☕ SharePoint Tip #16 — Microsoft Syntex: AI that reads your documents

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Good morning! Here is your 15-minute SharePoint tip for today.

Day 16 | Week 4 — Product Owner Mastery

Microsoft Syntex: AI-powered SharePoint

Microsoft Syntex brings artificial intelligence directly into SharePoint document libraries. It can read, understand, and process documents automatically — without manual tagging or data entry.

What Syntex can do

Document understanding models — train an AI model to recognise a document type (invoices, contracts, CVs) and automatically extract metadata. For example: upload 10 sample invoices, highlight "Vendor Name," "Invoice Date," and "Total Amount," and Syntex learns to extract these fields from every future invoice automatically.

Content assembly — generate documents from templates using data from SharePoint Lists or other M365 sources. Example: auto-generate a contract from a SharePoint list row containing client name, value, and start date.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — make scanned PDFs fully searchable by extracting their text into the search index.

Annotations — highlight, comment, and mark up documents inside SharePoint without downloading them.

Syntex licensing

Syntex is a pay-per-use service billed through Azure. Key costs:

  • Document processing: per page processed
  • Content assembly: per document generated
  • OCR: per page

For high-volume document processing (thousands of invoices per month), Syntex delivers clear ROI. For low volumes, manual tagging may be more cost-effective. As a Product Owner, always build a cost/benefit case.

Try it today (5 minutes)

Go to a SharePoint document library → click Automate in the top toolbar → Apply a content understanding model. Even if no models are published yet, you’ll see the entry point. This is where a trained Syntex model gets applied to a library to start auto-classifying documents.

As a Product Owner

Syntex is the answer to the most common enterprise content problem: "We have thousands of documents with no metadata because nobody has time to tag them." If your company has high-volume, repetitive document types (HR onboarding packs, supplier invoices, legal contracts), Syntex is worth a proof-of-concept. Start small, measure the accuracy, then scale.

See you tomorrow at 6:00 AM with Tip #17 — SharePoint Governance Frameworks!