SharePoint turned 25 on March 2, and Microsoft used the milestone to announce a set of meaningful updates to the platform. There are three main areas covered in the announcement: AI in SharePoint, a visual refresh of the SharePoint experience, and enhanced content governance. In this post, I want to look at what this means specifically for internal communicators and intranet managers, because not everything here requires a Copilot license, and that matters.
The new SharePoint experience is currently in preview and can be enabled by a SharePoint administrator via the SharePoint admin center. You can find instructions on how to enable it in the Microsoft documentation. One thing I appreciate is that individual users can toggle back to the current experience during the preview phase, which makes it easier to roll out without causing disruption. That said, after experimenting with the new experience myself, I haven't noticed any negative impact on the SharePoint UX.
AI in SharePoint: The Knowledge agent gets a new name
If you have been following SharePoint news, you might remember the Knowledge agent that was introduced in September 2025. Well, it has been renamed to AI in SharePoint. Microsoft does love a good renaming.
The core idea remains the same: you can use natural language to interact with your SharePoint content. You can describe what you want to build, and SharePoint helps you put it together: think sites, pages, lists, and libraries. It works like a collaborator rather than a tool. It asks clarifying questions, proposes a plan, and iterates with you until the result matches your intent.
On top of that, the AI-powered metadata enrichment, content cleanup, and library organization capabilities from the original Knowledge agent are still there. These are useful capabilities for keeping your intranet in good shape, which directly benefits how Copilot performs when employees search for information. Remember: good content in, good output out.
It is worth noting that these AI capabilities are still rolling out to Microsoft 365 tenants and require a Copilot license. So if you are working without one, the good news is that the most broadly accessible update, the new SharePoint experience, does not require a Copilot license at all.
The new SharePoint experience: A refreshed app bar built around how people work
This is the part I find most interesting for internal communicators, and it is available to all Microsoft 365 users regardless of whether they have a Copilot license.
Microsoft has given SharePoint a visual refresh and restructured how users navigate the product through a new app bar on the left side. The app bar is visible throughout the entire SharePoint experience and is organized around three core scenarios: discovering content, publishing content, and building solutions. Let me walk through each one.
Home: Your intranet front door, always within reach
At the top of the new app bar sits the Home button, which takes users directly to the organization's home site from anywhere in SharePoint. I really like this addition. For users who have invested in building a well-designed intranet homepage, this makes it instantly accessible no matter where a user is in SharePoint.
SharePoint administrators can configure which site opens when users click the Home button using the Set-SPOHomeSite PowerShell command.
Discover: A personalized front door for your content
The Discover section replaces the old SharePoint Start page with a more personalized experience. It surfaces recent and favorite sites, news from across the intranet, coworker updates, and file activity, all tailored to the individual user.
For internal communicators, this is great news. It gives employees a natural place to discover news posts from the intranet, access content they have saved to read later, and find documents they have marked as favorites. The less friction there is between an employee and your content, the better.
Publish: A central hub for content creators
The Publish section is where internal communicators will likely spend the most time. As Microsoft said, for the first time in SharePoint's history, the full communications workflow is brought together in one place. You can create, manage, and track your content without jumping between different areas of SharePoint.
Content creators can access their drafts directly from here and start new content using organization-approved page templates. Microsoft has also signaled ambitious plans to fully integrate Viva Amplify into this section, which would allow teams to manage their communication campaigns, including distribution across SharePoint, email, Viva Engage, and Teams, all from a single place.
What I particularly like is the overview for news posts and content pages. Content managers can see at a glance what has already been published or is still in draft mode across SharePoint, along with the number of unique viewers for each published piece. That kind of visibility has always been a bit scattered, so having it in one organized workspace is a real improvement.
Build: Finally, a simple overview of SharePoint agents
The Build section is aimed at makers and serves as a central launchpad for creating Sites, Lists, Libraries, and Agents. For users with a Copilot license, this is also where you can use natural language to plan and build SharePoint assets.
But here is something that stood out to me even beyond the AI angle. Users with a Copilot license can now find an overview of all the SharePoint agents they have created or have been assigned to across different intranet sites. I have personally been missing a simple way for everyday users to get a clear picture of which SharePoint agents are available to them. The Build section solves that. It is a small thing, but it makes agents much more discoverable and useful in practice.
Enhanced content governance: Mostly for admins, but worth knowing
The third area of the announcement covers content governance, which is primarily relevant for SharePoint administrators rather than communicators. In short, the SharePoint Admin Agent has been extended with new skills that allow admins to manage permissions, site lifecycle, and storage using natural language queries. Think of it as giving admins an AI assistant that can flag oversharing risks, surface inactive or ownerless sites, and provide storage insights, all through a conversational interface in the SharePoint admin center.
For communicators, the indirect benefit is a cleaner, better-governed SharePoint environment, which ultimately means better Copilot results and a more trustworthy intranet for employees.
Things to bear in mind
If you are approaching this from an intranet perspective, it is worth keeping one thing in mind. The new app bar is a SharePoint experience, but not an intranet-specific one. Users will see content from any site they have access to in Discover, and they can target any site when creating content from Publish. I don't see this as a limitation, but it is something to be upfront about with your team when introducing the new experience. The new app bar was not designed around the specific use cases you use SharePoint for, such as an intranet, a knowledge base, or a learning management system; rather, it is focused on the overall SharePoint experience.
Closing thoughts
The new SharePoint experience is a meaningful step forward, and the best part is that a lot of it does not sit behind a Copilot license. The refreshed app bar with Home, Discover, Publish, and Build brings a clearer structure to SharePoint that makes sense for everyday users and the way internal communicators and intranet managers actually work.
If you manage an intranet or create content for your organization, I would encourage you to try the new SharePoint experience currently in preview. The Publish section alone, with its unified content overview and viewer stats, makes it worth exploring. And if your organization has already set up a home site, the new Home button is a simple but impactful way to make your intranet homepage the true front door of SharePoint for every employee.
Thanks for reading,
Jarbas
