Despite a global rush toward enterprise digital transformation, the document remains at the heart of most businesses, and unfortunately, managing them still remains a distinctly manual process. Despite its structured nature, the flexibility of a document makes it hard to automate business processes, and taking data from multiple line-of-business applications to insert it in a document is a matter of cut-and-paste, from screen to document and often back again once a document is received. Launched at Ignite in October 2022, Microsoft Syntex is here to solve some of these tediously manual issues, adding document processing tools to SharePoint. The solution uses machine learning to help construct and parse documents, turning a manual process into one where humans guide and check software, and where legal, regulatory and contractual requirements are still met. In this in-depth look at Syntex, learn more about content AI and some of the current use cases for this release.

Project Cortex uses AI to organise content, delivering topic cards, topic pages and knowledge centres in Office, Outlook and Teams. Microsoft's history with knowledge management goes back a long way, from pre-SharePoint tooling with Site Server, through its abortive Knowledge Network platform, to today's mix of Bing and the Microsoft Graph for Microsoft 365 subscribers. Now the company is trying again, adding machine learning to the mix to help organisations understand what they know, and more importantly, who knows it. This time there's a lot more training data, a deeper understanding of the knowledge graph that underpins most businesses, and above all, the hyperscale compute of the modern cloud. Microsoft's Project Cortex is an ambitious set of tools built around Microsoft 365, intended to automate the complex process of building and deploying knowledge management systems.