New in ShareGate: MCP governance without leaving your AI chat

TLDR: ShareGate MCP is live. It connects ShareGate Protect to Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot, so you can govern your Microsoft 365 tenant from the AI you're already using.

Imagine someone asks you a governance question, "who has access to this site?", "are there inactive guests in my Finance group?", "how many unassigned E5 licenses do we have?" And instead of digging into reports or CSVs, you just ask the AI you're already using and get an accurate answer back. And if you find something problematic, you ask your AI to fix it. And it does.  

Good news.  

Today, we’re launching ShareGate MCP. It plugs ShareGate Protect into Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot. So, you have the governance power of Protect, right where you’re already working.

In this blog, we’ll show you what ShareGate MCP does, how to try it, and how to make it useful from day one with a starter prompt pack you can copy, paste, and run right away.  

AI-powered Microsoft 365 governance is here

ShareGate MCP is now live. It's a connector—built by us, hosted by us—that lets your AI of choice talk directly to your ShareGate Protect data.  

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI tools securely connect to outside software and pull real data into the conversation. So, instead of an AI making something up or pulling from a generic search, it's drawing from a specific source you've authorized. In this case, your Microsoft 365 governance data through ShareGate Protect.  

The case for Microsoft 365 governance that travels with you

Governance used to be a slow-burn problem. Permissions drifted. Guests lingered. Sharing links accumulated. None of it was urgent until someone went looking. And most of the time, no one did.

AI is the someone, now. If your tenant is connected to an AI tool and a user asks it a question about your organization’s data, Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT don't look selectively. They look at everything they're allowed to look at. Which means access decisions that used to be invisible now have an audience, and that audience has no instinct for what's confidential and what isn't.

That’s why 71% of IT leaders said that their governance workload has increased since enabling AI tools. The pressure on IT teams has changed. The questions come faster, the answers need to be more current, and the cost of getting it wrong has gone up. A lot.  

Nearly 1 in 3 companies have had AI surface sensitive data that it shouldn’t have had access to. In 2025, the US average cost of a data breach was $10.22 million, a record high, up 9% year over year.

ShareGate MCP is built for that pressure. It puts governance where the work is happening. In the same AI surfaces driving the new urgency in the first place.

What ShareGate MCP lets you do in Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot

The short version?  

1. Ask a question.

2. Get a real answer.  

3. Fix any problems.  

Here's what it actually looks like.  

1. Get the governance data you need in one prompt

ShareGate Protect already pulls Microsoft 365 governance data out of multiple admin centers and into one place. ShareGate MCP takes it one step further: it makes that data conversational, so you can ask anything Protect tracks from the AI you're already using.

Sharing patterns. Guest access. Workspace activity. Sensitivity labels. Ownership history. License usage. Whatever Protect surfaces in its UI is now just one prompt away. Then you can drill, filter, or hand off to leadership as a clean report.

And it doesn't stop at the current state. Protect tracks trends over time, so you can see how things are moving, not just where they stand right now.

Try this: "Generate this week's governance summary for my tenant. Include new findings, trend direction, and outstanding reviews."

You'll get a structured digest, including:

• New oversharing findings and how they compare to last week

• Sites remediated, external guest exposure trending up or down

• Outstanding owner reviews

• Idle license counts.  

From there, ask follow-ups like "which findings are highest-risk?" Or have the AI reformat the digest as a slide for your next leadership update.

No scripts. No CSV exports. No report builder.

2. Get richer answers from richer data

Here's where things get interesting. ShareGate MCP isn't the only MCP tool out there. Another example is Microsoft’s recent release Work IQ, an MCP server that exposes Microsoft 365 activity data: who's sending messages, who's modifying files, who's actively working where.

Connect both, and your AI can answer questions that neither MCP could handle alone. Because MCP is an open standard, AI tools can use multiple servers together, using each one for the part of the question it's best at answering.

Try this in Copilot: "Who's most active in workspaces that don't have a specified owner and belong to the Marketing department?"

Your AI splits the question. ShareGate MCP finds workspaces missing an owner in Marketing (governance data only ShareGate knows). Work IQ identifies who's most active in those workspaces (activity data only Microsoft knows). The AI stitches the two halves into one answer: a list of people who should probably take ownership, ranked by how much they're already using the workspace.

That's a richer answer than either MCP could give you alone. And it's a 30-second prompt.

With Microsoft's MCP Server for Enterprise, which works in Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, and other MCP clients, you can pair ShareGate's view of Microsoft 365 access with live Entra ID data on identities and MFA status.

Try this: "Find every guest user with access to Finance sites who hasn't signed in for 90 days and doesn't have MFA enabled."

ShareGate MCP lists the guests with Finance access and checks their last sign-in. The Microsoft Enterprise MCP checks each user's MFA status in Entra. You get back a focused cleanup list and a defensible reason to act on it.

That's the unlock. The data layer behind your AI gets richer with every MCP server you connect, and the questions you can ask get sharper as a result.

3. Act based on insights

ShareGate MCP won't be read-only for long. Once you find something risky, the same conversation will be able to fix it.

Starting in July 2026, you’ll be able to remove a sharing link, adjust group ownership, or set up an automated policy in Protect that handles a recurring problem on a schedule. ShareGate MCP will preview every action in plain language and wait for your sign-off before anything runs.

Try this next month: "Create a policy that removes Anyone links on files containing 'Salaries' or 'Compensation.'"

ShareGate MCP drafts the policy in Protect, shows you what it would catch, and pauses. You review it, give the go ahead, and from then on the policy runs on a recurring schedule, quietly cleaning up the same problem you'd otherwise be asked about twice a month.

How to get hands-on with ShareGate MCP

ShareGate MCP is live right now, which means you can connect today via manual install on Claude, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot. Marketplace listings are rolling out over the next few weeks, which will make connecting even easier. We're building this in the open, which means you can expect the experience to keep getting sharper as we go.

To try it, you'll need three things:

• A ShareGate Protect subscription or free trial—ShareGate MCP is included at no extra cost

• Access to a modern paid plan of Claude, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot

• About 10 minutes for the one-time setup

Steal these 6 prompts

Jim Ehrenberg of SharePoint Pros built a starter pack of six governance prompts you can use with ShareGate MCP in your AI of choice from day one. Each prompt targets a specific Microsoft 365 governance problem IT teams run into all the time:  

1. Ownerless workspaces  

2. License waste

3. Broad-access permissions (EEEU and All Company grants)

4. Public groups with external sharing

5. Inactive workspaces

6. Unclear access on high-value sites

Each scenario comes with more than the prompt itself. There's a use case—when to run it, why it matters, what it catches. There's a set of AI instructions that shape how the results land, written so the output works for both admins and non-technical readers. And there are parameter swaps for tuning each one to your environment.

Here's a peek at two of the prompts.

For finding license waste:

List users who have been inactive for 90+ days but still hold a paid license (such as Office 365 E3, E5, or Microsoft Copilot), with their last activity date and the licenses assigned. Rank by the monthly cost of the licenses involved.

For finding the riskiest oversharing:

List all public Microsoft 365 Groups that also have external sharing links, with the owner, member count, and guest count. Rank by exposure so the most open, most active groups surface first.

Download the full prompt pack →

The pack is built for IT pros and partners who want results they can act on, not just findings they can stare at. In this starter pack, every prompt is read-only. So, ShareGate MCP surfaces what's happening, you decide what to do next.  

We plan on sharing more prompt packs in the coming weeks, and we’ll include recommended actions to ask your AI tool to take.

Put MCP governance to work

ShareGate MCP brings ShareGate Protect's governance layer into Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot. So, the data Protect already pulls together from multiple admin centers is now just one prompt away, the answers get richer when you layer in other MCP tools, and soon you’ll be able to fix any problems you find in the same AI chat you’re already working in.

The best way to see how it really works is a live demo with one of our experts. They'll walk you through real MCP scenarios, answer your questions, and help you figure out where ShareGate MCP fits in your environment. If you want to try it out in your own tenant you can start a free Protect trial.

If you're already a Protect customer, you can connect today.

One more thing worth saying: ShareGate MCP is the first of its kind from us, but it won't be the last. More ShareGate products are coming to the protocol.