AI meets SharePoint: a pain to set up, a win to run.

We rolled out a company-wide AI layer at an SME: an AI assistant (Claude Opus 4.8, as of 06/2026), connected to Microsoft Graph via MCP — SharePoint, email and Teams. The short verdict first: setting SharePoint up was tedious. Running it is not. And on balance, the rollout clearly pays off.

The build was a slog. SharePoint is a chore to handle: a sluggish interface and a logic of sites, libraries and permissions that doesn't explain itself. What saved the build was, of all things, the AI assistant itself — it helped structure, permission and tidy up, instead of leaving us alone with the Microsoft docs.

In daily use the picture flips. That very Microsoft 365 storage works as a lightweight RAG: staff ask in plain language, the assistant fetches the right document and cites the source as it goes — no vector database, no pipeline of our own. The same goes for email and Teams. The knowledge already in the house becomes queryable.

Who it pays off for: anyone already running Microsoft 365 gets a viable AI layer on their own data with manageable effort — no new system, no data migration. The expensive route, moving data into a separate vector database first, isn't needed to get started.

To be honest: getting in takes patience, and SharePoint won't become pretty for it. But the hurdle sits in the setup, not in daily use — and it only comes up once.

Setup is the price. Running it is the payoff.

We guide Swiss SMEs along this path — human, competent, holistic.