Microsoft 365 | SharePoint Copilot | AI | Microsoft Copilot Agents
Copilot in SharePoint is not a single button buried in a settings menu — it’s woven into the content editing experience throughout the platform. Whether you’re drafting a page, working inside a document library, or querying site content, Copilot surfaces contextually wherever it’s relevant. This post covers two practical areas: using Copilot to create and refine page content, and building custom Copilot agents scoped to specific sites, libraries, or documents.
What Copilot Actually Is (and Isn’t)
Copilot in SharePoint is powered by a large language model (LLM), which means it works primarily with text. Think of it as a writing assistant: you provide the raw material — ideas, rough sentences, a list of keywords — and Copilot shapes it into coherent, polished content.
The workflow this enables is genuinely useful. Rather than agonising over structure and tone while drafting, you can focus entirely on getting ideas down in any form, then hand the output to Copilot for refinement. It handles grammar, flow, and tone so you don’t have to.
One important caveat: LLMs make mistakes. In AI terminology these are called hallucinations — confident-sounding statements that are factually wrong. Treat Copilot’s output the way you’d treat a first draft from a smart but occasionally unreliable colleague: useful as a starting point, but always worth a fact-check before publishing.
Creating and Rewriting Content With Copilot
Copilot integrates directly into the SharePoint page editing experience. Here’s how to use it:
Auto Rewrite
- Open your SharePoint site in a browser and navigate to the page you want to edit (or create a new one)
- Select a text web part and type in your content — rough ideas, bullet points, or a partial draft are all fine
- Select the Copilot button in the web part toolbar and choose Auto Rewrite
- Copilot rewrites your text and presents the result. Use the arrow controls to cycle through alternative versions
- If none of the options land right, hit Regenerate to get a fresh set of responses
- When you’re happy with a version, select Replace — the Copilot output replaces your original text
Adjust and Fine-Tune
Beyond full rewrites, Copilot’s Adjust option gives you more targeted control. From the Copilot dropdown, select Adjust to modify the text in specific ways:
- Length — make it more concise or expand it with more detail
- Tone — shift the register to casual, professional, enthusiastic, engaging, or creative
This is particularly useful when the content is structurally sound but doesn’t match the voice of the site or audience.
Copilot Agents: Site-Scoped AI Assistants
Every SharePoint site comes with a default Copilot agent out of the box. This agent is scoped to the entire site — it can read and respond to questions about all content within that site. Users access it via the Copilot icon, and for most day-to-day use cases, the default agent is all they need.
For more targeted scenarios, you can create custom agents scoped to specific parts of your SharePoint environment.
Creating a Custom Agent
There are multiple entry points for agent creation depending on where you are in the SharePoint UI:
From the main Copilot chat window:
- Open Copilot and select the dropdown at the top of the chatbox
- At the bottom of the agent list, select Create an Agent
- By default, the new agent is scoped to the entire SharePoint site
From a document library: A Create an Agent button appears in the document library banner, allowing you to create an agent scoped specifically to that library — useful when you want a focused assistant for a particular team’s documents.
From a specific document: The same option appears in the context menu for individual documents, letting you create an agent scoped to a single file. This is useful for large, complex documents where users need to query content without wading through the full document manually.
Configuring Agents
Once created, agents can be edited to expand their scope or adjust their behaviour:
- Sources — add additional SharePoint sites or libraries to the agent’s knowledge base, so it can draw on content from multiple locations
- Behaviour — configure pre-built prompts that appear when users first open the agent, guiding them toward common queries
Agent configuration files use the .agent extension and are stored in the Site Assets library under a folder called Copilots. To find them: gear icon → Site Contents → Site Assets → Copilots. Opening an agent file launches a chat interface identical to the main Copilot window.
Note: Microsoft is shipping Copilot features at a rapid pace. Agent behaviours and configuration options are actively expanding — check Microsoft’s release notes regularly as new capabilities roll out.
Where to Focus First
Copilot agents can get complicated quickly, but the majority of productivity gains come from two straightforward use cases:
- Content writing assistance — using Copilot’s rewrite and adjust features while editing SharePoint pages. This alone meaningfully speeds up content production and improves quality.
- Site content Q&A — using the default site-scoped agent to ask questions about content across the site. Instead of manually searching for information, users can query the agent conversationally.
Custom agents scoped to libraries or documents are worth exploring once your team is comfortable with the basics — but don’t let the breadth of what’s possible delay getting started with what works today.
Summary
Copilot in SharePoint operates on two levels: as a writing tool embedded in the page editing experience, and as a conversational AI agent that can be scoped to a site, library, or individual document. The content creation features — rewrite, adjust, tone and length controls — are immediately useful and require no configuration. Custom agents require a bit more setup but unlock targeted AI assistance for specific workloads.
Start with the default site agent and the in-page rewrite features. From there, build out custom agents as your team’s needs become clearer.
