Monday Question: Could a New Hire Find It?
Here's a test you can run before lunch: pick a question a new hire would have in their first week. Not something obscure, something routine. Then check whether SharePoint can actually answer it.
Could a new hire find the answer without asking a person?
If the honest answer is no, the content that would answer it either doesn't exist, or exists somewhere nobody would think to look, or exists in a form nothing can actually retrieve, buried in a PDF, split across three versions, or written for someone who already knew the context.
That gap is invisible until you go looking for it, because the people who already know the answer never notice the search failing. They just answer the question themselves, in Teams, and the moment passes without anyone logging that the system should have handled it.
Run the test on three real questions this week. It's the same retrieval mechanism behind why Copilot answers brilliantly in one company and confidently wrong in another, and it's worth running before you look at any AI use case that assumes the content is already findable.
If you'd rather find out what's actually retrievable in your SharePoint, that's a working session.
Rosemarie Withee has spent thirteen years helping operations teams get real work out of their software, first Microsoft 365, now AI. She’s written six books for Wiley and builds AI products at Portal Integrators.