SharePoint Premium highlights the hard road CIOs face with generative AI

SharePoint Premium, introduced in late 2023, just might be the worst bit of product naming in the history of software.

Hyperbolic? Perhaps. And yes, I know, it has a lot of competition for this prize. But as everyone knows, postfixing a software moniker with “Premium” means it has a handful of features the free version doesn’t provide, ones you might care enough about to pay for.

But slog through Microsoft’s introduction of “the future of AI powered content management and experiences,” and you’ll discover that if Microsoft delivers on its promises, SharePoint Premium isn’t just SharePoint with a handful of nice-to-haves bolted onto its posterior.

It’s something completely different, and potentially interesting, except for a few fatal flaws that shed light on the hard road CIOs are in for as we enter the era of enterprise software enhanced everywhere by generative AI.

SharePoint Premium’s potential

To understand why SharePoint Premium might actually matter, look no further than the fact that, in the typical enterprise, about 20% of all data is structured — the stuff that fits nicely into relational databases. The remaining 80% is unstructured: emails, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, voicemails, and so on.

Back in the day, when its assumptions, methodologies, and overall culture were formed, IT suffered from a serious case of ratio inversion, focusing something like 80% of its budget and efforts on the 20%, leaving 20% of its attention to help with the unstructured 80%.

Moreover, to better handle unstructured data, application vendors bifurcated their wares, with one group focused on unstructured data in its purest form, leaving the other group to manage documents. To oversimplify a smidgen, call unstructured data “content” and think of it as atoms. Documents, in this metaphor, are molecules.

And so we have content management systems (CMSes) and document management systems (DMSes). DMSes are, to continue the oversimplification, glorified folder trees, while CMSes enable users to assemble documents on the fly from chunks of content. Think of a contract as a document molecule, and stored boilerplate for contracts as content atoms that lawyers can assemble into contract molecules.

Until Microsoft added “Premium” to SharePoint, SharePoint was mostly a DMS, although it did other stuff too that made it look more like a DBMS plus app dev environment.

De-oversimplifying the opportunity

What a folder tree does for documents is categorize them, making them easier to find. It also makes it easier to turn their contents into knowledge because you can find everything about a subject — a category — that might be useful to review in one place.

Folder trees have one serious limitation: Most documents logically belong to multiple categories. You might, for example, file the document you’re reading right now in your DMS folder, CMS folder, SharePoint Documentation folder, and Brilliant Insights folder.

With a simple folder tree, you choose which category might prove most useful. Or you might stash a copy of a document in each folder it logically belongs to. But then you’d better freeze everything in each folder, because otherwise chasing down which version is the current version becomes a full-time job.

SharePoint and its fellow DMSes solve this problem by letting users file documents into multiple folder trees through curated metadata tags.

Problem solved, except that the cure is worse than the disease, because nobody will go through the trouble to file each document into all the folders it logically belongs to.

File it in the Great Theory But folder.

Enter SharePoint Premium — specifically, its Syntex subproduct — which uses (tell me you knew this was coming) artificial intelligence(!) to crack the multi-categorization nut, stashing each document in the folder tree and folder that fit it best, and pointers to it in all other folder trees / folders it also logically belongs to.

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.