Ask Copilot to show your team’s open approvals and it hands you a paragraph. No buttons, nothing to click. You still have to leave the chat and open SharePoint to act on any of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SharePoint Copilot Apps<\/a> exist to close that gap, and once I understood what that actually meant, I wanted to build one rather than just read the announcement. Public preview shipped July 9, 2026<\/a>. I picked a scenario nobody in the official sample gallery had touched yet: Work IQ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every SPFx component I’d built before this had the same shape: I decided where it lived, and the user had to go there. A web part sits on a page, so someone navigates to that page. An extension changes how a page behaves, a command in a menu, a custom column renderer, but it’s still bound to that page. An ACE lives on the Viva Connections dashboard, which is a real improvement since it’s the first thing most people see each morning, but it’s still a destination. You open Viva Connections, and the ACE is there waiting for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Copilot App breaks that pattern. It lives inside the conversation itself, and it only shows up when the conversation actually calls for it. There’s no button to find and no page to remember exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mechanically, it’s still SPFx underneath. You scaffold it the same way, write it in React or whatever framework you’re comfortable with, and package it the same way. What’s genuinely different is how it gets invoked. Every Copilot Component ships a tool description: a plain-English paragraph explaining what the component answers and when it should be used. Microsoft 365 Copilot’s own orchestration reads that description against whatever the person just typed and decides, per turn, whether this specific component is the right response. Nobody places it on a page. Nothing points a user toward it. If the question fits, it renders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s the actual tool description shipping in the manifest for this sample, word for word:<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat a Copilot App actually is, and why it’s a different kind of SPFx surface<\/h2>\n\n\n\n