Case study: Answergrove across about 400,000 SharePoint documents

Answergrove in production: what we deployed at a construction group, how long it took, and what we learned about adoption.

When SharePoint outgrows everyone who knows it

Answergrove runs at a construction group across 865 SharePoint sites with about 400,000 documents in four languages. It went live there in about eight working days.

Before that, there was exactly one way to find anything specific: know which site and folder it lives in. In practice that meant asking the colleague who knows. And when that colleague leaves, the knowledge leaves with them.

What we deployed

A page in SharePoint where people ask in their own language, the way they would ask a colleague. The answer comes with links to the documents it came from. Questions about registers kept as SharePoint lists are answered from the live lists, not guessed by a language model.

Three things without which no company should let a tool like this in:

1. Everyone sees only what SharePoint already allows them to see. Every candidate document is checked against the requesting user’s own permissions before it appears; when in doubt, it is dropped. Nothing new gets opened to anyone.
2. An honest “not found”. If the documents do not contain an answer, Answergrove says so instead of guessing.
3. The index updates automatically: a new document becomes findable without anyone lifting a finger.

Numbers

Went live in	about eight working days
Indexed	865 SharePoint sites, about 400,000 documents
Languages	four
Infrastructure	Microsoft Azure in the EU, Azure OpenAI in the EU Data Zone
Per-user licences	none

The honest part: trust has to be earned

We expected the search box to be flooded with questions from day one. The opposite happened: people use it cautiously, like something foreign. The first queries are careful probes, not a working routine.

That is not a failure of the tool. It is a finding about AI adoption in general. A tool can work flawlessly and still meet employees who do not trust it yet, and management enthusiasm does not skip this stage. Trust is built by answers that always carry a source link (verify it yourself) and by an honest “I could not find this” instead of invented text. Every correctly answered question earns one user.

We measure and manage this stage rather than waiting for it to pass.

Who is behind it

Answergrove is built and delivered by SIA KSJ, Latvia (EU), a member of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. It answers your team’s questions from your own SharePoint documents and lists, with the source next to every answer.

If you want this on your own SharePoint, the first step is a two-week pilot on one SharePoint site: €1,500 fixed, credited to the rollout if you continue. It starts with a check of who can see what on that site. The pilot runs in our Microsoft Azure environment in Sweden Central (EU), so you need no Azure subscription for it; after rollout, Answergrove runs in your own Azure subscription. Pricing: ksj.lv/en/answergrove

To start, tell us which SharePoint site or library you want to begin with, plus 5 to 10 real questions your team asks about it: kaspars@jurjans.dev. Answergrove is available on Microsoft Marketplace.