What's New in SharePoint in 2026: Discover, Copilot AI, and a Redesigned App Bar

If you've been keeping half an eye on Microsoft 365 updates lately, you'll know that SharePoint has been going through a quiet transformation. It's not the kind of change that arrives with fanfare, but spend a bit of time with the new experience and it becomes clear that Microsoft has done genuine thinking about how people actually use SharePoint day to day, and where the friction tends to creep in.

How to Enable the New SharePoint Experience

Before getting into what's new, there's something practical worth mentioning upfront. The redesigned SharePoint experience doesn't appear automatically — it needs to be enabled by your organisation's admin through the Microsoft 365 admin centre. If your SharePoint looks exactly the same as it always has, that's likely why. It's worth speaking with whoever manages your Microsoft 365 tenant before expecting to see any of the changes below.

The Old Start Page Is Gone — Meet Discover

The most noticeable change is the replacement of the old SharePoint start page with something Microsoft is calling Discover. Rather than landing on a static homepage and navigating your way to whatever you need, Discover uses AI to surface the most relevant content automatically.

It's a meaningful shift in philosophy. The old start page assumed you already knew where you were going. Discover takes the opposite approach, anticipating what you need based on your usage patterns.

The Discover page is broken down into several sections:

• For You — a personalised feed surfacing documents and files you've worked with recently, alongside SharePoint sites you've visited
• Left Rail — quick access to your most-visited and favourited sites, making navigation significantly faster
• Recent Sites — a summary of activity and updates on sites you've been to recently, useful for catching up after time away
• Updates from Coworkers — files shared with you and recent collaboration activity from people you work closely with
• Recent Items — your most recently accessed files, SharePoint pages, and news posts

Individually, none of these features are groundbreaking. But bringing them together into a single AI-driven experience is a genuine step forward for SharePoint, which has historically required a fair amount of manual navigation.

AI Features: What They Do and What You Need

On top of the structural changes, Microsoft has introduced AI-powered features that help users catch up on site updates and get quick summaries of file and activity changes. Rather than reading through everything yourself, the AI flags what's relevant and delivers a condensed version of what's happened.

There's an important caveat. These AI features are only available to users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. Without Copilot licences, your team will still benefit from the redesigned Discover experience — but the AI summarisation layer won't be visible. That's worth factoring in when planning your rollout, since the headline AI features do come with an additional licensing cost.

A Redesigned SharePoint App Bar

Alongside Discover, the SharePoint app bar has been rethought. Where the previous version was fairly limited, the new bar is organised around four distinct tabs: Home Site, Discover, Publish, and Build.

The Publish Tab

The Publish tab is the new central home for anyone who creates content in SharePoint. Pages, news posts, and communications are all managed from here now. Previously, site authors often had to move between different parts of SharePoint to manage content — Publish consolidates that into a single location.

For organisations that use SharePoint heavily as an internal communications platform, this is one of the more useful changes in the update. Having a dedicated space for content publishing, rather than treating it as a side function of site management, signals that Microsoft is taking the authoring experience more seriously.

The Build Tab

Build is aimed at the people responsible for creating and managing SharePoint's structure. Sites, document libraries, and lists — the tools you need to put these together are now gathered in one place, rather than scattered across different menus and settings areas.

If you've ever spent twenty minutes hunting through SharePoint trying to work out where to create a new document library, Build addresses exactly that. It's the kind of quality-of-life improvement that sounds minor until you've experienced the alternative.

Should You Enable the New SharePoint Experience?

If you're an admin weighing up whether to roll this out, the honest answer depends on how your teams currently use SharePoint.

For organisations where SharePoint is primarily a document storage tool people navigate to out of habit, the new experience will feel like a pleasant upgrade without being transformative. For teams more deeply embedded in SharePoint — publishing content regularly and building out their own sites and libraries — the improvements to Discover and the app bar should make a meaningful difference to day-to-day efficiency.

The Copilot AI features are worth keeping in mind as a longer-term consideration. If your organisation is already using or planning to adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot licences, the Discover AI layer becomes a more compelling part of the package. If not, you're still getting a cleaner, more intuitive SharePoint experience — just without the AI summarisation on top.

Either way, the update is available and waiting to be switched on. Whether now is the right time is a conversation worth having with your team.