How to enable/disable SharePoint agents for users without a M365 Copilot license
Imagine being able to ask questions in your natural language and receive responses that are relevant only to that specific project you're working on. Or picture yourself as a new employee, seeking answers based solely on your onboarding materials. Well, you don’t have to imagine anymore. SharePoint agents are here to make this a reality.
There’s a good chance that recently Copilot SharePoint agents became available in your SharePoint environment. These agents allow you to use specific sites, libraries, or files from your SharePoint as knowledge sources, giving you the option to receive precise and relevant responses based on your team or your project for instance. Each SharePoint site comes with a pre-built default agent based on that site's content, but you also have the flexibility to create agents based on the exact information you need.
While these agents are included in your M365 Copilot licenses, you might be wondering if there’s a way for unlicensed users to benefit from them as well. The good news is you don't need to purchase an expensive M365 Copilot license for every user. Microsoft offers two options to enable these agents for unlicensed users. Let's dive into these options and see how you can set them up and/or disable them.
Free Microsoft promotional access trial access offer
From January 6, 2025, through June 30, 2025, Microsoft offers a promotional trial period in which organizations with 50 or more Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses automatically receive 10,000 free queries per month for SharePoint agents. This gives users without a M365 Copilot license the option to use and create(!) agents. This promotional offer is enabled by default.
The unlicensed users will see the exact same as someone with a M365 Copilot license, apart from the subtle “Promotional access to agents” at the bottom. Only when clicking on that sentence, the end user will see that they have ‘promotional access’ for a limited time.
When all 10,000 queries have been used in a month, the promotional acces will be disabled until the next month and your unlicensed users will see the message "Agents are temporarily unavailable. Your organization has reached the maximum number of queries offered in its promotional access to agents. Return next month to continue using agents."
How to enable/disable the promotional access to SharePoint agents
It’s nice you have the option introduce the SharePoint agents to your whole organization, but there might be good reasons that you don’t want everyone in your organization using SharePoint agents or that you want to communicate to your (unlicensed) end users first before they gain access. As I said earlier the promotional access is enabled by default, so let’s look at how you can check the status and how you can enable or disable the promo.
Unfortunately there isn’t an option to control this through an admin center, we’re going to have to use PowerShell for this. But no worries, the cmdlets are very easy and straightforward. We’re going to use the Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell module for this, so make sure that’s installed on your machine. Note: I had to use PowerShell 5.1 for this as it didn’t work in PowerShell 7.
First we have to connect to our SharePoint tenant using ‘Connect-SPOService’. Just make sure to change the URL to your own.
Connect-SPOService -url https://YOURORGANIZATION-admin.sharepoint.comAfter connecting we have the option to check the current setting for the promo by running
Get-SPOCopilotPromoOptInStatusThis will give either TRUE or False as response, depending on the current status.
To disable the promo use the following
Set-SPOCopilotPromoOptInStatus -IsCopilotPromoStatusEnabled $falseAnd to enable the promo use
Set-SPOCopilotPromoOptInStatus -IsCopilotPromoStatusEnabled $trueFrom my experience access should be available/disabled pretty instant after setting this configuration.
Note: To set the status of the promo you’ll need the Global administrator or SharePoint administrator role.
Pay-as-you-go for SharePoint agents
For a more permanent solution to enable your users without a M365 Copilot license to use SharePoint agents you can opt to enable the Pay-as-you-go model. Microsoft states the costs are based on the number of messages used, where every message costs $0,01. Right below this information on the Microsoft article (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/microsoft-365-pay-as-you-go-pricing) a note states “Each interaction includes a question and an answer. A successful interaction uses 32 messages.”.
So, based on this information, it would be my conclusion that each prompt + response will cost you $0,32.
To enable pay-as-you-go for SharePoint agents will require at least an Azure subscription, an Azure resource group in that subscription and the Global admin or SharePoint admin role to set things up.
Microsoft has outlined the steps to enable pay-as-you-go billing for SharePoint agents as:
Visit the https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/syntex/documents as a Global Admin or SharePoint Admin
Click Pay-as-you-go services in org settings or Activate pay-as-you-go under setup.
Go to “Agents in SharePoint” Tab under Billing Tab
Setup billing by adding Subscription, Region, and Resource group.
Conclusion
Last year mostly consisted of the introduction of (Microsoft 365) Copilot within organizations and getting people acquainted with the possibilities it brings. I strongly believe this year will be filled with agents which will make specific tasks, workflows and processes easier and more efficient. The SharePoint agents are a very nice kickstart of the ‘year of the agents’ and I can’t wait to discover how they can support and create new ways of working!