Copilot in SharePoint, the 2026 practitioner guide

Copilot in SharePoint is the Microsoft 365 Copilot experience that turns natural language into real work across SharePoint sites, libraries, lists, and pages. It runs inside any site where a Copilot-licensed user is opted in, generates content, builds Skills, remembers site-level context, and from mid-June 2026 shifts to opt-out for every Copilot-licensed tenant.

As of mid-May 2026, the product is still in public preview. Most tenants have it switched off. Knowing what it is, what changes when the rollout flips to opt-out, and what your team should do this week is the difference between a smooth rollout and a Monday-morning surprise.

I have been in the preview since September 2025, when Microsoft shipped it as the SharePoint Knowledge Agent. Same product, three names, eight months of iteration. This guide is the practitioner reference for what it actually does and what to do about it before June.

The three names: Knowledge Agent, AI in SharePoint, Copilot in SharePoint

This is the most confusing part. The same feature has had three names in less than a year. Every search engine, every blog post, every internal email at your organisation uses one of them. They all mean the same thing.

If your admin has the Knowledge Agent preview enabled, you do not need to opt in again under the new name. The configuration carries through. If you ran the PowerShell six months ago, you are already set up.

The reason the rename matters now is search demand. Right now, almost every guide and blog uses "AI in SharePoint". From mid-June, anyone hearing about Copilot in SharePoint from a colleague or a Microsoft email will type the new name into Google or ChatGPT. The old guides will not surface for the new query, and the new guides will not exist yet for most of them. This four-week window is when getting the right answer in front of your team matters most.

What Copilot in SharePoint actually does

Microsoft frames the product around three capabilities. The framing is helpful because each capability solves a different job and uses a different artefact.

What to Know: site-level context files

Every SharePoint site can have a single Markdown file called SharePoint.md placed in the root of its Agent Assets library. The file tells Copilot what to know about the site: the purpose, the library map, the naming conventions, the rules, the things the AI should follow every time it acts on that site.

It loads automatically into every chat on the site. The user does not have to attach it. The admin does not have to push it out. One file, one site, every conversation.

A practical example. A people and culture site has a policies library where every document must follow the naming convention POL-NNN-Short-Title.docx. Without the SharePoint.md file, every chat starts from zero and the user has to re-explain the convention. With the file, the user can say "rename these eight policies according to our standards" and Copilot already knows what the standards are.

The What to Know capability rolled out across April and May 2026 to all opted-in preview tenants.

How to Act: Skills

Skills are the second capability and the most useful one once you have a team that does the same kind of work repeatedly. A Skill is a Markdown file stored at /Agent Assets/Skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md on a site. It captures a multi-step workflow once, then anyone on the site can run that workflow on demand.

Microsoft's examples include generating quarterly reports from business data, drafting proposals using past content, creating a project tracker list with the standard columns and field types, and organising content by an information architecture.

The example I run with clients most often is contract review. The Skill loads a base contract, compares it against a returned client version, applies an impact analysis, and produces a traffic-light priority table of every change. One person writes the SKILL.md. The whole legal team can run it. The output is the same shape every time, which is the actual win because review now scales without each reviewer drifting into their own format.

Skills are now available across all opted-in preview tenants. No additional setup is required beyond enabling Copilot in SharePoint on the site. The full deep-dive on writing, structuring, and shipping Skills lives in the SharePoint AI Skills article.

What to Produce: content generation

The third capability covers actually producing the work. Copilot in SharePoint can generate Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and structured outputs like interactive HTML reports and dashboards.

The interesting part for teams already drowning in monthly reporting work is that you can chain content generation with Skills. Build the report generation as a Skill once. Schedule it to run when new data lands in a library. Every month the dashboard rebuilds with current data, archives the inputs, and saves the output to your document library. The team meeting now starts with the report already done.

Content generation rolled out across late April and May 2026 to opted-in preview tenants.

For the full breakdown of how the three capabilities combine in a real workflow, see the three capabilities deep-dive.

Who can use Copilot in SharePoint right now

The licensing rule is simple. Anyone who has an active Microsoft 365 Copilot licence and works in a site where Copilot in SharePoint has been enabled can use it. There is no additional cost during preview and there will be no additional cost at general availability.

Three prerequisites must be in place before users see anything change.

First, the user needs the Copilot licence. If you have a tenant with mixed licensing, only the licensed users get the floating Copilot button in the lower right of SharePoint pages.

Second, an admin needs to have opted the tenant or specific sites into the preview using PowerShell. AI in SharePoint is off by default in every tenant until the opt-in command runs. The official setup guide on Microsoft Learn walks through the SharePoint Online Management Shell version requirement and the parameters.

Third, for the full preview experience, the admin should enable Anthropic as an AI sub-processor in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. This is optional but recommended. Without it, Copilot in SharePoint uses a Microsoft fallback model. With it, the advanced reasoning model handles multi-step planning and execution across SharePoint content.

The feature is not available in Microsoft 365 Government environments (GCC, GCC High, DoD), air-gapped cloud, or Microsoft 365 operated by 21Vianet.

How to opt in to the preview today

The PowerShell to enable Copilot in SharePoint across every site in your tenant is two commands.

Connect-SPOService https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com

Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentScope AllSites

Note that the PowerShell parameter name is still KnowledgeAgentScope, not CopilotInSharePointScope. Microsoft has kept the original parameter name for backwards compatibility during preview. The branding has moved on; the parameter naming has not.

If you want to enable Copilot in SharePoint on only a handful of sites first, use IncludeSelectedSites:

Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentScope IncludeSelectedSites

Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesList @(
  "https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/pilot-site-one",
  "https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/pilot-site-two"
)

To verify the current configuration, run Get-SPOTenant | Select-Object KnowledgeAgentScope and the cmdlet returns the active scope.

The full admin reference, including the multi-geo PowerShell pattern, the 100-site cap on the include and exclude lists, the rollback playbook, and how to handle the most common parameter-not-found error, lives in the Copilot in SharePoint admin guide.

What changes in mid-June 2026: the opt-out rollout

The shift from opt-in to opt-out is the main reason this guide exists right now.

Per Message Center notice MC1311968, starting mid-June 2026 Microsoft begins rolling Copilot in SharePoint out to every tenant with Microsoft 365 Copilot licences. The default behaviour flips. Where previously the feature was off until an admin actively opted in, it will now be on until an admin actively opts out.

For tenants who have been in the preview since September 2025, nothing changes operationally. Existing scope configurations carry through. Users who already see Copilot in SharePoint keep seeing it.

For tenants who have not opted in yet, the rollout means a floating Copilot button appears in the lower right of SharePoint pages for every Copilot-licensed user. The chat panel opens to the side. Users can ask Copilot to find documents, generate content, build Skills, and run them.

Three admin decisions need to be made before mid-June.

The first is whether to opt out tenant-wide. For organisations with strict change control, sensitivity policies, or compliance reviews still in progress, the safest move is Set-SPOTenant -KnowledgeAgentScope NoSites and then plan a deliberate rollout later.

The second is whether to opt out specific sites. If most of the tenant is fine but a handful of sites hold sensitive content where the AI sub-processor decision has not been made, ExcludeSelectedSites keeps the feature on everywhere except those sites.

The third is whether to enable Anthropic as a sub-processor. This is the next section.

There is also a third opt-out lever worth knowing. If a site has Restricted Content Discovery enabled, Copilot in SharePoint and AI actions will not appear on that site even if the tenant has opted in. For organisations with a handful of sensitive sites already flagged with Restricted Content Discovery, those sites are already covered without any additional PowerShell.

The full pre-rollout decision tree, including the communication template for letting your users know what is about to change, lives in the admin guide.

The Anthropic question: does Copilot in SharePoint use Claude?

This is one of the most asked questions on the topic and one of the most unclear public answers.

The Microsoft Learn documentation for AI in SharePoint setup is explicit. The refreshed public preview uses an advanced reasoning model to support multi-step planning and execution across SharePoint content. To access the full preview experience, tenant administrators should enable Anthropic as an AI sub-processor for Microsoft Online Services in the Microsoft Admin Center. If Anthropic is not enabled, AI in SharePoint uses a fallback reasoning model.

Microsoft 365 Message Center notice MC1311968, the announcement of the June rollout, mentions a different specific. It states the rollout will operate using OpenAI's GPT-5.4 Reasoning model at launch.

The honest practitioner answer reconciling the two sources is: it depends on configuration and timing.

During preview today, when admins enable Anthropic as a sub-processor, the full experience runs on Anthropic Claude. Multi-step planning, context-aware reasoning across libraries, and the multi-turn Skill execution flow are the parts that benefit from the advanced reasoning model. Tenants that have not enabled Anthropic see the same feature surface, but the heavier reasoning runs on the Microsoft fallback model and some advanced capabilities vary.

From the opt-out rollout in mid-June 2026 onwards the picture changes. MC1311968 is explicit. Copilot in SharePoint runs on OpenAI's GPT-5.4 Reasoning model at the rollout, and customer-controlled model selection is not currently available. Microsoft has framed the product as built with model agility at its core, with the team continuously evaluating and adopting the latest models, but the choice is theirs not yours. The Anthropic sub-processor switch in the Microsoft 365 admin centre still applies to other Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences (the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents fall under it), but Copilot in SharePoint at general availability launches on GPT-5.4.

For UK and EU tenants the Anthropic sub-processor decision still matters for those other Copilot experiences. Anthropic is disabled by default for UK and EU customers because Anthropic is currently excluded from EU data boundary commitments. Admins in those regions need to explicitly enable Anthropic in the Microsoft 365 admin centre for the broader Copilot suite to get the full Anthropic-powered experience. For Copilot in SharePoint specifically at general availability, the EU and UK situation is the same as everywhere else: GPT-5.4 Reasoning.

The fuller breakdown of the Anthropic question, including how to check which model is actually running in your tenant and the data residency considerations for the sub-processor decision, lives in the Anthropic in SharePoint article.

Five things you can do with Copilot in SharePoint today

The fastest way to understand the product is to watch what people are building with it.

The first is creating SharePoint lists and document libraries from natural language. In my five-minute challenge video I create a client list with custom columns, import data from an Excel spreadsheet, add pill formatting to choice columns, and apply conditional formatting to highlight contract renewals, all using my voice. The same flow works on document libraries with metadata.

The second is querying and updating list data conversationally. Once a list exists, Copilot in SharePoint reasons over the data the same way it reasons over documents. "Which contracts are renewing in April?" and "Update Fusion Digital Group to current status, please" both work, as shown in the Microsoft Lists walkthrough.

The third is the SharePoint.md context file. Drop a single Markdown file in the root of your Agent Assets library, give Copilot the rules your site follows, and every chat on the site starts with full context. The walkthrough shows renaming eight policy files sequentially based on the naming convention stored in the file.

The fourth is Skills for repeatable work. The contract review Skill I run with clients flags every change in a returned contract and presents them as a traffic-light priority table. Twenty-four changes flagged in the demo run. Same output every time, regardless of which legal team member runs it.

The fifth is interactive dashboards from SharePoint data. Point Copilot at a library full of exports and ask for an HTML dashboard. The ticketing dashboard demo builds a fully interactive dashboard from twenty-two SharePoint files, including SLA charts, agent performance heat maps, sentiment analysis, and on-brand styling pulled from a Design MD file.

If you want the full set of demo walkthroughs, the video library covers ten of them.

Copilot in SharePoint vs SharePoint Agents vs Copilot Studio

The naming gets confusing because Microsoft has three different things called something close to "agent" in this space. They are not interchangeable.

The simplest way to think about it: Copilot in SharePoint is for the work that happens inside the SharePoint site, written as Markdown, run by anyone with the right permissions. SharePoint Agents are declarative agents created in the SharePoint site for question-answering use cases. Copilot Studio is the broader authoring platform for everything that needs more complex logic, external connectors, or custom code.

Skills cannot connect to external APIs and cannot execute custom code. If your use case needs to call an API outside of Microsoft 365 or run anything beyond what Copilot in SharePoint natively supports, you are looking at Copilot Studio, not Skills.

What this means for your team

If your organisation has Microsoft 365 Copilot licences, three things happen between now and mid-July 2026.

In May, you decide whether to opt in early or wait. Opting in now gives you the time to build a couple of Skills before the rollout, write a SharePoint.md file for at least one site, and educate your team on what the floating Copilot button does. Waiting means the rollout lands cold and your team figures it out without context.

In June, you make the opt-out decision. Tenant-wide, scoped to specific sites, or do nothing. The decision needs to be made before mid-June because once the rollout starts, the floating Copilot button appears for every Copilot-licensed user. If your governance team is not ready, that is a problem.

In July, you start to see whether your team is actually getting value. The most common pattern I see in client tenants is that users discover the chat interface immediately, use it for ad-hoc questions, then stall when they want to do anything repeatable. The teams that get past the stall are the ones that have written at least one good SharePoint.md file and at least one working Skill before users start exploring. The teams that have not, end up with a tool that everyone tried twice and stopped using.

If you want help getting that pre-rollout foundation in place, the immersive workshop is a full day in your tenant with your team, building the context file, the first three Skills, and the adoption pattern. Otherwise, the launch readiness guide covers the same ground as a self-serve checklist.

Either way, the action this week is to read the admin guide for the opt-out rollout, make the opt-in or opt-out decision, and write at least the first version of a SharePoint.md for the site that has the highest concentration of Copilot-licensed users. That is the smallest investment that produces the biggest difference once the rollout lands.