without having to know all the configuration steps. Using plain language instructions such as “When a new file is added, set the Review status column to "Needs review”, the agent builds out the workflow.
The Knowledge Agent can add rules to libraries using plain-language
All these capabilities support your team in managing content efficiently over the long term.
Check out this interactive demo from Microsoft to see more features in action.
Benefits for teams and organizations
The benefits of the SharePoint Knowledge Agent includes:
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There’s less manual effort with content management tasks as automated suggestions for columns, tagging, and workflow creation make it easier to maintain order in libraries. This improves the accuracy of metadata and simplifies the process of locating and sharing relevant content.
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By ensuring information is well-structured and up to date, the Knowledge Agent empowers employees to collaborate more effectively and make decisions. Integration with tools like Copilot unlocks deeper insights from organizational data, driving real business impact and supporting productivity across departments.
Governance challenges and dilemmas
A well-known dilemma in SharePoint is that its flexible design can complicate management tasks, when IT and governance teams require consistency. Features that empower users, like easy column and document library creation, often lead to uncontrolled growth and messy environments. Before you know it, there are twenty different “Status” fields across sites.
Why is that important?
The use of numerous local columns often leads to a cluttered back-end, resulting in many similar fields that site owners and developers must navigate. Local columns also complicate automated retention or records management, making these tasks considerably more challenging. When you want records to be automatically determined by factors like date fields or status columns, inconsistency makes it significantly harder to manage the process effectively.
The local columns vs. centralized governance dilemma
On our projects, we adhere to a policy where we rarely, if ever, create local columns for a library. Unless the document library is a one-off and we’re confident that the columns don’t need to be reused elsewhere, we create reusable shared columns that are part of the Content Type gallery.
From a Governance perspective there is a clear drawback with using the column and metadata creation aspects of the Knowledge Agent. The agent creates local columns, this has always been against the recommended best practices for an organization that wants to govern their metadata and taxonomies.
Local columns are difficult to manage at an enterprise level and at scale. What happens when the SharePoint Knowledge Agent has created similar columns across 50 sites? Will it update those columns when you need to make a change to the metadata? Will it check the existing sites to ensure the columns are consistent across multiple libraries and sites? Perhaps one day, but not today.
The Knowledge Agent exposes this user experience vs. governance dilemma more visibly: Microsoft built AI to help organize content, but it works within the existing broken model (local columns) rather than fixing the underlying problem (making governed content types easy and fast to use).
Risks of using the SharePoint Knowledge Agent
While the SharePoint Knowledge Agent can help organize and enrich your content, it introduces several governance and operational risks that organizations should carefully consider:
Proliferation of local columns: The Agent creates local columns in document libraries, which are difficult to manage at scale, as discussed above. Each column must be updated individually in every library, increasing administrative overhead and the risk of inconsistencies.
Inconsistent metadata and search results: Local columns can lead to inconsistent values and naming conventions. This fragmentation undermines search accuracy and classification, as Copilot and other agents may surface incomplete or conflicting information. Inconsistent metadata also complicates retention, records management, and compliance automation.
Information Architecture enforcement risks: The ease of creating columns locally makes it harder to encourage proper information architecture and controls. This undermines efforts to centralize metadata, taxonomies, and content types, which are essential for compliance and scalability.
Risks related to governance and oversight: The agent enables site owners and even members to more easily modify document libraries, which are tasks typically managed by administrators, business analysts, or information architects. This increased access can lead to unchecked growth, disorganization, and clutter within the environment. Moreover, without clear audit trails in the agent and methods to standardize columns across sites, maintaining effective oversight becomes challenging.
Recommendations for safe adoption
We advise some caution about rolling out the SharePoint Knowledge Agent without some strong thought, training and controls in place. A few mitigation strategies:
Prototype and test in a sandbox: Before broad rollout, use a controlled environment to prototype and test the Agent’s features. This helps identify governance gaps and operational risks early. You can also use this environment to prototype possible shared columns to create, or explore the best set of metadata to use with a set of documents.
Leverage shared columns and tagging: Where possible, use shared columns from the Content Type Gallery instead of local columns. Encourage the use of AI-features on columns (Autofill and tagging) that work with shared columns to maintain consistency.
Implement training and controls: Provide targeted training for site owners and content managers. Establish clear policies and controls for agent creation and metadata management.
“Trust but Verify” Approach: Adopt a governance model that balances user empowerment with automated oversight, ensuring that local changes can be reviewed and promoted to enterprise standards when appropriate. You may need a third-party tool or some large-scale scripting to identify whether users are creating local columns. Feel free to reach out if you’d like help tidying this up!
Monitor and audit agent activity: Regularly review agent usage, metadata changes, and site health. Use available reporting tools to track changes and ensure compliance.
Closing thoughts on the Knowledge Agent
The SharePoint Knowledge Agent offers significant potential when applied appropriately. Its emphasis on organizing metadata locally does create some challenges for companies that want to manage their content types and taxonomies in a centralized way. Still, it's good to see Microsoft advancing AI tools in content management. We look forward to seeing more enterprise-focused features in SharePoint that help with scaling up and automating compliance, as ongoing improvements are important for meeting regulatory requirements and supporting long-term growth.
Thinking about rolling out the Knowledge Agent?
Talk to our consultants about safe adoption and governance best practices.
