AI
SharePoint Embedded: API-Only Document Storage for AI Apps
SharePoint Embedded is an API-only version of SharePoint, delivered as an Azure service. It lives in a dedicated partition inside your M365 tenant, alongside SharePoint Online and OneDrive, but the developer controls it entirely. The core primitive is a File Storage Container: a security boundary and a unit of business data you can scope per project, per customer, or per user.
Microsoft ships Copilot Notebooks, Copilot Pages, and Loop on top of this same container construct. The same stack is now available to ISVs and enterprise developers.
Building an AI Agent Without a RAG Pipeline
Documents in production are live, collaborative, and permission-bound. Copying them into a separate vector store breaks security and goes stale by the time the next edit lands.
“You need to reason with this context where it is.” — Yogesh
SharePoint Embedded solves this by automatically semantic-indexing content inside the tenant, so developers skip the RAG pipeline entirely. In the ContractWise contract-management demo (04:55), the agent queries a folder of vendor proposals, ranks them by uptime and hourly rate, and opens citations in Word, all without moving a file out of the container.
Publishing an Agent to Teams from a Custom App
Users don’t live inside custom apps. They live in Teams. The Teams agent publish demo (09:58) shows ContractWise published as a Teams agent using the recently announced Agents Toolkit. An @-mention inside a Teams channel returns the same grounded answer with citations, pulling from the same container that backs the custom app. The only code change is referencing the content source. Security trimming and grounding carry over automatically.
Who Is Already Building on SharePoint Embedded
Thomson Reuters built Core Counsel, an AI-centric legal app, on SharePoint Embedded so the agent’s knowledge stays inside each customer’s trust boundary. Thomson Reuters handles the UX; the customer’s own security policies enforce access. Several other large ISVs are running multi-tenant production workloads on the same stack. To get started, a VS Code extension generates sample apps and an SDK. Getting started docs are at the SPE Learn path; hands-on half-day sessions run across seven cities in June at aka.ms/SPEevents.
Notable Quotes
You need to reason with this context where it is. Yogesh · ▶ 4:45
All the responses are security trimmed to the user’s permission. Yogesh · ▶ 8:49
SharePoint embedded brings AI collaboration and compliance together under 1 technology. Yogesh · ▶ 11:11
Key Takeaways
- SharePoint Embedded automatically semantic-indexes documents so developers skip building a RAG pipeline.
- Every agent response is security-trimmed to the calling user’s permissions, enforced inside the M365 tenant.
- Agents built on SharePoint Embedded containers can be published to Teams with a few lines of code.