Copilot in SharePoint Returns… With a Very Different Rollout Strategy

Copilot in SharePoint is back! And everyone will be previewing its capabilities from June.

MC1311968 confirms that "AI in SharePoint", a new naming for Knowledge Agent that was announced during SharePoint 25th birthday celebrations back in March will now be known as "Copilot in SharePoint". That's three different names in eight months - but it also the name that makes most sense.

What makes slightly less sense is that this public preview will be turned on automatically for everyone in June. The AI in SharePoint preview will become opt-out rather than opt-in and will become available for all Microsoft 365 Copilot users running on the GPT-5.4 Reasoning model by default (presumably for those who have not turned on Anthropic models).

Copilot in SharePoint is a true update in capabilities that I have been enjoying exploring. But in the context of a product ecosystem where there are existing well-trodden and highly publicized paths for tech-curious to preview new capabilities (like the Frontier program), the addition of the opt-out preview as a feature deployment route is confusing.

While pushing preview features out by default is not unheard of, it is unusual. And, as far as I know, even if a preview is turned on for everyone, the specific preview terms and restrictions still apply. The biggest of these to be aware of is that Microsoft has no commitment to future supportability of the feature.

This leads to an important question: What is driving this strategy?

If Copilot in SharePoint is truly a set of capabilities that still need to be under preview as they are still being finalized, isn't this what the Frontier program is for? And if you're pretty certain Copilot in SharePoint is ready for mass consumption, why keep the preview label at all? Afterall, SharePoint is not Gmail!

If this is a unique situation, we can probably all muddle through. But if this is the start of an approach where the lines between released and preview for AI features get blurred, the governance conversation about Copilot is about to get a lot more complicated.

First posted on Linkedin 05/17/2026 → View Linkedin Post Here