News

Microsoft Marks SharePoint’s 25th Anniversary With New AI-Driven Building and Governance Tools

• By Chris Paoli
• March 03, 2026

Microsoft recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of its SharePoint collaboration platform by unveiling a set of advanced AI-infused features, a refreshed user experience and enhanced governance capabilities designed to help enterprises scale secure AI adoption.

 
The company’s milestone update, announced on March 3, 2026, by Adam Harmetz, corporate vice president of SharePoint and OneDrive, together with Jeff Taper, president of collaborative apps and platforms, detailed in a series of blogs that the updates span three major areas: AI, new visual interface and enhanced governance tools. These changes underscore SharePoint’s transition into an AI-centric knowledge platform as it enters its next quarter-century of use in modern digital workplaces. These updates aim to help organizations scale AI deployments with built-in security measures from the get-go.

From Prompts to Working Solutions
Central to the update is what Microsoft is calling AI in SharePoint -- a natural language-driven experience that allows users to describe what they want to build and have SharePoint generate a structured plan spanning sites, pages, lists and libraries. The company said the feature replaces the previously previewed Knowledge Agent, integrating those capabilities natively into the platform under the M365 Copilot license.

According to Harmetz, organizations will also be able to define custom AI skills -- packages of business logic, governance rules and terminology -- to shape how AI behaves within their environments. "These skills act as active guardrails through execution, not after the fact," Harmetz wrote, describing them as a mechanism for ensuring built solutions stay aligned with organizational standards rather than relying on post-hoc review.

Site creation via natural language is scheduled to arrive at the end of March through the AI in SharePoint preview. Page editing, library organization and list management are available now through the same preview program.

Microsoft also disclosed that the initial rollout of advanced AI in SharePoint relies on Anthropic's Claude. "Based on evals, testing, and capacity, our initial rollout of the advanced AI capabilities in SharePoint relies on Anthropic's Claude," Harmetz wrote, noting that some customers may need to opt in to allow Anthropic as a sub-processor under Microsoft Online Services terms depending on their location. The company said it plans to address that requirement before general availability.

Knowledge as an Active Asset
In his accompanying post, Teper framed the anniversary update as a broader shift in how enterprises should think about the content stored in SharePoint. The platform now serves more than 1 billion users annually, with over 2 billion files uploaded and 2 million sites created each day, according to Microsoft.

Teper wrote that SharePoint is now the top grounding source for Microsoft 365 Copilot, and that organizations need to treat their stored knowledge accordingly -- arguing that in an AI-era, "knowledge can no longer remain passive, as it needs to be activated." Major customers including Takeda, Mars and Hertz were cited as organizations already placing SharePoint's content management capabilities at the core of their AI strategies.

Governance Gets an Upgrade
The governance side of the update carries significant implications for IT administrators. Microsoft is adding new skills to the SharePoint Admin Agent -- first introduced at Ignite 2025 and covered previously by Redmond -- including capabilities for analyzing tenant-wide permissions, flagging oversharing risks and identifying ownerless or inactive sites. Storage management insights are also being added, helping admins surface cleanup actions and govern pay-as-you-go billing.

Harmetz said the goal extends beyond feature delivery. "Secure-by-design governance in SharePoint is critical to every Copilot & agent deployment," he wrote, positioning the new controls as a prerequisite for enterprise AI adoption rather than an optional complement to it.

That governance framing aligns with a broader pattern in Microsoft's enterprise AI rollouts. The company has repeatedly stressed that AI adoption at scale requires security controls to move in lockstep with capability expansion -- a theme that has surfaced across Copilot updates, the Microsoft Purview AI Hub and, most recently, the Microsoft Entra Agent ID preview at Build 2025, which extended identity governance to non-human AI actors.

Departmental billing for Microsoft 365 Backup, which allows organizations to allocate backup costs by team or geographic unit, is now generally available as part of the same release wave.

What's Next
Microsoft has also launched a two-week SharePoint Hackathon alongside the anniversary, inviting users across skill levels to build on the new platform capabilities. Six additional live streams from product teams are scheduled to run through mid-March.

Organizations interested in the new experiences can opt into the AI in SharePoint public preview here.