Balancing innovation and control: How Atlas powers enterprise-wide Knowledge Agent adoption

The launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot Knowledge Agent in SharePoint marks an important shift in how organizations manage information at scale. By automatically suggesting metadata and enabling Autofill across multiple column types, it promises to reduce manual effort, improve consistency, and surface insights that might otherwise remain hidden in documents and libraries.

Yet alongside these benefits come real risks. Without governance, Autofill columns can proliferate across sites and libraries, creating duplication, inconsistent metadata, compliance concerns, and unpredictable costs. In effect, enterprises risk building new metadata silos on top of existing content silos. Early adopters have already highlighted these challenges, particularly in large and complex environments.

For CIOs, Chief Knowledge Officers, and enterprise architects, the challenge is clear: how to capture the productivity gains of the Knowledge Agent while ensuring control, compliance, and cost predictability.

This article explores how Atlas provides the enterprise framework to achieve exactly that - enabling Autofill columns to be deployed responsibly and consistently - as part of a broader strategy for governance, knowledge management, and innovation at scale.

The enterprise-scale challenge

For smaller teams, adopting Knowledge Agent features can be straightforward. Use it to organise a handful of sites, and a few columns, and everyone feels the benefit. But the scenario looks very different in an enterprise environment with:

• Thousands of sites and libraries.
• Millions of documents, each with their own metadata.
• Multiple business units, each with their own priorities and taxonomies.

At this scale, uncontrolled Autofill columns can create metadata chaos. Instead of driving consistency, they risk introducing silos, duplications, compliance blind spots and unpredictable costs. As noted in my earlier blog, when usage ramps up without controls in place, enterprises risk exposure to unplanned consumption charges and budget overruns (read about costs here).

At large scale, performance and throughput will also matter. Currently, Microsoft has not published detailed limits (e.g. limits per minute, concurrency, large lists or metadata sets) for Knowledge Agent. However, given that the preview only supports up to 100 excluded sites, max 100 terms in a term set and lacks granular scoping modes, it's likely that additional constraints (e.g. batch size, latency, throttling) may emerge in GA.

We recommend trialling the Knowledge Agent on representative enterprise workloads (e.g. large sites, high item counts, deep folder hierarchies) before full estate rollout, and instrumenting telemetry to detect processing delays, timeouts, or failed suggestions early.

For senior stakeholders, that’s more than an inconvenience as this undermines trust in the systems that are supposed to enable productivity and knowledge flow.

Atlas: Turning potential into enterprise value at scale

Atlas is designed to bridge the gap between innovation and governance. By embedding the Knowledge Agent’s capabilities within Atlas, organizations can for instance adopt Autofill columns at scale while staying firmly in control, of data, compliance, and cost.

Enterprise metadata management

Atlas ensures that Autofill columns are not created in isolation and autonomously by end users. Instead, they are provisioned through flexible but governed enterprise templates, connected to the centrally governed enterprise taxonomy. This prevents “column sprawl” and ensures consistency across departments, geographies, and sites.

Cost control and predictability

Atlas allows enterprises to manage the use of Autofill columns with more confidence that budgets will not be blown. By defining where and how columns can be applied, organizations avoid the unpredictability of uncontrolled adoption, reducing the risk of runaway costs while still capturing the productivity benefits.

Alternatives to Knowledge Agent and Autofill

Atlas doesn’t limit organizations to one approach. Autofill metadata can be created using the Knowledge Agent’s suggestions or through Atlas’s own intelligent knowledge platform approach which includes a metadata service for suggested tags. This flexibility ensures enterprises can select the most cost-effective or context-appropriate method, balancing accuracy, governance, and budget.

Provisioning with Atlas ConneX

With Atlas ConneX, provisioning becomes smarter and safer. Workspace templates are pre-set with use case specific governance rules, metadata defaults, and Autofill settings (including the AI prompt), ensuring that every new MS Team, site or library aligns with enterprise standards. This removes the risk of “DIY” provisioning, accelerates adoption, and underpins compliance from the moment an Atlas workspace is created.

Consistency and reuse at scale

Autofill becomes more powerful when consistent. Atlas enables Autofill columns to be reliably reused across thousands of sites and libraries, ensuring that metadata is consistent and supports enterprise search, analytics, and AI initiatives rather than fragmenting them and creating chaos.

Adoption without risk

Teams can still benefit from the Knowledge Agent’s time-saving features, but Atlas provides the guardrails. The result is faster adoption, greater trust in the data, and fewer risks of compliance gaps, redundant metadata structures, or unexpected costs.

Pre-emptive damage control through innovation at highest level

CIOs, Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs) and Innovation Leaders know they have to temper the excitement caused by shiny new technology. At the same time, they are under pressure to leverage technology for competitive advantage.

With Atlas, we engage with innovative leaders every day who recognize the potential of technology such as Knowledge Agent in SharePoint and automated tagging, but who at the same time need to prevent technology and information chaos from taking over.

What we experience is that:

• CIOs gain the ability to drive adoption of new Microsoft innovations without risking fragmentation, compliance exposure, or budget shocks.
• Chief Knowledge Officers and Innovation Leaders can unlock new opportunities for knowledge sharing while maintaining trust in enterprise-wide systems.
• And their firms benefit from improved consistency, reduced complexity, and greater predictability across knowledge assets, creating a stronger foundation for both enterprise search and AI.

The message is simple: with Atlas, organizations can move beyond experimentation and adopt technologies such as Knowledge Agent at enterprise scale, confidently and responsibly.

Controlled innovation at enterprise scale

The Knowledge Agent in SharePoint with Autofill columns offers a glimpse into Microsoft’s roadmap for knowledge management tooling. But like any new technology, its true value depends on how it matures, how it is implemented and how it is adopted.

Without governance, Autofill columns, a core Knowledge Agent feature, risk creating more problems than they solve, from compliance gaps to cost surprises. With Atlas, enterprises can enjoy the benefits today, while ensuring consistency, control, and cost predictability.

In other words, Atlas enables organizations to embrace innovation without losing control unlocking trusted, enterprise-ready knowledge systems that power productivity and innovation at scale.