The New Way to Automate Without Power Automate: Skills in AI in SharePoint

Reading this article will give you a clear understanding of what Skills in AI in SharePoint are, what they are truly capable of today, and a detailed step-by-step example of building a Knowledge Base from Employee Experience, plus other powerful use cases.

Hello, guys. I’ve been working with this new Skills feature in SharePoint and found something that can be genuinely interesting. Most of us already know the basics of automation in Microsoft 365 through Power Automate, and we usually don’t pay much extra attention once flows are running.

A woman selecting a robotic dress from her wardrobe by Jaime López using Nano Banana

But here I bring you something that almost nobody knows about yet: Skills in AI in SharePoint, a smarter, more natural way to create intelligent agents directly inside your sites. Follow me, and I will show you how it works.

What Are Skills

Microsoft’s intention with Skills is to make it dramatically easier for anyone to create custom AI agents that transform repeatable, multi-step workflows into real assets.

In short, Skills add AI as both the orchestrator and the executor of the process. As soon as you identify a repetitive activity you do regularly in your SharePoint site, it can potentially become a Skill.

We’ve seen similar promises with Power Automate. The big differentiator now is the AI layer. Skills don’t require dragging and dropping actions anymore. You simply talk to Copilot, describe what you want in natural language, and the Skill can understand document content, interpret metadata, build a chain of thought, create a plan, and execute it. I’m fascinated by how this changes the game!

Planet Facts List Skill Proposal from Copilot

How We’re Doing It

Creation, duplication, modification, and execution of Skills all happen directly from the site agent chat panel; the built-in Copilot agent that every SharePoint site receives the moment it is created.

It’s refreshingly simple: open the panel and start with a prompt like “create a new skill for…”. Then continue interacting with Copilot to refine and polish the steps and actions the Skill will perform.

Here are the things I tested that Skills can do right now:

• Interact with any element and document in the site → Yes

• Create or modify items → Yes

• Modify metadata → Yes

• Create or modify documents (content) → No (but they can modify document metadata, including the filename)

• Create pages → No (even if Copilot sometimes suggests it)

• Create lists or libraries, including adding columns → Yes

This blend of implicit grounding with your site’s content plus your clear instructions is where the magic happens.

Why This Might Light a Bulb for You

Skills represent the next step in automation, putting powerful AI directly in front of every employee. They can handle repetitive and tedious tasks without anyone needing programming knowledge. Just natural conversation, exactly like using Copilot at home.

Thanks to content comprehension, metadata understanding, SharePoint context awareness, and deeper reasoning, these automations can go much further than traditional flows. With the right instructions, a Skill becomes like a reliable little minion acting on your behalf — turning boring processes into something much more intelligent and valuable. This is where we unlock the full potential of AI inside our daily SharePoint environments.

Building a Real Skill: Knowledge Base from Employee Reports

Let me walk you through a complete example that shows the real power of Skills.

The challenge

Let’s say that we are a company that offers services to other companies. So, we ask our employees to provide a report about their activities when finishing their projects and collaborations. We are storing all of them in a SharePoint library. Now, we can analyze the reports and obtain the global experience of the company based on the different technologies and matters our employees worked on. Turning this information into usable organizational knowledge is time-consuming and rarely done well.

Employee Reports Document Library

The Skill creation

We are going to create a Skill to read all the reports, extract the technologies and matters to feed a list which will show them and the aggregate amount of time spent in total by our employees.

Here’s how to build it:

1. Go to the SharePoint site that contains the reports.

2. Open the Copilot / Site Agent panel on the right.

3. Type a clear prompt such as: “Create a new skill to read the information provided by the employees and match technology/matter and amount of time as the result of summing up all the employees experience on that technology/matter. For example, Roberto ran an adoption project that took 5 months, Josefa participated in another adoption project that took 10 months, so the result is “Adoption” for the matter and 15 months for the amount of time. This information must be added to a list named “Company Experience”. Create the list if it doesn’t exist.”

4. Review the plan Copilot proposes and refine it with follow-up questions in the same chat.

5. Once we are happy with the plan, tell Copilot to confirm the skill creation.

Skill Creation Screenshots

The Skill execution

At the time the Skill is executed, it does several things:

• Understands the content of all the reports in the library (implicit grounding)

• Creates the new list with the right columns on the fly

• Analyzes each document

• Creates and populates items in the Knowledge Base list

Skill Execution Screenshots

What used to take a person several days of manual work can now be completed in minutes. This is where we unleash the power of AI inside SharePoint.

Knowledge Base List as the Result of the Skill Execution

More Real Use Cases You Can Implement

• Exams evaluation: A Skill that compares student exam files against a master answer template, creates a results list, and automatically assigns grades.

• Task dispatcher: A Skill that reviews open tasks every morning, understands requirements, and intelligently assigns them to the right team members based on skills and availability.

• Requirement collector: A Skill that reads an RFP file and creates a new list with one requirement per item. The Skill can also provide an answer to each requirement based on previous responses or technical documents.

These examples show how Skills can turn repetitive, tedious work into intelligent, automated processes.

Something to Try

If this resonates with you, start small and embrace the opportunity. Go to any team site, open the Copilot panel, and try a simple prompt such as: “Create a new Skill that reviews new documents in this library and sets a status metadata field based on content.” Refine it with follow-up questions and see how it feels. The path, not just the result, is what matters here.

Conclusion

After reading this, you should feel much more confident as the M365 person in your company when Skills in AI in SharePoint come up in conversation. Remember this feature is still in public preview, so things can (and probably will) evolve — keep an eye on the updates.

In the next article, we’ll explore Skills from the pure IT and governance perspective.

Don’t forget to share this article with your friends and colleagues… click on the heart if you liked it, or drop a comment and tell me.

See you in the trenches! 🚀

References

• Extend AI in SharePoint with skills: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ai-in-sharepoint-skills