Why Google Drive, Outlook or SharePoint are no longer enough to find your documents

A reality we all know

We've all said to ourselves one day: "I put this file somewhere... but where?"

Whether it's a contract, a quote, or meeting minutes, we end up wasting 15 minutes navigating between Google Drive, Outlook, and SharePoint. And sometimes, despite everything, it's impossible to find the right version.

I thought I was the only one experiencing this, but in talking with other freelancers and SME managers, the observation is the same: these tools have their limits .

The limits many of us face

1. Keywords are not enough.

   Typing “2023 customer contract” into Drive returns ten different files. At this point, we need to open them one by one to verify.

2. They don't understand our questions.

   If I ask, "What is the termination clause in contract X?" , no search engine will take me directly to the passage. As a result, I'm looking through 40 pages for a single piece of information.

3. Silos don't communicate.

   I search Drive… then Outlook… then SharePoint. It’s as if each tool lives in its own bubble.

4. Duplicates, the eternal problem.

   contract_v1, final_contract, final_contract2 … We all know this nightmare. And then we cross our fingers that we don't send the wrong version to the client.

What it really costs

Adding up these small losses of time, we realize that it adds up. IDC talks about 2.5 hours a day wasted just looking for information. Gartner estimates that we spend 18 minutes per document .

In a 10-person SME, that's the equivalent of several lost jobs each week just from... searching. Not from producing, not from invoicing. Just searching.

What AI actually changes

For the past few months, I've been testing a different approach. We ask questions like we would a colleague:

“Show me the last validated quote for customer X” .

And we get the answer directly. Not a list of results, not ten files to open: the answer .

The AI actually reads the content, finding the exact passage in a contract or email, and most importantly, centralizing everything: emails, drives, local folders. No need to repeat the search three times.

And reassuringly for many of us: it can run locally, without the files going who knows where to an American cloud.

In conclusion

We can see it clearly: Google Drive, Outlook, and SharePoint have been useful, but they no longer meet our needs. We don't need to "search." We need to find things quickly and efficiently.

With AI, it's finally becoming possible. And I think many of us are tired of wasting hours each week in this digital maze.

And you, how much time do you spend per day looking for a file?