A SharePoint Admin's Guide to Agent Insights and Governance
- Ryan Bowler
- Aug 17
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 22
SharePoint has worn many hats over the years, from being a simple document repository to a hub for team collaboration and company intranets. Along with the increasing emphasis on AI in today’s world, SharePoint is expanding once again in support of a new type of user, the digital agent.
SharePoint Agents are AI assistants scoped to specific sites or data in your tenant. They're designed to handle tasks like answering questions about a project’s documentation, summarizing a team’s meeting notes, or guiding users through onboarding materials. They can even help users locate specific documents that are difficult to find manually through the SharePoint search engine.
This new agent unlocks exciting productivity gains for users while introducing a critical governance challenge for SharePoint admins about how to manage these invisible digital contributors.
Agent Governance is Essential
Without visibility into the growing environment of SharePoint Agents, organizations are exposed to several risks:
Data Security - Agents operate with access to the content on their assigned sites. Where users may not find hidden files, the SharePoint Agent will. Admins must know where agents are deployed to ensure they aren't inadvertently accessing or surfacing sensitive information that may have incorrect permissions.
Performance and Cost Impact - Agents consume resources. Poorly configured or unused agents can affect performance and, depending on licensing, increase costs.
Accountability Issues - When an agent provides incorrect or outdated information, it’s critical to know who owns it, when it was last updated, and why it was created.
Monitoring Agent Insights
Microsoft now provides a powerful tool in the SharePoint Admin Center called the Agent Insights report to address these governance gaps. Think of it as the control room for your digital AI workers.
This dashboard gives you answers to the key questions every admin should be asking:
How many agents exist in the tenant?
Which SharePoint sites are they deployed to?
Who created each one?
Are they being actively used?
When was each agent last modified?
This level of visibility turns agents from a potential hidden threat into a transparent, manageable asset.
Let’s Talk Strategy
The data from Agent Insights dashboard is only as valuable as the actions you take based on it. The following are a few important governance recommendations for managing your SharePoint Agents effectively:
Make a routine of checking. Set a monthly review of the Agent Insights report. Use it to spot trends, outliers, and opportunities to improve.
Create a simple policy. Define simple but clear rules around:
Who can create agents?
Who are assigned licenses?
What naming conventions should be used?
How and when agents should be decommissioned?
Reach out to your agent creators. Using the report, reach out to your organization’s users. Understand the problems they’re looking for AI to solve and guide them toward secure and efficient agents.
Reduce the clutter. Identify agents with no or minimal usage. Talk to owners to validate whether their agents are still needed. Removing stale agents reduces clutter, minimizes risk, and keeps your AI environment running efficiently.
Sensitive Sites Your most sensitive SharePoint sites should have the tightest controls over agent deployment. Use the insights report to audit where agents exist—and ensure none are deployed in places they shouldn’t be or even utilize Restricted Content Discovery to protect these sites.
Moving Forward
SharePoint Agents mark a significant step in how people interact with content, turning stale libraries into dynamic, intelligent experiences. But this kind of power comes with responsibility.
As a SharePoint administrator, using tools like the Agent Insights report allows you to maintain visibility, control, and alignment with your organization's security goals. By building a proactive governance strategy, you’ll not only keep your AI SharePoint environment secure, but also help your organization’s teams unlock the full potential of their new intelligent digital assistants.