WonderLaura @iwmentor – Laura Rogers

When adding web parts to pages in SharePoint, you may have noticed a new category has shown up: AI. There are three AI web parts in SharePoint right now — Chart, Agent Link, and FAQ — and I spent this week’s Power Hour testing all three. In this post and video, we’ll walk through what I found.

📊 The AI Chart Web Part

This is the newest of the AI web parts in SharePoint. You’ll find the chart web part by adding it to any SharePoint page, and right away you’ll notice it doesn’t have any settings to speak of — no data source picker, no connection string. That’s because this web part expects you to describe what you want in a prompt through the Copilot panel, either by clicking the little AI sparkle or the Copilot button at the top right. Also, it works best in Edge, not so well in the Chrome browser.

How it actually works

Type your data straight into the prompt. For my first demo, I just said: “Create a pie chart of our top 5 ice cream flavors by votes: Chocolate 120, Vanilla 95, Strawberry 60, Cookies and Cream 80, Mint Chip 45.” No file, no upload — just numbers typed right into the chat.

Or point it to a file already in OneDrive or SharePoint. This is the bigger use case for real business content. You do have to upload your spreadsheet first — there’s no upload button inside the web part itself. Once it’s in OneDrive or SharePoint, you can just start typing the file name with a backslash and it’ll find it for you.

Here’s the output:

Refine it with follow-up prompts. I asked it to switch my pie chart to a donut chart and use a teal color palette, and it did that perfectly. I also asked it to make one slice pink and another brown by name, and it got close but not exact — so expect a little trial and error on precise color requests.

The catch (and why it’s still not a Power BI replacement)

Here’s the thing I need you to hear clearly: this is not Power BI. It’s not going to point to a SharePoint list, a database, or Dataverse, and it’s not going to update automatically when your source data changes. I tested this live — I edited a spreadsheet, republished the page, and did a hard refresh, and the chart didn’t budge. It only updated once I explicitly prompted it to “refresh the data.” So even though the spreadsheet lives in SharePoint, this is closer to a one-time snapshot than a live connection, at least from what I can tell in that one test.

If you want true dynamic reporting tied to your actual business data, that’s what Power BI is built for — and yes, Power BI has its own Copilot now too, which I cover in depth in my Power BI for Power Users course.

What are example scenarios?

Think of the AI chart web part as a quick-win tool, not a dashboard tool:

• A newsletter page where you want to talk through this month’s numbers
• A weekly status report page where you’re narrating how things went
• A quick mockup chart to show a stakeholder before you build the real thing in Power BI
• A one-off visual for a board deck or project update page

One neat detail: if you send a page containing this web part in an email (through a SharePoint news post), it shows up as a static image — no hover interactivity — but clicking it takes the reader straight to the live page.

Licensing for the Chart Web Part

The person building the page and prompting the chart needs a M365 Copilot license. Anyone just viewing the finished page does not. That’s a nice, approachable setup if you’re worried about rolling this out broadly.

🔗 The AI Agent Link Web Part

Of the three AI web parts in SharePoint I’m covering today, this one’s refreshingly simple. If you’ve already built an agent in SharePoint — like the policy agent or training-video agent I’ve demoed in past Power Hours — the Agent Link web part gives you a clean, obvious way to put that agent front and center on a page. In this example, I added three web parts, pointing to three different agents I’ve created. You can see that when I clicked on the Policy agent web part, the Policy agent appeared on the right panel.

Here’s how it works:

1. Add the Agent Link web part to your page
2. Pick an existing agent from your recent list, or search for it
3. Choose a layout — large, medium, or just a small icon

When an end user clicks it, the agent opens right there in a side panel, and they can start asking questions immediately. I demoed this with a policy agent trained on our company policy library — I asked it about our flexible work policy, and it pulled the answer straight from the right document, told me who authored it, and gave me a summary. No hunting through folders required.

You can even build a little “agent dashboard” by adding a three-column section to your page and dropping a different Agent Link web part into each column — one for policies, one for your intranet, one for training videos, for example.

Licensing for the Agent Link Web Part

This is where licensing works a little differently than the chart web part. Because the end user is actively interacting with the agent — asking it questions, having a conversation — they do need their own Copilot license to use it. That’s the key distinction: viewing information doesn’t require a license, but actively chatting with an agent does.

❓ The FAQ Web Part (A Quick Revisit)

We already did a full episode on this one (SharePoint’s New FAQ Web Part: Powered by Copilot), so I’ll keep this part brief — but it earns its spot in this AI web parts in SharePoint family, and I had fun trying a new angle with it this time.

A cool and creative way to use it would be to create a new page using SharePoint’s built-in FAQ page template with static text. In the demo, I swapped in the actual FAQ web part so the questions and answers were AI-generated instead of hand-typed. You point it at a source — I used a SharePoint training deck for one example and a spreadsheet of regional sales data for another — and it drafts categorized questions and answers for you.

A couple of practical notes from this round of testing:

• You can review and trim the generated questions before it drafts answers, which is worth doing if your source file is large
• If your questions use Heading 2 formatting, I showed a trick you can do on any page, where SharePoint automatically creates anchor links for H2 headers, so you can jump readers straight down to a specific section of a long page
• There’s no built-in “collapse everything by default” setting, but you can get a similar effect using collapsible page sections

Licensing for the FAQ Web Part

Same pattern as the chart web part: the person generating the FAQ content needs a Copilot license, but anyone reading the finished FAQ page does not.

The Licensing Pattern for AI Web Parts in SharePoint, in Summary

Across all three AI web parts, there’s one consistent rule worth remembering: if the end user is just viewing information, no Copilot license is needed. If they’re actively interacting with AI — like chatting with an agent — they need their own license. That distinction makes the chart and FAQ web parts especially approachable for rolling out to a broad audience.

My Honest Take on AI Web Parts in SharePoint

Fun fact: Twenty years ago, I wrote the web parts chapter in the MOSS 2007 Administrator’s Companion. Out-of-box web parts have been one of my favorite things to talk about in SharePoint ever since then. Seeing this new AI category show up in the toolbox feels like a fun full-circle moment.

The Chart web part won’t replace Power BI. But as a fast, no-code way to add a visual to a status report, a newsletter, or a quick mockup, it’s a legitimately useful little tool once you understand its limits. The Agent Link web part is the simplest of the three and does exactly one job well: making an existing agent easy to find. And the FAQ web part continues to be a great way to turn documents you already have into something genuinely useful for your team.

Which of these three AI web parts would you actually add to your site? Drop a comment and let me know — or better yet, join us live next time so you can ask your questions in real time.

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Here is the full video walkthrough:

Power Hour is held Wednesdays at 11AM CST, live on YouTube.