SharePoint has just rolled out a genuinely exciting upgrade: a brand‑new Quick Steps column type that lets you run actions from a simple button right inside your document library. No more digging through menus—your custom commands are now front and centre. Even better, one of those actions is the new Ask SharePoint (Knowledge Agent) integration, meaning you can trigger a pre‑configured AI prompt on selected files or even the entire library with a single click. It’s a huge step forward, bringing powerful, ready‑to‑use prompts directly to the content your teams work with every day.
The quick steps feature allows users to set up custom commands or actions for selected files. A common use case previously for me has been creating a quick step to move a file to a document library, like Archive, or even trigger a Power Automate flow. The image below shows the currently available quick step options, including the new Ask SharePoint options to call the Knowledge Agent.
The Quick Steps feature has been around for a while, but it was tucked away in the menu and not very user-friendly to access. Users had to first select the file, then go to the document library’s top bar, open the Integrate menu, and pick a pre-configured Quick Step from the flyout.
Adding A New Quick Step Column & Creating an “Ask SharePoint” Quickstep
I will now walk you through adding a quick step column to the document library – this will add a column to the document library along with creating a quick step using the Ask SharePoint functionality.
Add Column To The Document library
Bring up the Create a column menu from the document library – give the column a name i.e. Airlines. Then select from the column type dropdown “Quick steps”.
From the Quick steps dropdown, choose an existing Quick step or select New quick step to create one. I will select New quick step.
Create a New Quick Step (Ask SharePoint)
The Create a New Quick Step menu appears to guide you through setting up a quick step. I’m choosing Ask SharePoint to add a prompt to my quick step.
This is awesome: here’s where I can set up the prompt to run for each selected filto then use the prompt in Knowledge Agent (Ask SharePoint). I name the Quick Step “Airline,” add a custom prompt, and can even set the new button to display conditionally, only appearing if another column’s value equals x. Once happy with the prompt and other settings, I click Create.
The quick step is now created, and I can edit it further by clicking the pencil icon or even change the button’s colour by clicking the palette icon.
Change the colour of the button (see below) and once happy click Save to save the column.
The new column has now been added and you can clearly see the button “Airlines Involved” has been created!
I can now pick a file from my library and click the “Airlines Involved” button to target that specific file with a prompt.
Unfortunately, since Knowledge Agent is still in public preview and likely still being refined, selecting just one file and then clicking the corresponding “Airlines Involved” button for that document doesn’t seem to work. Instead, the prompt runs on all files in the document library instead of the selected file like it should! Hopefully this bug will be fixed soon!
However, if I repeat the process multiple times, it eventually works for one file and shows the airlines mentioned in that document. It’s not ideal, but since this is still in public preview, the aim of this blog is to highlight the potential of this exciting new feature! I’m sure this will be resolved by the product team ASAP :)!
Summary
This new Quick Steps column might look like a small tweak, but it can genuinely change how people work in SharePoint. Having one‑click buttons right there in the library—especially ones that can run Ask SharePoint prompts—makes automation and AI feel natural instead of hidden away in menus. Once the public preview of Knowledge Agent settles down, I can see this becoming one of those features lots of teams will rely on day to day.
The SharePoint Knowledge Agent is an awesome built-in tool that helps your organization get content ready for AI. It can handle everything from organising files, creating views, and automating library workflows to keeping SharePoint pages fresh, filling content gaps, and so much more! It’s available in tenants where admins have turned it on and for users with an M365 Copilot license.
Let me know if you’ve had a chance to experiment with Quick Steps or the SharePoint Knowledge Agent—curious to see what you’ve created with this awesome tech.
