More Than Switching On AI: Semantic Search for a Multilingual SharePoint Intranet

More Than Switching On AI: Semantic Search for a Multilingual SharePoint Intranet

Webinar Description / Agenda –

Employees no longer type keywords and scan a list of links. They ask a full question in German, French, Italian or English, and expect an answer they can check. On an intranet, that answer is often spread across pages, news, lists and long PDFs.

We built a prototype of a semantic search for our SharePoint intranet, and it is now going into a pilot. It took more than switching on an AI feature. The three of us show how we approached it, each from our own role:

• Business: why a semantic search, and what employees expect from it.
• Development: how a test intranet and test questions let us compare approaches by measurement, and how answers stay tied to their sources.
• Engineering: moving a lab prototype into an enterprise environment, with infrastructure as code, identities without keys, and permissions down to the single document.

Agenda:

1. Why a semantic search for the intranet
2. Measuring before building: a test intranet and test questions
3. Architecture and demos: from question to answer with sources
4. From prototype to pilot: DevSecOps and demo
5. Lessons learned and Q&A

Benefits of attending

• What we compared (Microsoft 365 Copilot APIs, SharePoint search with an LLM around it, Azure AI Search) and what decided it.
• A way to measure search quality before and after changes: a test intranet, test questions with known sources, and questions that should get no answer.
• An architecture for answers with sources on SharePoint content, with citations limited to the retrieved documents.
• What moving from prototype to pilot involves: infrastructure as code, managed identities, permissions down to the document, and an index that keeps up with content changes and deletions.
• Why content ownership and publishing quality matter more with semantic search, not less.

Is there a demo?
Yes, 3 demos, all on a synthetic test intranet with fictional content:

1. The search in SharePoint: questions in four languages and Swiss German, and answers with sources. It also shows a question answered only from selected documents, and one with no matching content.
2. Behind one answer: a diagnostics view follows one question through retrieval, ranking and answer generation.
3. Engineering: provisioning the environment from code, and how sign-in, app roles and managed identities control access.