The Internal Brain: Turning Your SharePoint into a Chatbot

The average knowledge worker spends 19% of their week just searching for information. That is one full day a week lost to "Where did I save that PDF?" and "What is our policy on remote work?"

Your business has a memory problem.

You have spent years accumulating data—Project Plans in Teams, HR Policies in SharePoint, Client Notes in CRMs. But this data isn't an asset; it's a Digital Landfill. It is buried, unstructured, and effectively invisible when you need it most.

Enter "The Internal Brain"

At Digital Sanctum, our primary AI deployment for SMEs is Enterprise Search. We don't just "install a search bar." We index your internal documents using the Sovereign RAG Architecture described in our Executive Guide to Sovereign AI.

We turn your static files into a dynamic conversation.

The User Experience

Instead of navigating folder trees or emailing a colleague, a staff member opens the secure "Sanctum Chat" window and asks:

• "Summarise the key outcomes from the Project Alpha kickoff meeting in November."
• "Draft a response to this client email using our standard Tone of Voice guidelines."
• "What is the procedure for approving a vendor invoice over $5,000?"

The Technical Mechanism: How It Works

It is not magic; it is engineering. Clients often ask how we make the AI "know" their business without training a custom model (which is expensive). Here is the pipeline we deploy:

1. Ingestion: We connect the "Brain" to your live data sources (SharePoint, Google Drive, Confluence, Xero).
2. Sanitisation: We strip out the noise. Headers, footers, and messy formatting are removed to leave only pure context.
3. Vectorisation: We turn your text into mathematical coordinates (vectors) and store them in a secure database.
4. Retrieval: When you ask a question, the system finds the specific paragraph that contains the answer, sends only that paragraph to the secure AI, and generates a response.

Real-World Scenarios

To understand the power of this, let's look at how it changes the daily workflow for specific Victorian industries:

1. The Construction / Logistics Firm

• The Old Way: A Site Manager on an iPad tries to find the "Safety Management Plan v4" in a Dropbox folder while standing in the rain.
• The Sanctum Way: He types into the app: "What is the safety protocol for working at heights above 3 meters?" The Brain reads the PDF instantly and gives him the bullet points.

2. The Legal / Professional Services Firm

• The Old Way: A Junior Associate spends 4 hours reading old case files to see how the firm previously handled "Commercial Lease Disputes."
• The Sanctum Way: They ask: "List all cases from 2024 involving lease disputes and summarise the settlement terms." The Brain aggregates the data in 10 seconds.

Killing the "Tap on the Shoulder" Tax

The biggest ROI of the Internal Brain is not speed; it is Focus.

In most offices, when a junior staff member doesn't know an answer, they tap a senior staff member on the shoulder (or Slack them). This breaks the senior person's flow state. Research shows it takes 23 minutes to recover cognitive focus after an interruption.

By giving your team an "Internal Brain", you create a self-serve culture.

• New hires onboard faster.
• Senior staff are interrupted less.
• Institutional knowledge is preserved, even if key staff leave.

The Security Advantage (Why Not Just Use ChatGPT?)

You cannot simply upload your SharePoint to public ChatGPT. Aside from the privacy risks, public models do not respect Permissions.

If you upload your Payroll folder to a public bot, anyone can ask "What does the CEO earn?"

Digital Sanctum's architecture respects Access Control Lists (ACLs).

• If the CEO asks "What is the payroll liability?", the AI answers.
• If an Intern asks "What is the payroll liability?", the AI checks their Microsoft 365 permissions, sees they are blocked, and replies: "I do not have access to that information."

The Warning: Garbage In, Garbage Out

This technology is powerful, but it reveals truths you might not like. If you have four different versions of your "Travel Policy" saved in different folders, the AI will not know which one is true.

This is why we start with the Sanctum Audit. Before we build the Brain, we must clean the library. We identify conflicting data, stale files, and permission errors to ensure your AI speaks the truth.