The intelligent intranet powered by Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Ignite 2019 announcements
Let’s dive in the announcements we have made it Microsoft Ignite 2019 that you helped inspire. These enhancements will roll out at various times in the months ahead. You can follow the for more details on specific items.New innovations in SharePoint & Microsoft 365 deliver power and simplicity for content collaboration
Today, at Microsoft Ignite we showed new innovations for content collaboration in the modern workplace. We showed how SharePoint and Microsoft 365 combine power and simplicity to meet your evolving business needs while ensuring ease of use for all.Introducing Knowledge Agent in SharePoint
AI is reshaping how we work, with human and AI collaboration at the forefront of “Frontier Firm” working patterns. But your AI suite is only as powerful as the content it’s built on. If your content isn’t ready, your AI tools won’t be either. To help optimize your content for Microsoft 365 Copilot and your organization, we’re introducing Knowledge Agent in SharePoint. Knowledge Agent, launching in Public Preview today, delivers a new wave of AI-powered features in SharePoint designed to streamline content management and boost Copilot capabilities. These new features blend curated organizational knowledge with advanced AI, transforming SharePoint into a dynamic, intelligent knowledge hub that gives your organization a competitive edge.Introducing a team knowledge base, curated by Copilot and agents
Collaboration is changing as teams of humans and agents now work together to get more done. That’s why we’ve evolved Copilot to empower these human-agent teams: just last month, we announced copilot in Teams, Autopilot as your digital teammate, and new tools in Copilot for managing a team’s content workflows. Today, we are taking the next step in human-agent team collaboration, designed to help address the problem of fragmented and outdated information and enable agent teammates to have the required team context they need to perform tasks and answer questions. In Frontier Preview, Copilot and agents in the newly announced Copilot app, Teams, and SharePoint will be able to create, contribute to, curate, and reference a team’s knowledge base in SharePoint. If the player doesn’t load, open the video in a new window: Open video Knowledge bases can support a range of team needs by bringing together the context people and agents need to do their best work. Here are some examples of how we are working with frontier teams to leverage a knowledge base: Legal: Collecting isolated knowledge from emails, files, and personal notes to help agents reference relevant context when creating agreements and contracts. Engineering: Combining technical specifications, user feedback, market research, and product history to give coding agents project context and support the onboarding of new engineers. Sales: Organizing account knowledge and history so sales agents can recommend relevant next steps or quickly provide account snapshots. Team members can explicitly contribute content— whether email, messages, meetings or content that is already on the SharePoint sites they work with. Copilot will organize all this information into an up-to-date knowledge base for the team, readable to people and grounding any agents that are working with the team. Turning raw content into synthesized knowledge At its core, the knowledge base is a specialized library of interlinked agent-friendly markdown files, created by Copilot using Work IQ’s native knowledge compilation engine. This content processing platform can help transform a team’s content into agent-ready knowledge to improve agent performance and results. In our early internal testing, we see that an agent’s responses were up to 4x faster and 30% more token-efficient with the knowledge base when retrieving content to answer questions and performing team tasks 1 . Figure 1: The knowledge base pipeline We believe this is the first step in transforming how human-agent teams work together by leveraging Work IQ’s knowledge compilation engine. As the science advances, the engine improves. By combining advances in content processing with the latest corpus enrichment innovations from our Applied Science research teams, we are continually improving how enterprise content is transformed into usable knowledge. The evidence is promising so far. For example, in a recent paper, we evaluated agents on the task of answering complex questions that require connecting information across multiple documents. We observed significant improvements in both cost efficiency and quality when compared with traditional agents that worked with the original documents or other enrichment methods. Figure 2: Retrieval quality and cost improvement when using the knowledge base corpus map. Note: Results are from a synthetic test environment and published in a public research paper. With millions of sites created by customers every day, SharePoint plays a critical role as the home for the content and knowledge of a team, whether as a vibrant site of pages, files, and lists or the backing content store for a Teams Channel or Modern Group. When enhanced with a knowledge base, the SharePoint site evolves from a content source to the context layer for a team that people, Copilot, and agents can use and reference together. What’s available now This is rolling out now to our Frontier preview tenants. You can start by adding a knowledge base to any SharePoint site— including those backing Teams Channels and Microsoft 365 Groups. You can further use Copilot in SharePoint and the newly announced Autopilot in the Copilot app to create, curate and use your knowledge base. And with the power of Autopilot, you can also use the knowledge base directly from within Teams, from email (by emailing your autopilot). If the player doesn’t load, open the video in a new window: Open video Note: While the knowledge base and its tools are available in Frontier public, the integration with Autopilot requires access to Autopilot, which is rolling out on a separate cadence. Knowledge base is currently available only to users enabled for usage-based billing. Administrators can manage access and spending through the Microsoft 365 admin center. Learn more about managing AI experiences enabled by usage-based billing and how to create the right policies for your organization. Because knowledge base capabilities are currently in preview, billing terms may change before general availability. What’s coming soon Next on our roadmap: Knowledge bases in more places you work, including tools in Cowork and Copilot in Teams, and custom agents created in Microsoft Copilot Studio. Deeper integration with M365 groups – to allow for easier bootstrapping knowledge bases from existing sources (channels, email). Automated, ongoing curation with the help of Microsoft Copilot Studio’s agent flows to help keep your knowledge bases up to date as your organization’s content changes. Greater content scaling, building on our corpus map approach to support larger volumes of content with higher quality at a lower cost. Integration with CLIs and coding agents via Work IQ to allow a broader range of agents to contribute to and work with a knowledge base. If the player doesn’t load, open the video in a new window: Open video More content AI innovation across the Copilot ecosystem Our content AI strategy is focused on helping organizations turn their content into knowledge that people and agents can use in the flow of work. We’re continuing to bring that strategy to life across the Microsoft 365 and Copilot ecosystem with knowledge bases in SharePoint. And we’re not done yet! Here are a few more recent updates in the content AI space: SharePoint tools in Work IQ are coming soon. Last month, we announced that SharePoint tools were coming to the new Copilot app through Work IQ. Copilot in SharePoint is now generally available, bringing Copilot directly into the place where your organization’s content lives. It helps you understand, create, organize, and act on content with AI. Learn more in last month’s blog. New capabilities to govern the content that powers AI. Copilot and agents perform best on well-governed content. The SharePoint Admin Agent is the centerpiece of our new capabilities for getting there. Admins can use natural language to get tenant-level analysis and guided remediation across permissions, content lifecycle, storage, and settings. They can also monitor cross-geo content moves (preview). Catalog management turns a sprawling tenant into structured, manageable content clusters, so admins can scale actions like site attestations, access reviews, and Restricted Content Discovery, and build rollout plans that better match how their organization works. A detailed file level EEEU permissions report enables targeted cleanup, insights on agent access show which agents are reaching SharePoint and OneDrive content, and Governance Hub helps site owners follow through on assigned actions. Today’s preview is just a first step, and we look forward to building this with you. Learn more about how you can be among the first to put the knowledge base to work for your teams and help shape what comes next by sharing feedback. You can either share in-product feedback using Copilot in SharePoint, Autopilot, or sign up here for an opportunity to go deeper with us on this journey. References: 1. Results are based on Microsoft internal testing, October 2026.
