AI-Powered SharePoint Updates: Faster Document Automation, Better Data – and Why You Should Care

At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Las Vegas this May, a live demo of SharePoint’s new AI features got the crowd cheering. I was in the audience when Miceile Barrett from Microsoft went onstage and showed how SharePoint can automatically tag and summarize documents in seconds – no manual effort needed. As someone who helped build these content AI solutions (back when they were part of the Microsoft Syntex initiative), it was a thrill to see people so excited about what this tech can do.

Miceile Barrett demos Autofill at the M365 Conference

In this post, I’ll break down the key announcements (think Autofill and a Sensitive Info Detector), and more importantly, explain what they mean for you as a business leader. Bottom line up front: Microsoft has made document automation easier, faster, and more affordable, and that unlocks big productivity wins and better AI outcomes for your organization.

Autofill: Let AI Do the Data Entry

One highlight from the keynote was the general availability of “Autofill” columns in SharePoint document libraries. In plain terms, Autofill uses AI (GPT-4, behind the scenes) to read the contents of your files and automatically pull out the info you ask for. Instead of you hunting through a document for a date or a name and typing it into a column, you just tell SharePoint what you want and it fills it in for every file.

Using Autofill to automatically tag conference decks with the event name

During the demo, Miceile showed how you can add a new Autofill column, type a question like “What is the project deadline in this file?”, click a button – and boom, every file in the library now has the answer in that column. If a file didn’t have an answer, that entry stays blank (so you know it needs attention). You can also do things like “Summarize this document in 3 sentences” and get an AI-generated summary saved for each file. It works with PDFs, Word, Excel, PowerPoint – most common file types. Essentially, Autofill turns your document library into a smarter spreadsheet, where a lot of the cells can fill themselves in.

The reaction in the room was amazing – people started clapping when they saw a column of 20 files all get populated in an instant. Why the excitement? Because we’ve all been that person copy-pasting info from one place to another, or scrambling to tag documents after the fact. Autofill is like having a tireless assistant that handles those chores for you, at scale.

And here’s the kicker: Microsoft dramatically lowered the cost of using these AI features. As of March 2025, Autofill costs about $0.005 per page of content processed (it was 10x more expensive before). Plus, Microsoft is currently giving everyone a promo allowance of 100 pages per month for free through June 2025. This got a big thumbs-up at the conference because it means even small teams can try AI-powered tagging without worrying about budget. In short, Autofill is now accessible to organizations of all sizes, not just the enterprises with deep pockets.

Sensitive Info Detector: Your Built-in Privacy Guardian

The other big update is a new prebuilt AI model for detecting sensitive information in documents. This one might not have gotten cheers (it’s hard to make compliance as sexy as a live AI demo), but it’s incredibly important. In just a few clicks, you can scan your files for things like email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses – and have those automatically identified and extracted.

Here’s how it works: In SharePoint’s Syntex content AI settings, you select the Sensitive Information prebuilt model. You don’t need to train anything or write code – it’s ready to go out-of-the-box. You just pick which types of info you want to detect (email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, etc.), maybe test it on a couple of sample files, then apply it to a document library. The AI will then go through each file in that library and, for example, create a column listing all the email addresses it found in each document. If you chose to extract the actual values, it can put each type of info in its own column (one column for phone numbers, one for addresses, etc.).

Detecting and extracting informaiton like company names and addresses

What really impressed me is that this model can even read text in images or handwriting. So if someone scanned a signed form or took a photo of a document, the AI can still catch the phone number written on it. That’s huge for industries that still rely on scanned paper documents.

From a business standpoint, this Sensitive Info detector is like an automatic privacy and compliance audit. It ensures nothing sensitive in your content goes unnoticed. For example, you could run it on an archive of contracts to quickly pull out all the addresses or to make sure no document contains a personal phone number that shouldn’t be there. At the conference, a lot of heads were nodding when the presenter explained how this helps with GDPR and other regulations – it’s a tedious task made effortless. And yes, this feature is also covered by the 100-page free monthly allowance right now. Microsoft clearly wants everyone to try these AI tools and see the value.

How These AI Updates Benefit You

Based on our sessions and workshops at the M365 Conference, information architecture matters. Pre calculating values with precision is optimizes your bsines precesses, and maximizes the value of your content.

People have different ways of interacting, and sometimes it's just quicker to visually scan through a library for summaries, outliers, or specific dates rather than using AI. Sorting, views, and color coding make things easier. Plus, accurate metadata helps apply security rules and workflows to content.

It's more efficient in terms of energy and computation. Some believe AI will make information architecture obsolete, but consider the resources needed. For a company with 10,000 people and a billion documents, constantly recalculating security and data for every query is wasteful. It's better to extract key information once and share it, rather than redoing calculations repeatedly.

Why should a business leader care about any of this? Let’s translate these tech updates into plain business outcomes:

• Speed and Efficiency: Tasks that used to take hours (or require dedicated staff) can now happen in seconds. Autofill can process dozens of documents faster than you can blink, which means reports get done faster, analyses start sooner, and projects don’t bottleneck on paperwork. For instance, preparing a quarterly report might involve collating data from 50 documents – now the AI can pull those key data points instantly, letting your team move straight to analysis and decision-making.

• Reduced Errors: Every manual step is a chance for human error – a typo, a copy-paste mistake, a forgotten field. By automating data extraction and tagging, you dramatically cut down on mistakes. The AI will not misspell a name it copied from a document, and it won’t overlook a date written in an odd format. This leads to more reliable data in your systems. Imagine the confidence in knowing your sales database or compliance records are consistently accurate because they were filled by an AI that doesn’t get tired or distracted.

• Better Compliance & Lower Risk: This is where the Sensitive Info model shines. It’s like having a compliance auditor that never sleeps. If there’s a passport number or personal email hidden in a file, it will surface it. That means you can take action – protect it, delete it, or secure that file – and avoid the nightmare of a data breach or compliance violation. For regulated industries, this is a game-changer. It also helps build trust with your clients and partners, because you can confidently say, “We have systems ensuring private info is handled properly.”

• Empowered and Happier Teams: No one enjoys the grunt work of sifting through documents or entering data into spreadsheets. By offloading these chores to AI, you free your team to focus on more meaningful work. Your financial analysts can analyze numbers instead of transcribing them. Your HR staff can spend more time with people and less time with paperwork. This isn’t about cutting jobs; it’s about elevating everyone’s work. In my experience, when people see tedious parts of their job disappear, morale goes up and productivity follows. It’s the kind of efficiency that also makes the workplace more enjoyable.

• Higher Quality Content (and Better AI Results Down the Line): This one might not be obvious, but it’s very important: By automatically enriching your documents with tags, metadata, and summaries, you’re turning unstructured information into structured knowledge. Later on, when you use tools like search or AI assistants (hello, Copilot!), they can give you much better answers because your content is well-organized. It’s garbage in, garbage out – and the inverse is true too, quality in, quality out. For example, if every contract in your library has an “End Date” and “Client Name” column filled in by AI, you could ask an assistant “how many contracts with Client X expire next year?” and get an instant, accurate response. Essentially, you’re investing in the cleanliness and richness of your data, which pays dividends anytime you leverage AI for insights. SharePoint content is a key knowledge source for Copilot; the better your content is structured, the better Copilot (or any AI) can perform.

• Scalability and Agility: Businesses change fast. You might acquire a company and suddenly inherit 10,000 documents, or have to respond to a new regulation that requires analyzing all employee records. These AI features scale effortlessly – process one document or a million, the effort is roughly the same (just a bit more computing time). And because it’s pay-as-you-go, you’re only paying for what you use. This means you can handle spikes in workload without missing a beat or breaking the budget. Scaling up a process no longer means scaling up headcount linearly. That’s a big strategic advantage when planning capacity and growth.

Next Steps: How to Leverage These Features

So, how do you take advantage of these updates? A few suggestions:

1. Try it on a Pilot Project. Identify one document-heavy process that’s a pain point – maybe invoice processing, contract management, or compliance document review. Set up an Autofill column or apply the Sensitive Info model, and see what it can do. Microsoft has made it easy to enable these (your IT admin can turn on Syntex content AI features in SharePoint). With the current free allowance, you can likely automate a batch of documents at no cost to get a feel for it.

2. Show the Before & After. Nothing convinces stakeholders like results. Time how long the process takes manually, then time it again with AI help. Check the error rates before and after. When you can say “we saved 5 hours of work and caught 3 errors that would have slipped through,” it makes a compelling case to expand use of the technology.

3. Educate Your Team. Make sure everyone understands why you’re introducing these AI tools. Emphasize that the goal is to eliminate drudgery, not jobs. Encourage folks to learn and play with the new features – maybe host a lunch-and-learn or share a quick demo video. Often you’ll find enthusiasts in different departments who, once they get it, will come up with new ideas for how AI can streamline their work. Empower those champions.

4. Integrate into Strategy. Consider these AI capabilities as part of your digital transformation toolkit. They shouldn’t be a novelty used once and forgotten. Where else could you apply them? Perhaps your customer service team could use Autofill to summarize feedback forms, or Legal could use the Sensitive Info model to ensure all outgoing documents are scrubbed of personal data. Bake the use of content AI into your standard operating procedures where it makes sense.

5. Stay Informed and Keep Experimenting. Microsoft is continuously improving these services (for example, they hinted at future support for scanning inside encrypted files, and more integrations down the line). Keep an eye on the Microsoft 365 roadmap and community blogs. Join user groups or forums (like the Microsoft Tech Community) to see how others are using the features. The technology will only get more powerful, and getting in early means you’ll be ahead of the curve in understanding how to leverage it fully.

In the end, what we saw at the M365 Conference was not just a cool demo – it was a validation that AI is ready to tackle the mundane work that bogs us down, and people are ready to embrace it. By integrating these new SharePoint AI features into your business, you’re effectively gaining superpowers for your content: automatic organization, instant insights, and iron-clad compliance checks. That translates to saved time, saved money, and a smarter organization.

I’m genuinely excited about what this could do for you and your teams. As always, feel free to reach out if you have questions or want to swap stories about putting content AI into practice. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a wave of success stories in this space – make sure your company is one of them.