SharePoint AI in 2025: A guide to features and limitations

AI is popping up everywhere these days, and Microsoft’s SharePoint is no exception. For 2025, Microsoft has woven AI directly into SharePoint, aiming to turn it from a simple file cabinet into a smart assistant for your company’s documents and data. This push, which we’ll call SharePoint AI, is all about smoothing out workflows and helping you find the valuable information tucked away in your files.

But what can it actually do, and is it the right move for your business? This guide gives you a straight-up look at SharePoint AI. We’ll walk through its main features, how you might use them day-to-day, and just as importantly, the limitations you should know about before you go all-in. We’ll also look at a different way to think about AI so you’re not locked into just one company’s tools.

What is SharePoint AI?

SharePoint AI isn’t one single thing you buy. It’s more of a catch-all term for the different AI features Microsoft has added to SharePoint and the broader Microsoft 365 world. The main idea is to help you and your company make sense of all the information you have stored away. It does this by trying to understand, sort, and automate work tied to the mountains of files in SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook. The key pieces of SharePoint AI are:

• SharePoint Copilot: Think of this as an AI helper that lives inside your Microsoft 365 apps. You can ask it in plain English to help write documents, summarize long reports, or find information for you.
• SharePoint agents: These are like specialized, mini AI assistants you can build with a few clicks. You can set them up to be experts on a specific SharePoint site or library. For instance, an agent could be trained only on your HR documents to answer employee questions, keeping the answers relevant and secure. Microsoft has explained that these agents act as subject matter experts based only on the content they can access.
• SharePoint Premium: This is the next step up from what used to be called Microsoft Syntex. It’s a more advanced platform for managing content that uses AI for things like processing documents, assembling new ones from templates, handling eSignatures, and automatically applying security rules. You can learn more about it on the Microsoft Adoption site.

All these tools are built to work inside the Microsoft 365 environment, meaning they respect the security permissions and data rules you already have in place.

A breakdown of key SharePoint AI features

Let’s dig into what SharePoint AI can actually do for your team. These features go beyond simple automation and change how you work with your company’s knowledge.

SharePoint AI for content creation and summarization

Right off the bat, SharePoint AI can help you write faster. With Copilot, you can get a first draft of an article, project outline, or website page just by giving it a simple instruction. It can find information in other documents you have saved in SharePoint to create something new, which can save a lot of time on research. It’s also great for summarizing long documents, meeting notes, or email chains, giving you the highlights in just a few moments.

SharePoint AI Copilot feature for content creation.

Intelligent document processing and automation with SharePoint AI

SharePoint Premium and AI Builder can automate some of the most repetitive, content-heavy tasks. These tools can look at documents like invoices or contracts, pull out key details (like names, dates, or amounts), and organize that information in SharePoint. This whole process, called document processing, gets rid of boring data entry and keeps everything consistent. From there, you can use Power Automate to start a workflow, like sending an invoice to a manager for approval or flagging a contract that’s about to expire.

Automated document processing workflow with SharePoint AI.

Advanced SharePoint AI search and knowledge discovery

The standard search bar isn’t always helpful, especially when you can’t recall the exact file name or keyword. SharePoint AI improves search by figuring out what you actually mean. It uses natural language to find not just files, but specific answers hidden inside your documents. This makes it much easier for people to get the information they need without digging through a pile of search results.

Custom SharePoint AI agents for specific tasks

Maybe the most interesting feature is the ability to create your own SharePoint agents. These are AI assistants you can tailor to specific sets of information. For example, you could build an agent for your HR onboarding site that only answers questions using official policy documents. Or you could make one for a project site that can give you the latest status on every task. According to Microsoft, you can set these up quickly, and they automatically follow your existing permissions, so they’re both useful and secure.

Practical SharePoint AI use cases in 2025

Okay, that’s the theory. But how does this look in a real-world job? Here’s how different teams could use SharePoint AI to make their work easier, based on examples from Microsoft and industry stories.

Department	Use Case	How SharePoint AI Helps	Key Features Used
Finance	Expense Report Automation	Scans uploaded receipts, pulls out info like vendor and price, sorts expenses, and flags any that don’t follow company rules.	SharePoint Premium (Document Processing), Power Automate
HR	Employee Onboarding	A dedicated AI agent on the new hire site answers common questions about benefits or IT setup, using only approved HR files.	SharePoint agents, Copilot
Sales	Proposal Generation	Copilot helps write a new sales proposal by grabbing key details, customer success stories, and product info from past proposals stored on a sales team site.	Copilot, AI-Powered Search
Legal	Contract Management	As new contracts are uploaded, it automatically sorts them, pulls out key dates and clauses, and adds the right retention labels for legal compliance.	SharePoint Premium (Content Assembly, Governance)
Operations	Frontline Safety Q&A	An engineering firm gives field workers instant mobile access to safety manuals. Workers can ask questions and get immediate answers from official guides. This is based on the Amey customer story.	SharePoint agents

The limitations and challenges of native SharePoint AI

While SharePoint AI has a lot going for it, it’s important to be realistic about its limitations before you jump in with both feet. For a lot of companies, these issues can be deal-breakers.

The "walled garden" limitation of SharePoint AI

The biggest catch with SharePoint AI is that it pretty much only works within the Microsoft world. Its smarts come from files in SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook. But what if your most important company knowledge lives somewhere else? If your support team uses Zendesk, your engineers live in Confluence and Jira, and your marketing team works out of Google Docs, SharePoint’s AI can’t see any of it. This leaves you with big blind spots where your AI is missing a huge chunk of your company’s brain.

The walled garden limitation of SharePoint AI.

SharePoint AI can get complicated (and expensive)

Getting the best out of SharePoint AI isn’t always easy or cheap. Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is an add-on license that costs $30 per user, per month, and that’s on top of your existing Microsoft 365 subscription. Some of the more advanced features in SharePoint Premium are pay-as-you-go, which can make your monthly bill a bit of a surprise. On top of that, building truly custom AI helpers often means learning tools like Power Automate and Copilot Studio, which can be a lot for teams without a dedicated developer.

SharePoint AI relies on perfectly organized data

An AI is only as smart as the information it learns from. If your SharePoint is a mess of disorganized sites, inconsistent file names, and confusing permissions, the AI’s answers will be just as messy. To work well, SharePoint AI needs you to put in the time upfront to clean up and organize your content. If you don’t, you’re just building a fancy system on a shaky foundation, which will probably make the existing confusion even worse.

Pro Tip: Before you roll out any AI tool, do an honest check of where your company knowledge is stored. An AI built on messy, siloed information will give you messy, siloed answers.

A more flexible approach: connecting all your knowledge with eesel AI

The "walled garden" problem is a big one for companies that use a mix of different tools. This is where tools that aren’t tied to one system, like eesel AI, come in handy. Instead of making you move all your company knowledge into SharePoint, eesel works like a smart layer that connects to your tools, wherever they happen to be.

eesel AI connects right into the help desks, wikis, and chat tools you already use, creating a single source of truth for your whole company. This means you can build AI assistants that pull information from past support tickets in Zendesk, technical documents in Confluence, and project discussions in Slack, all at once.

eesel as a flexible alternative to native SharePoint AI.

Here’s a quick comparison:

Feature	Native SharePoint AI	eesel AI
Knowledge Sources	Limited to Microsoft 365 (SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams).	Connects to over 100 apps including Zendesk, Intercom, Slack, Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and more.
Implementation	Needs multiple licenses and can be tricky to set up with tools like Power Platform or Copilot Studio.	One platform with straightforward pricing. Easy, no-code setup using plain English.
Flexibility	Designed to keep you inside the Microsoft ecosystem.	Works with whatever tools you use. It adds to your existing help desk, chat tools, and wikis without making you switch.
Testing	You usually roll it out right after setting it up.	Has a simulation mode to test the AI’s accuracy on your past data before you go live, so you can launch with confidence.

With its multi-bot approach, eesel lets you create separate, focused bots for different teams. Each bot learns from its own specific mix of tools. An IT bot can learn from Jira and Confluence, while a customer support bot learns from Zendesk and your public FAQ page. This breaks down the information barriers that hold back native SharePoint AI.

The future of workplace AI is integrated

So, what’s the bottom line? In 2025, SharePoint AI is a pretty powerful tool if your team lives and breathes Microsoft. It offers some great ways to automate tasks and get more out of your Microsoft 365 data.

But its usefulness is held back by the fact that it can’t see outside its own bubble. For companies where important knowledge is scattered across different platforms, a native solution just isn’t going to cut it. The future of AI at work isn’t about picking one perfect platform, but about connecting all of them.

To build an AI that really understands your business, you need something that can pull from your entire set of tools. That’s how you get rid of information silos, give people complete answers, and truly tap into your company’s collective brainpower.

Get started with an AI that connects to everything

Don’t let your AI get stuck in one platform. See how eesel AI can bring together all your knowledge from SharePoint, Zendesk, Slack, and everywhere else. You can book a demo or start a free trial today to build an AI assistant that works across your entire company.