Governance at a large scale is messy. Not because admins lack the skill, but because the environment keeps getting bigger, noisier, and more complex. SharePoint Sites that no one remembers, random permissions changes, 500GB sites created for a “temporary” project three years ago, guest users who never left, it all piles up fast.
And now with Copilot entering every corner of Microsoft 365, that problem doubles. AI-powered features mean more content, more agents, more automation, and honestly… more things to govern.
But this time, Microsoft seems to be taking governance seriously in a way we haven’t really seen before.
At Ignite 2025, they rolled out one of the biggest updates for SharePoint admins in years:
The SharePoint Admin Agent — now in Public Preview.
This isn’t just a new button in the Admin Center. It’s a whole shift toward AI-driven, policy-backed, governance automation.
So in this blog, I’m walking you through everything Microsoft announced, what it means, and how it changes life for admins managing tens of thousands of sites (or even just a handful).
What is SharePoint Admin Agent?
The SharePoint Admin Agent is Microsoft’s attempt to bring AI-powered, scalable governance directly into the SharePoint Admin Center.
It’s an intelligent assistant that constantly monitors your environment and helps you act before things break or before something risky spreads across your tenant.
Here’s what it actually does:
- Tracks inactive sites so you can clean them up instead of paying storage bills forever.
- Flags overshared content and permissions sprawl.
- Surfaces high-activity sites where governance risk grows faster.
- Automates cleanup tasks like archiving and adjusting access.
- Optimizes storage costs with insights and recommendations.
- Works alongside Copilot to “explain” your environment in plain language.
If you’ve been managing SharePoint for years, you know none of this is new as concepts — but it’s the first time these things are centralized, automated, and powered by natural language.
And yes, the Admin Agent is available only for organizations with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. So, if your organization has Copilot licenses, you can head over to the SharePoint Admin Center right now and check it out.
This is definitely part of the broader Copilot + governance vision Microsoft is pushing.
A New Experience Inside the SharePoint Admin Center
The Admin Agent isn’t something you need to deploy. It now shows up directly inside the SharePoint Admin Center (Public Preview) and acts like a governance hub.
What’s interesting is how tightly integrated it is with the “agentic skills” Microsoft has been rolling out. This feels like Microsoft putting the pieces together:
- Copilot intelligence
- Site metadata
- SharePoint Advanced Management
- Tenant-level insights
- Storage analytics
- Permissions reports
It’s all finally talking to each other. Let’s go through these skills one by one, because this is where the real magic is.
Agentic Skills in SharePoint: The Real Upgrade
Microsoft is taking content governance and SharePoint management to a whole new level with these new advanced, cloud-scale agentic skills. The best part? You interact with them using natural language. Seriously, you just talk to Copilot in the SharePoint admin center like you’re talking to a colleague.
Below are the incredible new skills, all available in public preview:
- The Permissions Skill
- The Lifecycle Skill
- The Storage Skill
- Catalog Management
- Agent Insights V2
The Permissions Skill – AI Oversharing Detection in SharePoint
Every admin has faced this nightmare:
Some sites have gone wild with sharing, no one knows who has access, and by the time you fix it, you’re two hours deep into permission inheritance.
The new Permissions Skill tries to fix exactly this. You can literally type:
Which sites in my tenant are overshared? Check the image for its response!
And Copilot responds with a clean, prioritized list!
- Not a 20-page export.
- Not a cryptic CSV.
A simple, structured answer. This skill analyzes your Site Permissions Report and identifies:
- Sites overshared with too many users
- High-risk sharing patterns
- Likely root causes (ex, broken inheritance, external sharing, too many owners)
Being able to generate these kinds of insights with a simple prompt is just incredible. It gives us back the control without the complexity. (P.S. If you want to dive deeper, keep an eye out for the dedicated Permissions skill page on Learn!)
Lifecycle Skill – AI Cleanup for Inactive SharePoint Sites
Inactive sites are one of the biggest hidden cost drivers in SharePoint. They consume storage, create governance inconsistencies, and introduce compliance risks.
Managing site lifecycles in SharePoint has always been a chore. Now, with the Lifecycle skill, it’s easy! You can ask Copilot to:
- List my high-storage inactive sites.
- Show me sites that haven’t been accessed in 90 days.
- Identify sites with low activity but high risk.
Copilot then gives you:
- A ranked list of top sites you should focus on
- A clear summary of why each site matters
- Recommendations on next steps
- An exportable detailed report
Even better, it helps enforce your lifecycle policies without jumping around multiple admin dashboards!
Storage Skill – SharePoint Storage Insights and Cleanup
SharePoint storage management is one of those things no one enjoys doing. You either over-provision, under-provision, or spend too much time looking at reports that don’t tell the full story.
The Storage skill makes SharePoint storage management simple, and get this smart!
You can literally ask Copilot to help you:
- Which sites are using the most space?
- Help me clean up SharePoint storage.
- Review my tenant storage settings.
- Guide me on expanding storage.
Check the image below to see how Copilot answers and simplifies everything!
The skill returns:
- A breakdown of top storage-heavy sites
- Recommendations to reduce usage
- Options to adjust tenant-level settings
- A quick view of your overall storage health
Copilot steps in, providing cleanup recommendations and instantly highlighting the sites that are consuming the most storage. With these kinds of actionable insights available through simple prompts, you can optimize your SharePoint environment in seconds.
I’m personally thrilled about this!
Catalog Management – SharePoint Catalog Management at Scale
This one is easily the most underrated update of all! Most SharePoint environments become unmanageable over time because of inconsistent metadata, siloed ownership, and unclear site categorization.
Catalog management works by organizing your sites into logical clusters using site properties (like department ownership, system metadata, custom properties) and user attributes (like roles and business groups).
This will be available directly in the SharePoint Admin Center in Public Preview.
Basically, SharePoint finally understands your content hierarchy the same way your organization does.
- Panoramic View: It gives admins a “map” of their content across different locales, roles, and business groups. It aligns your digital structure with your actual organizational ownership.
- Scalable Governance: By having content grouped logically, it becomes way easier to apply SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) policies, things like lifecycle policies, access reviews, and even controlling Copilot access at scale.
This makes it dramatically easier to:
- Apply lifecycle policies at scale
- Run access reviews with clear owners
- Scope Copilot access properly
- Manage permissions based on business roles
- Apply governance consistently
Agent Insights v2 –Agent Activity Insights for SharePoint
With AI and agents becoming a central part of how organizations work, a very important question is top of mind for all of us: What exactly are these agents doing with my Microsoft 365 content?
Until now, visibility into agent activity has not been great! Agent Insights v2 fixes that in a big way.
This is for the admins who need to monitor the sites being accessed by all types of agents within the organization. You can now navigate to the agent access insight report in the SharePoint Admin Center to get a comprehensive view of:
- All agents accessing SharePoint and OneDrive
- Agent access patterns
- Agent types (declarative, custom, etc.)
- Call volume
- Top 20 agents accessing sites
- Distribution across site templates
This is huge for organizations adopting AI at scale. Furthermore, for SharePoint-specific agents, we’re getting an enhanced report that lets admins view the detailed list of SharePoint agents recently created in a site, which is crucial for applying policies like restricted content discovery.
Microsoft also upgraded the SharePoint Agents Insights Report, giving admins the ability to see:
- SharePoint agents created inside each site
- Detailed agent lists
- Restricted content discovery policies
- Agent behavior visibility
This is going to matter even more as AI agents become embedded into workflows, apps, and processes.
The Future is Now
SharePoint has been around for over two decades. It’s grown from a document repository to a full-blown enterprise content platform. And now with Copilot, the volume and velocity of content management is exploding.
You can’t govern this world manually anymore! Microsoft seems to have realized that the only way forward is:
- AI to monitor
- AI to analyze
- AI to suggest
- AI to take action
And admins simply supervise and adjust. Honestly, wow, what a massive leap forward this is! The SharePoint Admin Agent and its related skills and features aren’t just minor updates; they represent a fundamental rethinking of how we manage content governance in the era of AI and Copilot.
The Bottom Line: SharePoint Governance Just Got Smarter
This Public Preview is one of the biggest governance updates Microsoft has released in a long time. Not because it adds new admin buttons, but because it changes how admins actually manage their environment.
SharePoint governance finally feels modern and, honestly, long overdue!
If you have those Copilot licenses, please do yourself a favor and dive into the SharePoint Admin Center to check out the public previews for the Permissions, Lifecycle, and Storage skills, as well as the new Catalog management options. And take confidence in the Agent Insights v2 now in GA.
What part of the SharePoint Admin Agent are you most excited about? Drop a comment below!
