Microsoft 365 in 2025: What will be the most transformative feature?

At ESPC 2024 in Stockholm, we asked Microsoft MVPs what features they thought would make the biggest impact in Microsoft 365 in 2025. We compiled their answers into a short video, but they had so much to say that we decided to put all their answers together in this blog post to share their amazing insights.

Getting your digital estate in better shape with governance and information architecture – Marc D Anderson

To me, it’s really not about the technology so much for this coming year. In my mind, it’s about getting that digital estate in better shape for the technologies that are getting everyone excited. Copilot is not going to be successful in your organization if you have a bad information architecture, if your governance is not solid, or if you don’t have people who understand what changes in their work style or workflow will be supported well by these new technologies. I’m always more interested in how do we make this work well, as opposed to how do we turn it on?

Copilot right now doesn’t pay much attention to metadata, but it will and it probably won’t be that far off. So we need to make sure that we have good metadata and that we have content classified well. I think a big part of all of this will be the security and content lifecycle. Copilot is also effectively looking underneath the rug and every old site that we’ve got lying around and can pick up ideas and content that really isn’t valid anymore. It’s not dangerous in the sense that it’s confidential. It’s dangerous in the sense that it’s no longer correct.

So understanding that content lifecycle and sort of getting people to understand what it’s like to get rid of things that are no longer valid or are no longer needed is a shift in behavior. It’s going to be a lot of softer stuff that will be hopefully supported by tools from Microsoft and other companies, so that people’s digital estates can become more reliable, more effective.

You’ve got ideas like storage costs going up and they’re going up for the same reasons I’m talking about. They’ve just got too much junk. The silverware drawer has string and stickers and everything else in it, and we need to be cleaning up what we’ve got and making sure that we’re being as effective and clear as we can be. So to me, it’s less about the technologies and actually more about governance itself and information architecture itself. And I have been beating those drums for years. So I actually feel good about the fact that Copilot and some of the associated technologies are sort of shining a light in places where I’ve wanted the light to shine for a long time.

Copilot agents will be the most transformative for Microsoft 365 in 2025 – Richard Harbridge

In 2025, it’s going to be the year of agents and the most transformative stuff is agent-like or related. So we all talk about the 5 or 6 agents, and Microsoft’s announced the employee self-service agent. You’ve got the project management agent, which is almost like a swarm of agents working with each other. You’ve got these models of your own agents, like a SharePoint agent, how it’s an entry point. But I actually think it’s what underpins the agents.

So one of the things that I think a lot of people have kind of slept on is that Microsoft also announced Copilot actions, and actions are a way to take a series of scheduled prompts, activities you would do, and have it do a couple things on your behalf. And I think that’s a very accessible, Madlib-style experience. There are a lot of things about it that are really powerful.

And while agents might be how a lot of people initially start exploring it, I actually think actions and the way actions will grow over time will affect more adaptive change in agents than agents themselves, because agents will be a lot of “I just want a calibrated experience for Copilot to look at these SharePoint documents”. I want a self-service one that’s kind of saving me time over here. Those agents are great, but it’s the things that it does. The actions that it can take that really drive success and growth over time. I would look more at the Copilot actions experiences than I would look at agents for where your own maturity is and where some of those great ideas might be coming from.

Autofill columns from SharePoint Premium – Emily Mancini

I think one of the most transformative features of Microsoft 365 in 2025 is going to be autofill columns from SharePoint Premium. We’ve been building really robust information architectures for a long time, and sometimes our metadata completion isn’t necessarily happening by the end users. So having the ability to create these AI prompts to complete the metadata will be so powerful.

And as we know, metadata will be coming to Copilot in the future. And when we have all of that in place and Copilot starts to include it in its reasoning, you’re going to have all of this declarative truth and really giving it good grounding against your content.

Microsoft 365 in 2025 is much more about building on a foundation now – Toni Redmond

I don’t think there’s any big transformative feature on the horizon. The thing is that all of the different Microsoft 365 workloads advance at different rates with different technologies. It’s just going to keep on growing and evolving. I don’t think you’re going to see something massive come along.

To me, Microsoft 365 in 2025 is much more about building on a foundation now and making use of some of this technology rather than introducing some great new technology.

Copilot agents and the Copilot framework – Martin Rovekamp

The most impact from my side is still AI, and with the agents coming and with the Copilot framework, this will be mostly influencing all the M365 tools we have.

Also, as a SharePoint guy, the way how we might work with SharePoint in the future. The SharePoint agreement solution, for example, is really nice. The recent announcements regarding SharePoint design, the functionalities we’ve seen that we can automatically create champion pages with Copilot or with AI, and the ability to create and modify pages in SharePoint like we already know how to use it in PowerPoint. Finally, the flex web part allows you to put your elements somewhere you want and have a grid inside your SharePoint site. This is really fancy.

SharePoint agents is the biggest thing for Microsoft 365 in 2025 – Knut Relbe-Moe

I think actually SharePoint agents, which is kind of like Copilot agents, would be the biggest thing for Microsoft 365 in 2025, because Microsoft also has announced that they will commit to an option for agents in SharePoint. So that means that all organizations will be able to start to utilize them.

You also need to have a Copilot license to be able to use them so that small change will have a tremendous impact on the Copilot agent and the SharePoint agents in that sense. So I think that we will see, like next year when Jeff Teper will do his keynote, we will see all the nice numbers of how many SharePoint sites and how many files, and all that kind of stuff. You also see how many agents that are in SharePoint.

New flexible sections and the brand center custom fonts – Vlad Catrinescu

I feel like SharePoint agents, the agents built on the SharePoint site, are one thing that will make the biggest impact for Microsoft 365 in 2025 from an AI point of view. But from a design point of view, I think the new flexible sections and the brand center custom fonts. I come a bit from an intranet background as well. So having those features where SharePoint can be sexy, for lack of a better word. And when I was working in intranets, I saw a lot of bigger companies say, you know what, I want my intranet to be pixel perfect, so I’ll create stuff in Azure. I’ll go to WordPress to make it pretty, but now you can be in SharePoint, have all your collaboration features, and also have a sexy-looking site.

So I think from a communication perspective, you have flexible sections and the brand center that will change everything. From a Copilot AI perspective, SharePoint agents are my pick, as I can never only pick one.

More power to the people through Copilot – Thomas Vochten

I think that’s going to be Copilot again. It’s no surprise there. Copilot is everywhere. Microsoft is integrating Copilot in almost every product, certainly also in Microsoft 365, as we all know. So I think that more power to the people through Copilot is definitely the thing to watch out for.

Another feature to mention is Copilot in Teams, especially the translator features. The live translation was fantastic. If you ask me, I’m from Belgium. We speak multiple languages to each other. My French is quite good, but it would be super nice if I could also just speak my own language and then get translated in my own voice automatically.

Would you like to know more?

It was great hearing what MVPs had to say about the most exciting features for Microsoft 365 in 2025. You can also check out other MVP videos about balancing collaboration vs security and the benefits of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Thank you to all the Microsoft MVPs for their insights!