Add Managed Metadata in SharePoint with AI (Full Tutorial)
Tired of inconsistent tags and messy filters in SharePoint?
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use AI-powered taxonomy tagging to automatically apply Managed Metadata to your documents — step by step.
You’ll learn:
What Managed Metadata is and why it matters How AI matches document content with your term sets Setup requirements (like Pay-as-you-go) Limitations, supported file types, and governance tips A full live demo of taxonomy tagging in action
This is part of our Ultimate SharePoint Content AI series — check out the full playlist to go even deeper
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
TranscriptIf you’ve already worked with SharePoint, you already know how important metadata is to have a good experience—whether it’s searching for documents, filtering in a list or library, or simply opening a library and making sure that you understand what every document is about. Now, there are many different ways to use AI to extract data from documents and put it in different fields. But the problem with them is that they might create different variations of the same piece of content every single time. And when you try to filter or search, that will just create multiple options for the same exact thing. It doesn’t help us much.
This is where taxonomy tagging comes in. Welcome back, everyone, to the Ultimate SharePoint Content AI Series. I’m again joined by my good friend Gokan as Chief Chi. And for those of you who have been following along, this is part 14 of the series. And for those of you who are new, well, welcome to the series. We really hope you’re going to enjoy this video and check out some of the other ones. But now, Gokan, I’ll let you take it away.
Thank you so much, Vlad. It’s always a pleasure to be with you on screen. And the phenomenal part is that your introduction already covers half of my slides, so I’m going to just repeat what you said. Well, taxonomy tagging in SharePoint uses AI to automatically apply terms from your organization from metadata within your document in your field, your document libraries. And you can definitely use them to search, sort, filter, and so on and so on.
So basically, you just upload a document, and then AI will analyze that file, check within the managed metadata, and then apply those terms if there is a match. Today, there are only four types that are supported for that kind of operation: DOC, DOCX, PDF, and PPTX. So only those four—the most important ones—but still, I know it can be bigger. A lot of other AI options have more, but this is a very good start. So those four only.
And you have a few things to bear in mind. Within a document library, you can only have five of that kind of column, so you can’t have more than five taxonomy tagging columns within a document library. The second part is it only works on native PDFs—so no scanned PDFs, unfortunately. You cannot scan something and say, “Hey, analyze that and bring me that within the taxonomy field.”
The third and most tricky side is—and I know you have a joke about the Microsoft minute—this is a bit more of that Microsoft minute. It’s between 20 minutes, but a Microsoft minute can be anything. That’s the thing. A Microsoft minute is from 30 seconds to 72 hours. So this is less than a Microsoft minute. It can take up to 24 hours maximum in order to extract the field and bring it to your document library.
There is no backfill, unfortunately. So if you already have documents in your document library and you create that column, well, you have to re-upload them. You cannot do autofill where you select them and press autofill—no, you can’t, unfortunately. So that’s the biggest drawback.
And the columns are editable. So it’s not because they extracted something and put it in your column that you’re stuck with it. You can always modify it. If you’re not happy with the result, feel free to modify it. You can always have a workflow where AI does almost everything and somebody checks it, for example.
Totally. Okay, awesome. Again, the automation guy who talks. Okay, next one is: here are the four steps in order to use taxonomy tagging while enabling Pay-As-You-Go, setting up the taxonomy tagging, and then we can either create a new column or use an existing one and modify it. That’s the only slide I had. So, if you’re ready for the demo—can you go one slide back really quickly?
Yes. And for those of you who are new to the series, for the first part, enable Pay-As-You-Go. If you haven’t done it already, we have a dedicated video that only covers how to do that. So if you haven’t done it yet, after this video, go check it out—it’ll be linked in the description below.
Now, Gokan, I know you already spent too much time on slides for your usual, so I’ll let you go to the demo.
There you go. So I have a document library, and you will see that there is nothing special about it. Now we just add a column, and what you’re going to see here under managed metadata when you click on “Next” is—after enabling Pay-As-You-Go services—you get that “Automate tag documents with terms.” This is the first time I’ve seen it. So you need Pay-As-You-Go, and you need to have it enabled on the site, and then you have those options.
There you go. Awesome. And then I’m going to just select my term here within my term set. I can either go on that name, but you can also go here and say, “You know what, I have multiple customers, and I want every time that I’m uploading a document, check the content of it, and if there is a match with those names, fill in my column with that data.”
Awesome. I’m going to just select “Customers” and click on “Save.” One golden rule that I’m giving to everyone is: try to use—if your governance permits—the premium logo or the diamond logo and then just have the name in front of that. You do know that half of the people are going to love it, and half of the governance people are going to hate you for giving that idea, right?
That’s why I say check with your governance people first, because when I create this—look how it’s beautiful—and it’s somehow the same as the Power Platform, you know, like premium connectors. Now this is a premium column. Half of me is like, “This is beautiful.” The other half wonders, “What does the ID of the column look like if I want to put it into PNP and things like that?” Please don’t. Anyway, please don’t. Again, check with your governance people if allowed to do that, because some of them might hate you.
Now I’m going to just click here and then upload a file. Let me go for my PDF file just here and click. But what happens if Wingtip Toys doesn’t have any of V-neck Solutions or Neoxy? If there is no match, it’s going to be empty. Okay, it’s going to be empty. So now we’ll have to wait 20 minutes to 24 hours in order to see our column filled in.
Okay, we’re back. So now you can see here that my document’s uploaded, and I can see that it extracted the value from my metadata store, and I have “V-neck Solutions Inc.” And if I go check here, well, it’s exactly the same value as you can see in my term store. As I said, these are editable fields. So if you’re not happy with that, you can always delete that and bring your own value into it. But that’s how automatically things are being done with the taxonomy tag.
That’s amazing. So you can combine—I know you said we can only have five columns of this type—but I can add another five of type autofill if I want to, for example, right? And this way still extracts ten columns from that document.
Yes.
Yes. I know I’m asking you all the edge cases and weird things like that. I’m sorry, I’m putting you on the spot.
Yes, you can add those. You can even go for any other AI model and then have almost all kinds of scenarios. But technically, yes, you could do that.
Okay. And I know you’re a big autofill fan, so yes, you can do that, Vlad.
Okay, thank you. I’m happy now.
No worries. So that’s basically it. Nothing very spectacular, but I think it’s core for any content management within SharePoint. And I know organizations have been struggling to put metadata into their columns. Well, nobody wants to do it. That’s the problem. It’s important, but nobody wants to do it. And just by having those columns, autofills, AI models, and so on, well, you can add and fill in your columns with exactly the value you want to see for better content management within SharePoint.
So, I have a question for you, Gokan. Is this free?
It’s not for free. That’s why you have the little diamond there.
There you go. And I know that this is a premium service that I’m going to consume money from my credit card with the Pay-As-You-Go services.
Awesome. But for all of you on the screen right now, you’re going to see exactly how much it costs per extraction or per transaction. This way, you have all the information. We’ve already covered it in the “Setting Up Billing Pay-As-You-Go,” but if you just watched this video, this way you have it on the screen and you get your answer right away.
Gokan, anything else you want to add or is it just that easy?
It’s just that easy. I feel like this video is too short.
It’s just that easy. I can just show one more thing if you have time—is it?
Well, here I have the taxonomy tagging, and again I can just edit and say, “Okay, this is available to all sites, no sites,” or I can select up to 100 sites.
That’s awesome. I love it.
Well, Gokan, thank you so much for your time. This has been an amazing deep dive. For everybody watching, we really hope you have enjoyed this as well. If you want to check out the next video in this series, it should appear on the screen right about now. And make sure you like this video and subscribe to the channel. This way, you get notified as soon as more amazing content like this one gets released. So, thank you so much and see you in the next one.
