Unpacking the SharePoint Knowledge Agent: Technical & Compliance notes

This blog was updated 02 February 2026,

Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot Knowledge Agent in SharePoint (Knowledge Agent) into preview during September 2025. Check out the original and official Microsoft blog about the release here.

Microsoft's recent (Nov '25 - Jan '25) announcements and roadmap points to General Availability (GA) during early 2026 with additional controls and licensing details being made available as well.

This Microsoft 365 Copilot for SharePoint capability, brings a range of potentially valuable and exciting information management capabilities directly into end-users’ hands. For instance, the Knowledge Agent makes it possible to automatically generate columns, views, and rules that help organize content in document libraries.

The Knowledge Agent is now described in official docs as a built-in SharePoint capability that helps prepare content for AI. It enriches, organizes, and maintains SharePoint content in a structured, authoritative format optimized for Copilot.

For technical and compliance teams, the Knowledge Agent marks an important shift: capabilities that were once controlled (although often through obscurity rather than actual governance controls) by administrators or information architects can now be initiated by site owners and members with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

The implications are twofold.

On the one hand, Knowledge Agent has the potential to accelerate adoption of better metadata practices across large volumes of content within a list or a library. This is great news for Atlas platform customers, and for any organizations that already have an overarching strategic approach, including a good handle on their taxonomy, their information architecture and their content governance.

On the other hand, for those without an overarching approach, it introduces governance challenges in areas such as change management, auditability, and standardization. With tenant-wide enablement and relatively light configuration controls, organizations will need to consider carefully how to balance the power of automation with the need for oversight.

My aim is to provide guidance to help you make the Knowledge Agent sing as the feature matures over time! This blog unpacks the technical set-up, current limitations, and governance considerations of the Knowledge Agent in its current state. I hope this helps a) to provide SharePoint administrators, compliance leads, and technical teams with a clear view of what the feature can (and cannot) do today, and b) to highlight the points where further preparation and guardrails may be required before general availability.

(If you are a KM&I leader, please also see: The Knowledge Agent for SharePoint: for Knowledge Management & Innovation Leaders)

Enabling Knowledge Agent for SharePoint

Microsoft announced a M365 Admin Center UI for the Knowledge Agent, which will be available via the "Agents 365" dashboard.

For now, you will need to

1. use PowerShell for this and

2. you will need to authenticate with an account that has tenant-level SharePoint admin permissions.

Configuration limitations

While in preview, you can - via PowerShell - set the scope of operation for the Knowledge Agent by setting the mode to disabled or to one of three other modes across your SharePoint tenant:

• NoSites mode: Tenant-wide off (i.e. it is disabled).
• AllSites mode: Tenant-wide on for all sites.
• IncludeSelectedSites mode: Tenant-wide on, but including specific sites in a list of selected sites.
• ExcludeSelectedSites mode: Tenant-wide on, but excluding specific sites in a list of selected sites.

The list of sites (to be either included or excluded) is called the KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesList and can be up to a maximum of 100 sites.

For example, if you only want to run the Knowledge Agent in a single site, you will have to include a single site in KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesList and run in the IncludeSelectedSites mode.

Running the PowerShell to enable Knowledge Agent for SharePoint

For preview, Microsoft has released the admin toggle with the “KnowledgeAgent” parameter in SET-SPOTenant.

Tip: You will need to use SharePoint Online Management Shell (version 16.0.26615.12013 or later) which means that you need to run this in PowerShell 5 as far as I can tell (I am not a PowerShell guy though).

After you have successfully imported the module (Import-Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell), you can connect to your tenant and then follow the steps below. You can also review Microsoft’s full guidance is here.

Enable or disable everywhere:

If you simply want to enable the Knowledge Agent for all sites, you run this command:

Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentScope AllSites

And disable the Knowledge Agent (from all sites) again like this:

Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentScope NoSites

Only enable in a select few sites:

In most cases you are likely to prefer to only run it – at least initially – for a few select sites. In the initial preview release, it was not possible to have an inclusion list, only an exclusion list, so this is a welcome improvement:

So let me walk through the two steps to achieve this:

First, configure Knowledge Agent to include selected sites (IncludeSelectedSites mode):

Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentScope IncludeSelectedSites 

Next, define the list of sites you wish to include within scope as follows:

Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesList @("siteurlA", "siteurlB")

This last command above will now enable the Knowledge Agent in those selected sites.

Enable everywhere, except for a few sites:

If you prefer to go the other way around, you can enable the feature everywhere, except for those defined in your KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesList .

First, set the scope to enable the KnowledgeAgent in all sites, except those in the exclusion list as follows:

Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentScope ExcludeSelectedSites

Next, define the list of sites you wish to exclude within scope as follows:

Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesList @("siteurlA", "siteurlB")

This enables the Knowledge Agent in all sites, except those listed in the array.

Adding (appending) more sites to your scope

You can include the “append” option to the command if you wish to additional sites into the array:

Set-SPOTenant ‘
-KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesList @("siteurlC","siteurlD") ‘
-KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesListOperation Append

This is the same command whether you are excluding or including sites to the scope.

Checking the status of your current mode and scope

Check the current configuration like this:

Get-SPOTenant | Select-Object KnowledgeAgentScope

A few additional notes

For ease, I load the list of sites into an array. Also also start by enabling the Knowledge Agent against an empty array to clear it, and then I pass in my array with the append command you saw above. If I make changes to the array, I just load that append command again.

For those with site URLs that may contain special characters, please note these URLs may fail when running the command against them. 

Microsoft limitations and recommendations

Please see the most up-to-date list here.

Important ones to note: Only *the first 100* terms of a mapped term set will be considered if you are using Managed Metadata columns.

In the current preview, administrators can set Knowledge Agent enabled on all sites, except for a list of up to 100 sites or can set Knowledge Agent disabled on all sites, except for a list of up to 100 sites.

Also note that for Autofill columns a seperate tenant level setting allows control of where it can be used. The setting can be set to "On" or "Off" for all sites, or on for selected sites. This selection is also limited to 100 sites. But confusingly, please be aware that this the Autofill sites selection is an "inclusion" selection, while the setting above is an "exclusion" or "inclusion" selection. 

(Finally, as an aside, please note that in limited testing it has been have observed that results from SharePoint agents may differ in quality compared to Copilot Studio agents, potentially due to differing indexing mechanisms.)

Licenses, costs and cost controls

Today, in preview, usage is included with Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

Whether this later shifts to a usage-based model later is not clear. Note that Microsoft introduced Roadmap ID: 503145 which covers support for Pay-As-You-Go for SharePoint Agents, which started rolling out in October 2025, although this is not directly linked to Knowledge Agent for SharePoint. 

Also note: While the usage (of the Knowledge Agent) is included, the actual Autofill processing is charged for on a metered PAYG service. I explain this in more detail here. 

Giving access to use the Knowledge Agent

To use the Knowledge Agent, you must have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license assigned and you will need to be a site-owner or a member to see the button for the Knowledge Agent.

In other words, any user with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license will see this feature in any site where they are an owner or a member. Assuming, of course, that the Knowledge Agent is enabled for the specific site.

Governance of the Knowledge Agent and its actions

The current version of Knowledge Agent for SharePoint is very light on governance. It is currently in preview, so I naturally expect some more controls to be implemented before General Availability. However, if Power Automate governance is anything to go by, organizations will need to quickly get their head around the power that is coming into end-user hands.

Creating rules with Knowledge Agent

A great new feature is the ability to automatically set-up rules. In preview this is however quite limited, but I would expect the capabilities to expand in short order.

In summary, you can create a rule to [carry out an action] under [specific conditions] when [a trigger] occurs.

• The supported triggers today are:
  • a new item is created
  • an item is modified
  • an item is deleted
• The actions that can be carried out are:
  • email
  • move
  • copy
  • set value.

Note the following key limitations for larger teams:

• A maximum of 15 rules can be created per list or library.

• Rules don't support email-enabled security groups for notifications.

The combination of these two limitations makes the use of rules very limited for larger teams in collaboration within a single library or list.

Please see updated requirements and limitations here.

Behind the scenes

What actually happens when you let the Knowledge Agent organize a library for you?

Library settings

To find out, go to the library, click on the settings cog and select “Library Settings”.

(Note: In case you have previously used Syntex, ignore anything related to Microsoft Syntex settings.)

Then click the “More library settings”.

What you should now see are your library settings. If you are working in the default library for a site, you will see “Documents > Settings” up top.

In one of my tests, I was suggested to create “Case name”, “Judgment Date” and “Key Issues”.

The takeaway here is that while Knowledge Agent cleverly creates new columns, the columns are unlikely to follow typical enterprise standards for column naming and configuration and this this is not within the near or mid-term roadmap of the Knowledge Agent.. 

For example, you may want to enforce naming standards for fields. So for instance, the internal field name for "Case name", might be something like "abcCaseName" while Judgment date might be "abcJudgmentDate". And you may want to enforce this consistently across 100s or 1000s of libraries and sites.

Lack of governance at this foundational (low) level, will bubble up to the surface as a real enterprise governance issue if not closely managed. 

Search settings

As far as our initial tests have shown, the new columns that are created become searchable, but no other changes are made to the search schema. In other words, the Knowledge Agent doesn’t magically create new search schema settings (such as creation of refiners).

Power Automate integration with Knowledge Agent

Apart from the Rules that can be suggested and created using the Knowledge Agent, there are no specific Knowledge Agent triggers or actions available for Power Automate integration. On the as-soon-as-possible-wish-list would be a trigger to initiate a Power Automate workflow when changes have been made using the Knowledge Agent. At least then the Administrators and Site Owners can be notified if new columns have been created.

Closing comments

The Knowledge Agent for in SharePoint is still at an early stage, but it already introduces significant capabilities that will shape how content is structured and managed in SharePoint. For technical teams, the immediate priority is understanding how to enable and configure the feature at tenant level, and where the current limitations sit. For compliance teams, the focus should be on recognizing the governance gaps: limited auditability, lack of standardization controls, and the risk of inconsistent application across sites.

In practical terms, organizations should test the feature in controlled environments, establish internal guidance for site owners and members, and plan for monitoring once Knowledge Agent is more widely deployed. Keeping track of Microsoft’s roadmap and updates will also be critical, as the preview functionality is likely to expand rapidly.

It goes without saying that enterprise-wide governance of your information architecture, your taxonomy and how tags are applied has become more crucial than ever. If you want Microsoft 365 Copilot and Knowledge Agent in SharePoint to sing, you need to orchestrate it well. 

By preparing now, technical and compliance teams can ensure they are ready to harness the benefits of Knowledge Agent, while also protecting against the risks that come with putting new automation tools directly into the hands of end users.