SharePoint Turns 25—and Its ‘AI in SharePoint’ Rebrand Raises Bigger Questions Than It Answers

My big takeaway from SharePoint turning 25: "Knowledge Agent" is now "AI in SharePoint" and is the latest Microsoft AI capability to embrace Anthropic's Claude alongside OpenAI's models.

Is this yet another rename for the Copilot age? Well, yes. But in some ways "Knowledge Agent" did not make sense when set against other agentic experiences in SharePoint or Copilot. For me, the interesting aspect is not that "Knowledge Agent" got rebranded, but why it didn't get renamed to "Copilot in SharePoint".

The new Claude dependency is somewhat less clear. Right now, I'm genuinely unsure what happens to your previous "Knowledge Agent" service if you were part of that preview but you have opted out of allowing Anthropic as a data sub-processor or you operate in a region where that is not on by default. Did your testing of these preview features just stall out? The documentation does not give an indicator of this possibility so if you're in that position, please leave a comment.

What makes sense is not that existing "Knowledge Agent" features currently need Claude but that new announced features like SharePoint Skills will. This will allow you to define processes in the scope of SharePoint, and while it's currently unconfirmed whether these parallel Claude Skills in anything other than name, they are the capability that makes the most sense as being dependent on using Claude over GPT-5. But if this is the case, this leads to another question. If Claude Skills integration is coming to SharePoint, what about the core Microsoft 365 Copilot or other agents?

At the follow-up AMA after the SharePoint 25 announcements, it was acknowledged that this Claude dependency might cause problems for some organizations and it is an issue that will need to be resolved before "AI in SharePoint" goes GA. This though adds to a growing list of to-do items for this now 6-months-in-preview feature; not least of which is the fact that its core library organization via autofill capability to help wrangle your data into the AI age is absolutely not scalable to big existing datasets.

The direction of these features is exciting. I firmly believe the key to Microsoft being able to fully leverage its existing data estate to differentiate Copilot lays within SharePoint. But simply renaming an existing feature does not reset the ticking clock on it becoming a forever preview; and the more high profile the feature, the more impactful that preview label becomes.

First posted on Linkedin on 03/05/2026 -> View Linkedin Post Here