SharePoint refuses to die, and the consultancies that understand why are quietly making a lot of money

There’s a piece of received wisdom in the technology press that gets repeated about once every eighteen months. It goes something like this: SharePoint is dying. Modern collaboration tools have surpassed it. Teams has eaten it. Slack has eaten it. Notion has eaten it. The next-generation knowledge platform is on its way. The headline writes itself.

The headline has written itself, on and off, for about a decade. Meanwhile, in actual corporate IT departments, SharePoint continues to host the documents nobody can find but everybody desperately needs. Twenty-five years after Microsoft launched it, the platform that everyone loves to disparage is still where the contracts live, where the policies live, where the brand assets live, where the project plans live, where the leavers’ checklists live, and where the photo of the office Christmas party in 2018 still sits, untouched, in a list nobody has the authority to delete.

This is not a defence of SharePoint. SharePoint is, in many of its incarnations, a bit awful. The information architecture is bewildering. The permissions model has the kind of complexity that requires an actual specialism to understand. The search has been one good version away from being good since approximately 2008. Anyone who has spent serious time with the platform has a small collection of war stories about lost sites, broken inheritance, and the day someone gave the wrong group full control of the company-wide library.

But the consistent prediction of its demise has been consistently wrong, and the reason is worth understanding. SharePoint is not popular. It is necessary. Those are different things, and the digital workplace industry has spent twenty years trying to pretend otherwise.

The necessity comes from a fact that nobody outside enterprise IT fully appreciates. Large organisations have document estates that look, when properly inventoried, like geological deposits. There are layers in there from every major IT initiative the company has run since the early 2000s. Some of it is current and active. Some of it is legally required to be kept and findable for seven years. Some of it is the only documentation of how a particular system was set up, written by someone who left in 2017. Some of it is genuinely worthless but nobody is brave enough to be the person who deleted it. All of this has to live somewhere. The somewhere is, in almost every Microsoft-shop enterprise in the country, SharePoint.

This is the dirty secret of the digital workplace space. Every consultancy in the category leads its marketing with Teams, Copilot, Viva, the AI-infused future of work. The day-to-day delivery work is heavily, sometimes overwhelmingly, SharePoint. Tenant migrations. Intranet builds and rebuilds. Permissions audits. Content cleanup projects. The unglamorous work of making sure that when an employee searches for “expenses policy 2024,” they actually find one document instead of fourteen.

The modern workplace consultancies that quietly know this have organised their teams accordingly. They have certified SharePoint architects on staff, even though SharePoint architect is not a job title anyone leads with on LinkedIn anymore. They have project managers who have run forty tenant migrations and can predict, within a couple of weeks, when the inevitable retention-policy crisis is going to flare up. They have adoption specialists whose job is not to roll out Copilot, despite what the proposal says. It’s to convince three thousand employees to actually use the new intranet instead of bookmarking the old one and quietly carrying on.

The Copilot angle has, if anything, made this work more important rather than less. The thing nobody told the early Copilot adopters about Microsoft 365 Copilot is that its quality depends, almost entirely, on the quality of the underlying SharePoint estate it’s reading from. A Copilot pointed at a clean, well-governed, properly-permissioned SharePoint tenant produces something like the marketing demos. A Copilot pointed at the typical real-world tenant — full of duplicates, orphaned sites, badly-applied sensitivity labels, and the residue of three different content migrations — produces something between unhelpful and embarrassing. The boring SharePoint hygiene work that has been quietly going on in the background for years has suddenly become a strategic prerequisite for the AI capability the board has just signed off.

So the consultancies are busy. The marketing is all about the future of work, but the timesheets are full of SharePoint cleanups. The platform that was supposed to be dying is, in 2026, having something close to a quiet renaissance, because it turns out the document estate is the thing you can’t replace, and SharePoint is the place the document estate lives.

The headlines will keep predicting the death of SharePoint. The platform will keep not dying. The people who quietly run it will keep being expensive to hire, and the consultancies that have invested in them properly will keep being the ones whose Copilot projects actually work.