Your intranet of tomorrow: Friendly, Content-aware, and AI ready
Microsoft
AMER | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Discover how working with files, sharing/collaborating, and creating beautiful sites and pages is easier than ever. With Copilot in SharePoint, your content, pages and sites are grounded in the data that matters most. We’ll focus on recent innovation and announcements across SharePoint agents, content AI, sites, pages, and new creation experiences.
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Without further ado, we're very lucky on the Americas Festival today. We have Mark Kashman from Microsoft joining us, so I think Mark is available. Are you there, Mark? I am.
Hello, hello. Hi. Brilliant.
So, really lucky. Wonderful. You're joining us today.
We've seen some of this content already. It's incredible. There's some great stuff coming out for SharePoint.
So, without further ado, I'm going to hand over to you, Mark. Thank you so much. Awesome.
Thank you, Gemma. Yeah, absolutely. And obviously, wonderful to see the activity in the chat.
I had caught the last two presentations to just see how people are using SharePoint, not just SharePoint itself, but pulling in features from Viva and leveraging a lot of the features with email. But I think most importantly, just to see how people are working together across the different spectrums of different roles, pulling in information worldwide. It's so critical to be able to let people have a voice in their space within the internet, but also to then enable the different ways that people like to work with each other.
So, I thought we would take about 20 minutes, and then we'll jump into lots of Q&A across the whole panel, so definitely flood in any questions that you have that are sparked with the slides and the information that I'm going to share here. But just wanted to show you, if you haven't seen some of the new features and some of the ways that Microsoft is shaping SharePoint and other technologies to support your internet, we're really going to go through a whirlwind of what is SharePoint today and a little tease of what's coming tomorrow. So, let's jump into it.
My name is Mark Kashman. I'm your Senior Product Manager. My job today, though, is to highlight SharePoint in the context of the internet and to much enjoy being here at the SharePoint Internet Festival.
So, if you have seen SharePoint recently, which I'm getting at this event, a lot of people have, there's a notion where we're really plumbing a lot of the value of SharePoint into SharePoint itself, but also across the spectrum of all the apps that you would use in the broader context of the internet. How you communicate, how you collaborate, how you manage your content, how you do a lot of things, both big and small, but the intent of this visual is to showcase all of how SharePoint is the content service, underpinning a lot of the new applications and, of course, a lot of the existing applications and services behind the scenes. So, new applications like Loop and Whiteboard, obviously, the elevation of Office 365 Video to Stream, to FYI, it's becoming ClipChamp, if you saw that, so value of video throughout your internet, and just the breadth of how it is that we're building into Microsoft Teams, we're leveraging and building into Microsoft Viva, a lot of brands, a lot of value, and it all culminates into one of the newest things that we're doing with Copilot.
So, there's a lot that you can do with AI before Copilot, and Copilot really brings it into this next era of enabling you to create and collaborate in ways that you've never really maybe thought of before. And if you haven't used Copilot or you're wanting to think about it and pilot it, there's, of course, a lot that it brings directly into SharePoint and directly related to the SharePoint intranet. So, in this era of AI, not to only focus on Copilot because that's certainly a big new element, but it really is carrying forward a lot of what you've probably thought of SharePoint and are using it today, which we're very grateful for, as a communication tool, as a content collaboration and content management tool.
And in this era of AI, certainly one of the things that we all hope to get out of, whether it's Copilot or just the way that you build your common business flows and to automate a lot of what you do, to segment and automate in the context of you getting more work done without really getting in the way of something that you have to do manually. If you have to do something more than once, definitely look into automating it. The breadth of this, and I loved hearing in the last session the focus of Viva Engage as one element to pull the knowledge in.
There's all of that kind of grounded, hardcore type of content, your sites, your page, your news, the flexibility of all that. But the real value is just people talking and how it is that they interact with the content, both in what they provide and how they speak and share and link to things, but also some of the behaviors that they have to be able to like and post and activate in terms of views and to track and manage that so that you can make sure that your intranet is dynamic and has all of the right content for all of the right regions and all of the right reasons. But it really is knowledge.
If you have a good, healthy intranet with a lot of people being able to participate and wanting to participate, you're also growing knowledge. So knowledge is key and never stop sharing. Sharing is caring.
So let's share a little bit of what SharePoint looks like today. One of the elements that you've probably heard of, and this will just give you a visual, is how you can make your pages more dynamic and you have a lot more control over the page canvas itself. This is just a short visual to show you the new flexible sections.
It's really easy to create a lot of different types of sections, but flexible sections let you do a lot of visual work where you can overlay items. You can use different looks and feels for your images. You can overlap the images, overlap text web parts.
You can bring in different elements across the page and really move things around so that it starts to look not only how you want it to look, but it looks engaging. It looks professional. It looks something that isn't SharePoint from five or ten years ago.
It really is an element that is making you look great as a communicator, making it more engaging as a consumption person, people who are reading your news, visiting your pages to get the information that they need, and hopefully in a way that is then engaging for them to be able to share. Another new element right alongside the flexible layouts is this context of an editorial web part, but if you read into the editorial part of it, it's just another tool to be able to put forth your information in an engaging way, and you'll have a lot of different looks and feels. So as this gives you a sense of what you can do to customize the different editorial cards, all three of these on the screen are editorial cards, and you can drop them in, and especially in a flexible layout, you can drag them around.
The real focus is your information links and, of course, imagery, and to be able to turn things on and off and make the look and feel a little bit change, you can see that there's a lot of different ways to represent your content, and you have that control so that you can make it exciting and engaging and, of course, actionable. Click here to do something. This is a new maybe news item or a new project or campaign that you're rolling out with inside your intranet, and it's just a way to highlight that and then get right to it.
So beyond that, if we start to look at how you can work with each other, there's a new element that's really been within Microsoft Office for quite some time, and it's really great to see it coming to the SharePoint canvas. It has also come to the Microsoft List canvas, and it's within, of course, all of the Office applications, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and what I mean is the element of actually working together on the canvas, the canvas being often for the intranet that is SharePoint powered, the SharePoint page. So what you're seeing here is co-authoring across multiple web parts and multiple layouts and sections, and, you know, you can see where your colleagues are working, and if you've ever done a quarterly business review readout or something that's an advanced, you know, getting ready for a campaign or you're just building out a page of information about your team, working on it together during a meeting or asynchronously, certainly there's a lot of different ways to get things done.
But what you see here is you can see who's working in the page. You can, of course, chat with them, and then you can see what part of the page they're working on, and it's great, of course, if you have a context of who's going to work on what, and then you can see it here. But imagine you're creating a page, and then you invite your manager or your leadership team to polish it up and give their final critique on it.
You can do that in real time, and, you know, it does a really great job of saving things, making sure of error correction if people are stepping over each other. There's a lot in place to make co-authoring in SharePoint, and, again, at the page level, a really great and unique experience. So moving into just a little bit of what is this co-pilot thing and what is it bringing to SharePoint, there's a number of different things when you think of co-pilot in SharePoint, co-pilot in OneDrive, co-pilot in Teams.
There's a lot to summarize and aggregate and, you know, help you create content. This example is going to take you through a little bit of a long form to show you what it's like to create a page with co-pilot. You've already got a lot of content that exists.
This will take you through leveraging a template, but also materials that already exist so that you can accelerate, pulling maybe a spec sheet that's going to be into a pretty SharePoint page. What you see here, I always like to think of this as a Mad Libs. If you know what that is in the United States, you fill in the words to make silly sentences.
In this context, you're actually telling it, I want to make a page about the subject X. It's going to be featuring a summary. I can choose content like you see here that's actually going to then get pulled into the page as it gets created. So this is a little bit of a long look at it, but it is in real time to give you a sense of what is co-pilot doing here.
It's looking at your sentence structure that tells it what you want to create. It's also going to go into the content that you pointed it to and start to pull that information and literally from the top down, start to build out your page. If I was doing this in real time for real, I literally would put my hands up like this and the demo is doing itself.
I've done this a number of times for different things that I do internally to basically share information. There's existing content. There's formatting that's being done for you.
It's even changing the background of the section layout. It's pulling in the meeting notes because this video in this particular example is a meeting that was recorded in Teams. Teams, of course, is storing that file, that video file in SharePoint.
So it has native access to the script, the team members, all of the different information that you then maybe want to put into a nice readout or a page that's a leave behind. Hey, thanks for coming to the meeting. Here are the highlights, the main documents, and the people who participated.
Again, we haven't gotten to me touching back onto the keyboard in essence until that last click which basically says, looks great, keep it. And then you've seen a ton of demos and a lot of instances today of how you can take it further. It's just a SharePoint page at this point and I can go in and I can add web parts.
I can change some of the backgrounds. I can make things look exactly how I want them. But it did a lot of the lifting and aggregation of all the different content for me.
And it really is a real value to be able to have that co-pilot who is the co-part. You're the pilot, it's the co-pilot, and it's great to have it do a little bit of that work for you. And then you get to fly the plane all the way to the end.
So let's take a look at the other elements of co-pilot that's pretty significant in terms of what the SharePoint team is working on. These are SharePoint agents and these are things that you build within SharePoint. You sometimes don't have to build it at all because it's there by default.
If you're investing in Microsoft 365 co-pilot, this is a component that comes with it. There's also a licensing model that you can do as a pay-as-you-go for people that you don't want to fully license with co-pilot. But I thought I would give four examples of what this looks like, of course, in SharePoint.
If you open up the co-pilot right-hand pane, there's an element of using co-pilot, which is what you see here. But there's also the building co-pilot. You get a co-pilot SharePoint agent per site, but then you can go and create agents for a variety of different use cases.
And the important part is you can ground it to the specific content that you want to point it to. So site-wide content, you've got pages, you've got document libraries. You, of course, have the site itself.
Coming in the future, as noted by our SharePoint agent lead, is the ability to then ground it to lists. But the value you're really doing is giving somebody a window in to be able to ask questions in a natural way to then get that information. And if they're in SharePoint, this is the user experience.
They'd be able to see the SharePoint agent. They'd be able to ask it questions. And, of course, if you have multiple agents, they can switch in between them.
There's a lot that we're doing to be able to put the agents themselves as more of a web part on the page. And that's a little bit of something that's being worked on in the future. But to skip through just a little of the experience when you create a SharePoint agent, but use it outside of SharePoint, this is in Teams.
Whether you're in a Teams chat, a Teams meeting, and coming soon to the channel experience, you can actually copy-paste the link to the SharePoint agent and have it become a part of your conversation, which is really giving you that ability to ask a question within the context of your chat that goes all the way back to the SharePoint site that it's connected to and programmed against just that small subset of content. Maybe just a single FAQ or a big spec document that you wrote for a new project or product that you're working on. It gives you a really nice canvas to be able to then offer that to your people that are within the chat.
But when you're in the chat, it also respects all of the access to the content. So if you're in the chat and you're the owner of the site that eventually is connected to or ultimately connected to, you'll get this view where you actually get a pop-up that says, you know, you're sharing with people that don't have direct access to the site. That's based on the policy.
The agent doesn't change any access. And if you do want to share the information, you're sharing it in the chat. You're not actually sharing access to the site.
So you're always in control with what the SharePoint agent can bring. And in a group context, you might be in chats that not everybody has the same access that you do or consistently across all members of the chat. But once you get posted into the chat and you validate that, yes, it's okay to share, you're in control of not oversharing.
But you're also making it available for people to answer those questions. Quick view. If you have an agent in OneDrive, you can create it off of your own content.
So your work files. And then you can use it by yourself. If you want to have maybe like I have.
I have one folder that has all the blogs that I've written basically in the last 20 years. And it's really helpful for me to be able to go into it. And I've done this just to test it.
What did I write about? Did I cover this? What did we call that 10 years ago? It's really nice to be able to use the agent to comb through instead of doing a search, which would take me a little bit longer to derive the answer. I can ask it in a natural way and, of course, get a natural answer. And, of course, there is the broader copilot chat.
SharePoint agents, if you mention them, will bring in a lot of content from SharePoint in the broader what was called biz chat, which is now called Microsoft 365 copilot chat. So a lot of flexibility on where SharePoint agents are and where you can integrate with them. And by nature of time, I'm going to jump right into looking ahead.
This is, of course, a great slide that was presented a couple weeks ago. So it's fairly up to date. All of this is on the Microsoft 365 roadmap.
But it really gives you a sense of some of the things that have started to roll out or are available now. Not all of them are through what we call the rings of release. So hold on to your rings as they come, because the releases certainly sometimes takes a number of weeks, if not months, for certain features.
But there is no value for us not to provide it to everybody. So everything that's listed here is intended for all sorts of customers, no matter whether you're in sovereign clouds or in the broader space of the enterprise or small, medium businesses. There's a lot of value that's coming to you, including some of what I shared and showcased here, and, of course, some of the other things that were announced recently.
I'll highlight just one thing, and then I'll wrap it up so we can move it into the Q&A with the full panel. But you'll see on here the FAQ web part, and I'll just give it a ghost of an underline with a pen here. The FAQ web part is more than what it sounds like.
It actually leverages Copilot and the value of AI to basically build out a page of a fully functioning FAQ, questions, answers. Of course, you validate it all the way to the end. But it does all of like you saw it creating that page for me.
It would create the FAQ with the standard question, good answer, all validated because of the content that it's pulling from, and it puts it into a really nice format that makes it searchable and, of course, shareable in a really easy way. So be on the lookout for the FAQ web part, just as one great example of even at a pretty small level, just a web part on a SharePoint page where you're taking advantage of AI to be able to build that out. But remember, not everything is Copilot.
There's so much that's being done for your intranet. There's so much that you can do to take advantage of it, like you saw in example. And, of course, if you're across the different regions today, you're seeing a lot of examples across a lot of great companies using SharePoint as their intranet.
We're grateful for them for showcasing it, grateful for you for being here.
Meet the speaker:
Mark Kashman
Senior Product Manager (SharePoint)
