Some of us wait eagerly for new features to appear in our tech. Be it a mobile phone, tv or any of Microsoft 365 environments we use. The last one is getting new features at amazing speed – faster than ever. And we know what is getting the most love at Microsoft at the moment: Microsoft 365 Copilot, other Copilots and everything related to Copilot. These SharePoint Copilot Agents were announced at Build 2024, and half a year after that they started to appear in tenants. These agents will be possible to be attached to Teams conversations, shared with links and later used as agents inside the Copilot. Users can have a conversation with AI about contents the agent has – for example project management manuals, project documentation, product information, employee handbook, it guidance, and so on. Combined with easy ways to attach agents to the conversation in chats and channels, this will be a nice step forward bringing AI to the collaboration – to the real work.
Let’s take a look how you can create and use them in action!
Create agents in multiple ways From a document library From a folder From the site home Do I always need to create a site agent? Are there more places where to create these no-code SharePoint Copilot agents? Talking with agents (= using agents ) Sharing agents Editing agents Deleting agents Conclusion and what’s next
Create agents in multiple ways
You don’t need any coding skills to create these agents (or bots, or Copilot extensions – as they were called before) in SharePoint. If you have create/editing permissions on the site & document library, just select the content and click Create Agent from a menu. There are multiple ways to do this:
From a document library
This is something I can see being used quite often. We want to select some files and folders and create a “knowledge bot” our of this information. In this case I use demo materials to create one directly in the SharePoint document library by selecting content and then clicking Create a Copilot agent.
After this, the agent is ready. Done. Just like that.
It automatically gets a suitable name and logo (the site logo). I can go on and try or edit it.
Tip: You can also click Create a Copilot agent without selecting any file or folder, while you are at Document library.
This way agent is using automatically the current document library as the content source.
Let’s continue with editing the Documents agent we created first.
Editing the agent opens a dialogue, where I can edit name, icon, description and test the agent.
There is also an upcoming option to go to the next level by adding advanced customizations in Copilot Studio – like making these connected to more data sources and adding conversational workflows. This feature is not available yet.
There are also tabs for editing Sources and Behavior.
In Sources it is possible to manage contents (adding and removing contents) or adding additional SharePoint sites for agent’s knowledge sources.
When you want to add new document libraries, folders or files , it opens a dialogue for selecting content:
If there are more Document libraries in the site, it is possible to include content from any of them. At the moment it is possible to select only document -type libraries, so site pages can’t be included in the agent’s knowledge.
It is not possible to switch to other sites to add content. For that you need to add links to other SharePoint sites in the Sources tab.
In the final tab Behavior it is possible to set agent’s welcome message, starter prompts and instructions (=system prompt). Using Copilot Studio, it is possible to take conversation flows to next level.
Editing any of these can be tested immediately and saved when you are ready.
Where is this agent stored? In the same library and folder where you clicked Create a Copilot agent!
The agent can be found as .copilot named file, that can be shared with others. And if you click on the agent, it will open it to the side panel automatically.
From a folder
Another case to create one, would be to navigate to a folder and select key files from there (perhaps only relevant product information documents) when creating an agent.
This isn’t any different from the previous one. Why I added this to the article? So you can see it is possible to select Words, PowerPoints and Excels as the content source.
And just like before, the .copilot file is stored in the folder where you created the agent.
I created a Loop component in team channel and edited the Launch agent and added a Loop component to it as the source. I was happy to see that all documents I have in sources work. Word-documents ✅, PowerPoints ✅, Excel ✅ and Loop ✅
From the site home
When you open the site home page, you can start agent creation from there as well. Just click the +New menu and select Copilot agent.
Now you have an agent, that includes the whole site.
There is a slight difference when defining content sources:
You can select the entire site or change to the mode where you add document libraries, folders and files, like we did before. When the whole site is selected, agent uses also site pages in the content source.
When creating a Copilot agent from the site home, the agent is stored in Site Assets to Copilots-folder, instead of a document library.
Do I always need to create a site agent?
Simple answer: no. All sites will have a Copilot agent pre-created, and it can answer questions related to contents of the site. You can find it by opening Copilot from the top to the side panel and your site Agent is there by default. From the same location you can switch to other site agents.
Are there more places where to create these no-code SharePoint Copilot agents?
Yes, there are! When you open the Copilot to the site (at the top of the page) you can create one from Copilot as well. In the previous chapter ( Do I always need to create a site agent? ) we just opened the Copilot to the site. From that one open the Copilot agent dropdown, and choose to create a new one.
And it creates a new agent that contains Documents library as the source.
This gets saved to the Document library root, just like our first test agent.
Talking with agents (= using agents )
How can we use these agents? Click Copilot logo at top navigation to open the side panel Copilot. From the drop down you can select the agent you want to use.
Other option is to just click on the agent in the document library, and it will be opened to the side panel.
We can also delete the conversation history from the same dropdown dialogue. When we have selected the agent, we just ask questions or have conversation with it.
Now we can also see the chat history in the dropdown.
What I found quite useful, is that I see all chats in the history – despite which agent was used. Selecting a chat from the history allows to continue the conversation – and the right agent is automatically selected alongside the chat.
Sharing agents
It is great to have agents on the site, but the real deal comes when it is possible to share agents to others. That can be done two ways:
Share from the document library using share-icon or any of other share-features we use with files normally.
Or open the agent dropdown in Copilot and select share from there.
Fun fact: you can’t share the pre-created site level agent at all (there is no … menu and thus no share ). If you create your own site-level agent, you can share that✅.
After getting a link to the agent, you can share it in Teams messages or channels or other ways (like.. email). It is possible to open this link in a web browser for a full page view.
And if I have enough permissions, it is possible to edit the agent even from this view.
At this point agents don’t work in Teams chats nor channels nor in Outlook. There are currently only two ways to use SharePoint Copilot agents: open the link to the browser or navigate to the site and use the agent there.
Fun fact: you can attach extra files to the agent conversation, just like you do when using BizChat. It is possible to reference Files and People.
This opens even more use cases for agents, as you can combine other files to the context – and even analyze/summarize Excel-files. I didn’t see any Loop-files in the files list, so these seem to be limited to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and at least PDF. This opens the use case to compare a vendor information to the baseline what agent contents store.
Editing agents
Editing agent is not done via the stored file, but through the site side-panel Copilot. Select the agent from the drop-down and click three dots (…) menu on the right. There is Share and Edit.
Editing doesn’t differ from editing a newly created agent.
Deleting agents
Deleting is another easy task: just delete the .copilot file! After a browser refresh or two it disappears automatically from the site Copilot agents list.
Conclusion and what’s next
SharePoint Copilot Agents are a fantastic next step on the Copilot journey. Bringing AI to SharePoint sites and having a conversation about site contents is way better than searching for information: with this you can ask for the finalized / styled result that you can just copy-paste to your needs. We can also share these agents very easily to others. Just like sharing files.
Users who use these agents are required to have Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
SharePoint Copilot Agents are still work-in-progress. Until we get AtMentions in Teams the use is limited to the site and opening the agent in web browser. This is not ideal considering the Flow of Work, but it is a start. It has never been easier to create bo…agents to Microsoft 365.
What I was happy to see, is that how well it reads Excel and Loop files. Thinking all documents we have in our sites, this is a great addition. I didn’t test OneNote and PDFs, but I am quite sure these work as well.
SharePoint Copilot Agents will be extremely useful as simple AI buddies full of knowledge, but when Advanced editing capabilities become available it opens much more new possibilities to extend capabilities and add process flows. Today, this is the easiest way to create knowledge agents.
As it is extremely easy to create new agents to match even smaller needs, we will be seeing AI alongside people in chats, channels and emails in the near future. Think about asking about product information, maintenance plans, project plan, or guidelines during and in your conversation. The AI will be there. I can easily see that there will be agents even covering a single meeting content, making it faster and easier to get information from the content source. In the flow of work, without switching to another app.
The Future is Full of Agents!
