Table of Contents
SharePoint Skills in Copilot Won’t Impress SharePoint Administrators
Message Center notification MC1147976 (4 September 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 501427) apparently heralds a new era of AI-enhanced administrative assistance for Microsoft 365 workloads. The post describes two skills to assist administrators to perform tasks in the SharePoint Admin Center:
- Step-by-step task guidance: Copilot provides clear instructions to help administrators complete common tasks.
- Multi-variable site search: Copilot enables administrators to search for sites using multiple conditions, such as inactivity, external sharing, and size, and suggests recommended actions.
The change will roll out in general availability worldwide from October 6, 2025. The capability showed up in my targeted release tenant, so I thought that I’d ask Copilot to help me to manage SharePoint Online, especially because of the promise that Copilot will help “both new and experienced admins complete tasks faster.” Alas, the skills exhibited by Copilot didn’t live up to expectations.
SharePoint Skills and the Promise of AI
Largely because of Teams, SharePoint Online administrators have many more sites to manage than in the past. It therefore makes perfect sense to apply artificial intelligence to help administrators detect potential problems that might be lurking or to find sites that need attention.
I started by asking Copilot to find which sites have most files. That seems like a pretty simple question for AI to answer, but it’s not and Copilot couldn’t answer, saying that it was unable to search for that criterion (Figure 1).
Hmmm… Such a response seems at odds with Microsoft’s promise that Copilot will strengthen governance at scale by allowing administrators to “ask complex questions and receive actionable results, making it easier to detect risks and enforce lifecycle policies across large environments.” Knowing which sites store most files seems like a fundamental piece of information from a data lifecycle perspective.
SharePoint Skills Need Data
The root of the problem is likely to be the data available for Copilot to reason over. All the Microsoft 365 admin centers present sets of data relevant to a workload through their UX. The Exchange admin center deals with mailboxes and other mail-enabled objects; the Entra admin center deals with directory objects; the Teams admin center deals with Teams policies and other team-related information, and so on. The information in these data sets is whatever’s accessible through and presented by the admin centers.
In the case of my question, the SharePoint Online admin center doesn’t have the data to respond because there’s nowhere in its UX that surfaces the file count for sites. In fact, although the SharePoint admin center reports the total number of files in the tenant, finding the file count for a site takes some effort unless you use the slightly outdated information that’s available through the site usage Graph API.
On the other hand, when I asked Copilot to “Find sites without a sensitivity label that have more than 1GB of storage,” the AI could respond because the storage used by each site is available in the SharePoint admin center (Figure 2).
Delivering the Promise
Tenant administrators have a lot to do, so any tool that can help is welcome. This is a first-run implementation, so it’s bound to have flaws. Copilot can offer limited help that novice administrators might welcome while not offering much to anyone with some experience. Microsoft is likely to iterate its Copilot assistance for SharePoint administrators to improve, deepen, and enhance what Copilot can offer, but I fear it will take several attempts before the promise of AI is delivered.
What SharePoint Skills Would Help Administrators?
This raises the question of what kind of assistance Microsoft 365 administrators might want AI tools incorporated into the admin centers to deliver? To me, the answer lies in bringing information together from available sources to answer questions faster than a human being can.
For example, SharePoint advanced management includes a change history report. It would be nice if an administrator could ask Copilot to review all changes made to SharePoint over the last month to report changes like sensitivity label updates for any site that generate label mismatches for documents. The information is available in audit logs and SharePoint document libraries, but it takes effort to bring everything together in a concise and understandable format. AI should be capable of answering questions like this instead of simple queries against site properties, which is all that Copilot can do today, and that is hardly a great example of AI in action.
Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
That’s the problem with Microsoft’s “AI” integrations. It is just LLM trying to work with some text data it seems. We had a demo about Copilot in Intune and they were excited to show us how you can ask Copilot to show you that you can just click on a menu and see anyway and not crammed into a small sidebar. If that was free, ok, but it is a pricey license of such a basic things just re-phrasing information that is already available in UI. It is not AI. But it has a price tag of AI (well, price tag of an actual AI would be astronomic).
Hi Tony. For what it’s worth, looks like this has gotten better recently. I just tried “which site stores the most files” and CoPilot returned the top five sites with URLs, date of creation, and the number of files stored therein.
As always, thanks for these great posts. I always learn a lot.
Thanks. I’m still not getting much value from the skills that Copilot delivers for the admin centers. I want Microsoft to do more… more than any reasonably competent administrator can do without much effort.