SharePoint Premium highlights the hard road CIOs face with generative AI

Assuming it does what it claims to do, SharePoint Premium will, in theory, give users the best of folder-tree navigation and semantic search.

Plus, again in theory, SharePoint Premium’s AI capabilities invert the CMS/DMS atom/molecule perspective by turning documents into content, and from there, through the miracle of generative AI, to knowledge.

SharePoint Premium’s missed opportunity

Microsoft Windows gives users folder trees, useful for organizing files of various types. SharePoint also gives users folder trees, also useful for organizing files of various types.

Microsoft Outlook gives us folder trees one more time. They’re useful for organizing emails for the same reason SharePoint folder trees are useful for organizing other types of documents. But search for “email” on the “Introducing SharePoint Premium” page and you’ll find just one mention: that Microsoft makes an integration available for email, whatever that might mean.

What it means to me is that Microsoft has missed a major opportunity. An email is a document just as every Word, Excel, and PowerPoint presentation is a document. Turning documents into content and content into knowledge is at least as valuable when it comes to emailed communication as it does for shareable documents. And unifying email under the SharePoint Premium umbrella would, as a practical matter, save us all from having to set up our Outlook folders as trees that duplicate our SharePoint folders.

SharePoint Premium’s fatal flaw

Imagine you can penetrate Microsoft’s SharePoint Premium word salad. Imagine it works as advertised, without the usual v.1 glitches Microsoft is famous for.

Imagine you find Microsoft’s AI-driven, deep view of content compelling enough that you want to dive in and take advantage of it all.

Now think of the user community you support. That’s right — the same end-users you can’t persuade to use Word styles instead of direct text formatting. The ones who format every PowerPoint slide from scratch, ignoring the carefully crafted templates you and Marketing have provided to save everyone time and effort while adding consistency as a fringe benefit.

As long as we’re griping about them, they aren’t willing to even try the automated note-taking tool you did battle with the CFO to get permission to license.

Think your end-user community will be willing to invest serious time and attention to understand Microsoft’s content vision in enough depth that they’ll take advantage of the brilliant capabilities SharePoint Premium will enable?

No, they won’t. End-users have a job to do. And they have an ingrained world view that enables work habits that, by dint of their familiarity, makes users good at getting their jobs done.

Sure, what you as Microsoft’s proxy have to offer is better from the perspective of a deep and consistent content architecture. But if this is all going to happen, Microsoft is going to have to step up with an organizational change management vision that’s just as compelling as IT’s newly embraced and AI-enabled content architecture.

Oh, and one more thing: As CIO you’ll need to one more thing: a better, simpler explanation you can use in the executive suite. Because if you try using Microsoft’s explanation you won’t get approval to proceed. Head-scratches, yes. Approval? Not a chance.

Ever since ChatGPT made its first foray into the public consciousness, commentators have been concerned that its generative AI capabilities might make us mere humans obsolete by doing what we do only better.

But it appears the commentators had it backward. The challenge won’t come from AI being able to do what humans do only better. It’s that AIs will demand more of us humans, just to keep pace.