Microsoft has announced knowledge bases in SharePoint, rolling out now in Frontier preview.
Any SharePoint site can have one, including the sites behind Teams channels and Microsoft 365 Groups. Team members contribute email, messages, meetings and existing site content, and Copilot compiles it into interlinked markdown pages that people can read and agents use as grounding. Knowledge bases can be created and curated through Copilot in SharePoint and the new Autopilot.
The challenge of information access for Copilot is usually framed through a security lens. Whether or not a random Copilot prompt can reveal the CEO's salary has been keeping IT pros awake at night for the last three years. But there’s a more insidious part of the data access problem. Permissions and sensitivity labels decide what Copilot is allowed to see. They don’t decide whether it sees enough.
Business reality is often a combination of what the user knows and what the agent sees. The user holds tacit knowledge and organizational memory outside the view of our AI tools. The agent sees files, email, chats and meetings that the user may have only quickly skimmed or completely forgotten about. These overlap some of the time, but neither is the whole picture, and the gap between them is where wrong answers come from.
Knowledge bases are aimed squarely at that gap, and in my view that’s exactly the right problem to be working on. My hope is that they become the place where what people know gets added to what Copilot can already see. But this puts at least some of the weight of curation back on users versus the early promises that Copilot would just understand your organization based on the data it can see.
And it's those promises that came into focus for me when I read that, during its preview phase at least, these knowledge bases are going to be a usage-based billing (UBB) feature. A curated dataset of team knowledge makes a huge amount of sense. Whether it is justified as a chargeable add-on given its critical value to Copilot's understanding of business reality is an open question.
If you’re in Frontier and trying this, what do you hope it will capture that Copilot couldn’t already reliably see?
First posted on Linkedin on 10/16/2026 → View Linkedin Post Here