We all know the frustration of searching for answers we can’t find, and legal professionals often spend too much time answering the same questions repeatedly.

To address these challenges, knowledge must be captured, presented, and made accessible so that individuals can quickly find answers on their own. Our legal team supporting marketing at Microsoft developed a SharePoint agent to help achieve just that.

Over the years, our Microsoft legal team, Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs, has developed rich, comprehensive, and curated content accessible through SharePoint. This includes guidelines, policies, summaries of laws, self-service tools, and more; all presented in a way that’s understandable for a non-legal audience. The marketing section alone of this SharePoint site drives approximately 8,000 page views per month, resulting in significant cost savings.

When Microsoft released SharePoint agents, it created an opportunity to do even more. Now, the marketing legal team’s newly developed SharePoint agent sits on top of its robust SharePoint site, adding the power of AI to answer legal questions and further unlocking the value of the existing resources in an elegant and streamlined way.

SharePoint agents are natural language AI assistants tailored to specific tasks and subject matter, providing trusted and precise answers and insights to support informed decision-making. Each SharePoint site includes an agent based on the site’s content, or, with a single click, users can create and share a custom agent that accesses only the information they select. 

“At Microsoft, AI is transforming how our legal teams operate, creating new opportunities to enhance workflow efficiency,” says Hossein Nowbar, chief legal officer and corporate vice president for Microsoft. “We’ve used SharePoint agents to improve the discoverability and delivery of legal resources, scale our legal advice, and gain critical insights into content usage. This saves considerable time for teams that need advice and those that provide it, all the while driving greater legal compliance and consistency.”

To determine whether using this SharePoint agent that we showed you in the demo is better than using search and navigation alone, the legal team ran a test consisting of six legal questions to which five participants were asked to find answers. For each question, the participants were timed using search and navigation alone and then using the new SharePoint agent.

In timing each participant, we stopped the clock either when they were satisfied that they had found the correct answer or at five minutes if they did not find the correct answer. In the first test, using search and navigation, participants only found the answer 83.3% of the time, leaving 16.7% of the questions unanswered. Using the SharePoint agent, participants found thecorrect answer 100% of the time.

Not only were participants more successful at finding the correct answers, but they also found the answers much more quickly using the SharePoint agent. Participants found and confirmed the answer in under 1 minute 46.7% of the time and found and confirmed the answer in under two minutes 100% of the time. On average, participants found the correct answers 2.97 times faster using the SharePoint agent compared to using site search and navigation.

We know from experience and feedback that when people can find answers to their legal questions quickly and easily using self-service resources, the legal department can focus on more complex issues. A SharePoint agent is an essential tool for any organization seeking to harness the power of AI to make answers readily available, reduce the need for live support, and bring their existing content to life.

“The Microsoft Legal team was an ideal early adopter of SharePoint agents due to their well-curated content,” says CJ Tan, principal group product manager for SharePoint agents. “They recognized the value of an agent in scaling support and handling easily addressable questions, allowing the team to focus on more complex, unique business scenarios. Instead of learning how to build an agent, they could concentrate on helping marketers surface and use the right content for their business needs. As subject matter experts, they were also well-positioned to validate and test their agent before publishing it on their SharePoint site.”

As we build our array of Microsoft 365 agents, we continue to look to our internal experiences to guide the product’s evolution for our customers. We are exploring new ways for SharePoint agents to be shared and extensible across a variety of content sources. Lastly, we know that governance controls and analytics are critical as organizations introduce new features within their workflow and are excited about the roadmap for additional insights available and coming soon from Copilot Analytics, SharePoint Advanced Management, and SharePoint Purview.

“Organizations rely on SharePoint, creating more than two million sites and uploading more than two billion files daily,” says Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work @ Microsoft. “By giving every SharePoint site an agent, employees can quickly tap into this massive knowledge base with a single click.”

As with any new product and technology innovation, we’re focused on education and customer learnings. At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in May, we will host a variety of sessions on SharePoint agents to go deeper into business use cases and best practices for creation and usage.

Connect with author Brent Sanders on LinkedIn.

Here are some of our top tips for getting started with SharePoint agents at your company:

• Prepare your content: Ensure SharePoint content is highly curated, accurate, complete, and unique. This helps agents provide more accurate and relevant responses.​ Organize content into smaller, manageable sets to improve response accuracy. For example, using smaller document libraries with fewer files and minimal graphics.
• Maintain your content: Updates made to content sources are reflected in the SharePoint agent responses so ensure content sources are maintained. Also regularly check file permissions are accurate based on the agent audience.
• Use ready-made agents: Each SharePoint site comes with a ready-made agent scoped to the content of the site. SharePoint admins can approve this agent to help jumpstart usage. Use the communication kit to help announce SharePoint agent availability and increase awareness.
• Identify where custom SharePoint agents can add value: SharePoint agents can be grounded to specific sites, folders, or files. Collaborate with business stakeholders to identify business objectives and priorities to create specialized expert and informational agents.
• Target 20 or less content sources: If you are selecting a site or folder, you can have any number of files underneath. However, when selecting items individually, we recommend capping 20 sites, folders, or files for best results.
• Encourage users to provide feedback: Users can use a “thumbs up or thumbs down” to give feedback on the SharePoint agents response. This feedback can be used to continuously improve content and enhance response accuracy over time.
• Measure the impact: We have a variety of analytics resources to help measure adoption and usage including; the SharePoint document library, SharePoint Advanced Management, Microsoft Purview, and additional reports coming to Copilot Analytics.

For organizations with at least 50 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, any employee in the organization will be able to create, share, and interact with SharePoint agents. Qualifying organizations will receive 10,000 queries per month through June 30, 2025. Learn more about SharePoint agents.

• Explore the SharePoint agents Adoption page to learn more about implementing and using SharePoint agents.
• Learn about using ready-made-agents that are automatically scoped to the content on your site.
• Start your journey with SharePoint agents.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

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