SharePoint is now AI-powered after latest redesign, and it's driven by Anthropic Claude

Over a week ago, we reported that Microsoft is "reimagining" SharePoint to focus more on AI capabilities, which isn't surprising considering the company is actively investing in this space. That said, this is still an important change because SharePoint is heavily used in enterprise environments to manage content and files hosted on the private network of organizations, so each update impacts millions of customers around the globe. Now, Microsoft's latest big update for SharePoint has landed, and as expected, it highlights AI experiences and offers a visual redesign.

Starting off with the AI-powered experiences in the new SharePoint, novice and experts users of the platform can now use natural language to plan, build, and transform their SharePoint solutions. Microsoft has described the platform as an "active partner", which can work with you to orchestrate multiple tools to facilitate you in reaching your goal. All Knowledge Agent capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot have been integrated into SharePoint, with the service now being known simply as "AI in SharePoint".

For now, the salient features in tow include structured plans for Sites, drafting and reorganization of content stored in Pages, intelligent management of Libraries through metadata extraction, population and structuring of Lists, and generation of various templates from structured Word documents. All of these capabilities are available now or rolling out this month. Soon, customers will also have the ability to define custom skills that will act as guardrails and ensure that the design of the solution is modular. What's even more interesting is that all of these advanced AI features are powered by Anthropic's Claude model rather than OpenAI.

In terms of the visual refresh, which can be launched the "New SharePoint" toggle. Microsoft boasts that during private preview, 99% of customers preferred this redesign and did not roll back. You can play around with an interactive demo of the revamp here, but some of the highlights include a new app bar, a customizable navigation pane on the left, and a Discover experience to surface news, updates from collaborators, and Sites, while featuring AI-powered actions.

Meanwhile, the Publish view unifies SharePoint and Viva Amplify to make it easier to distribute content. Finally, Build offers AI-powered workflows to create solutions for those who have a license and rich templates for those who don't.

Since this infiltration of AI also demands better governance across SharePoint, the SharePoint Admin Agent, for those with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, now unlocks the following agentic skills:

• Site permissions skills: Use natural language to analyze tenant-wide permissions, quickly flag oversharing risks, explain root causes, and provide clear remediation.
• Site lifecycle management skills: Surfaces inactive, ownerless, high-risk sites with clear cleanup and insights, advanced filtering, and exportable reporting.
• Storage management skills: Copilot-powered insights into tenant and site storage trends flag risks, surfacing cleanup actions guiding governance and PAYGO onboarding with fast recovery support.

As can be surmised, this is a fairly big update, which also makes sense given that Microsoft is celebrating SharePoint's 25th anniversary. Whether or not these changes will be appreciated by SharePoint customers remains to be seen. You can find out more details about rollout here.