Scale knowledge sharing with AI community agents in Viva Engage

Hi, Insiders! We are Kaleem Rahman and Christina Ferancik, Product Managers on the Viva Engage team. We're excited to share with you some new capabilities coming to agents in Viva Engage communities.

Transform community support with AI‑powered answers in Viva Engage

AI-powered community agents are your new built-in knowledge assistants to help communities scale knowledge, speed up answers, and reduce repetitive work for admins.

Communities in Engage help employees learn from one another and share knowledge. In a time of rapid change, questions are often coming in faster than admins and experts can answer them. Community agents are designed to help community managers quickly answer repeat questions with high-quality trusted content from the community.

These new AI agents live directly inside Viva Engage communities and act as helpful assistants, powered by your organization’s trusted content. They can help ensure important answers don’t get buried and expertise becomes part of your long‑term organizational memory. They can:

• Proactively answer questions by drawing from past conversations and approved content.
• Ground answers in information from trusted, admin-defined SharePoint sites.
• Support @mentions, so members can bring the agent into any conversation to clarify or answer follow-up questions (coming soon).
• Add to the community’s searchable history of answered questions, so knowledge compounds over time.
• Offer admin controls to define content sources and maintain confidence in every response.

Agents can be of great help in communities where questions repeat or where accurate guidance is critical, like:

• AI change and adoption communities, such as Copilot adoption communities
• Communities of practice (HR, IT, Communications, Sales Enablement)
• Onboarding and “how‑do‑I” hubs for employees navigating change
• Global communities spanning time zones and languages
• Product, program, or tool‑focused communities where up‑to‑date answers matter

With these new agents, your communities can be more responsive and productive, especially when engagement surges. Your communities can handle more questions without adding to the workload of admins and experts.

You’ll experience:

• Fewer repetitive questions thanks to instant, consistent answers, so experts can focus on the questions that need a human touch.
• Faster access to information, so newcomers and infrequent contributors can get unblocked quickly.
• Smoother conversation flow, with questions answered where they’re asked instead of redirecting you elsewhere.
• Scaling support as your community grows, without a proportional increase in admin workload.

How it works

A Viva Engage network admin needs to opt into community agent preview via the Engage admin center. Microsoft 365 Copilot-licensed community admins can add a community agent to communities they manage.

You can then opt your network into the Agents in communities public preview through a simple network toggle:

1. Go to the Engage admin center and select Tenant settings.
2. Set the Community agent preview toggle to On.

Find more instructions here.

Add and configure the agent in your community

To add an agent, Copilot-licensed community admins can select to "Add agent" in the community member panel to the right.

From there, Agent configuration is straightforward.

1. From the Set up your agent page, apply the following settings:
• Require review before posting: By default, the agent automatically posts answers to questions asked in the community. To require admin and expert review and approval before posting, enable this toggle.
• Add sources: Add a SharePoint site or library to give the agent deeper information to draw from. Enter the URL (E.g., https://zava.sharepoint.com/teams/Sales_Marketing_Resources) and select Add. The agent will only use content that’s accessible to all community members. If the site isn’t already shared with the community, you’ll be prompted to grant read access.

• To update agent configuration, select the Edit icon next to Agent in the community member panel.

2. Select Save to complete setup.
3. To update agent configuration, select the Edit icon next to Agent in the community member panel.

Review agent-drafted answers

If you enable reviews of agent-created information, suggestions appear in a dedicated Review agent suggestions page. Community admins and experts can apply the following actions:

• Approve: Select Post to push the answer to the community, marked as verified by the reviewer.
• Edit and Approve: Edit the answer before posting. The answer appears as posted and verified by the reviewer.
• Dismiss: Remove the suggestion from review. The agent doesn't attempt to answer questions again when the agent answer is dismissed.

Availability

The agents in communities feature is currently in public preview. A network admin needs to opt in through the Engage admin center. Features may change before general availability.

Community agent can be added by Microsoft 365 Copilot-licensed community admins. After the agent is active, Copilot-licensed admins and community experts can review, approve, and edit agent-drafted answers. After agent responses get posted, admins can delete them. All community members can see content posted by the community agent, regardless of license assignment.

Find set up and licensing information here.

Feedback

We want to hear from you! When you question your agents, rate agent responses with a thumbs up or thumbs down. Your feedback can help us to improve. 

 

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