Episode 32: What AI Learned from Librarians (and SharePoint)

About the episode:
In this episode, I sit down with Sean Squires from the SharePoint product team at Microsoft, on Redmond Campus and in the same room as my guest for a change! We had aproper deep dive into something that quietly underpins almost everything we do with content and AI: librarian skills!

(We also had a lot of coffee...)

We talk about why librarian skills still matter in a world of large language models, how concepts like folksonomy, taxonomy, and ontology show up in very real product decisions, and why “messy content with magical AI on top” is not a strategy.

We also unpack the evolution from Syntex - to what’s now branded as AI in SharePoint, what changed (and why), and what this means for organisations trying to make AIactually useful — not just impressive.

This is a practical, honest conversation about content lifecycle, authoritative knowledge, and how natural language and AI conversations mean everyone suddenly has a SharePoint expert in a box.

About Sean Squires:
Sean is a Principal Product Manager for SharePoint at Microsoft and has spent 23 years working on the platform, starting with SharePoint 2003.

He holds a Master’s in Library Science from the University of Washington and brings deep expertise in how information is structured, described, and made usable at scale.

His work focuses on metadata and knowledge models — from folksonomy and taxonomy through to ontology — and how these foundations underpin AI in SharePoint.