Integrating Viva Topics with Microsoft Search and SharePoint

Most companies waste hours each week searching for information they already have. The shocking part? With Microsoft 365, that doesn’t need to happen. Viva Topics can automatically detect and connect your organization's knowledge, but only if you know how to guide it. Today, I’ll expose the curation and customization steps most admins skip — the ones that turn a vague AI guess into the exact insight your team needs in the moment they need it. This could be the difference between people using Search… and people actually trusting it.

AI Topic Detection: Friend or Frenemy?

You switch on Viva Topics for the first time and the AI starts surfacing topic cards everywhere. At first, it’s exciting. Then you notice a few that make you question if it’s been reading the wrong SharePoint sites entirely. The names seem familiar, but the content? Half of it feels like it’s been stitched together by someone who skimmed your library once and guessed the rest. That’s the core reality with AI-based topic detection — it can be brilliant in one moment and baffling in the next.Under the hood, Viva Topics is constantly scanning your Microsoft 365 environment. It’s looking at files in SharePoint, conversations in Teams, and even list items or pages you haven’t touched in a while. It pieces together people, files, and keywords into what it believes is a coherent “topic.” With no human intervention, it can connect the dots on projects or acronyms your team tosses around daily. That’s where it shines: picking up patterns you didn’t explicitly tell it to look for. But it’s also why it will sometimes lump unrelated content together. The AI doesn’t understand nuance — it matches on signals and relationships, not business meaning.Take “Project Falcon” as a real-world example. For your team, it’s an internal initiative tied to a specific rollout. The AI detects documentation from SharePoint, meeting notes from Teams, and timelines buried in old Excel files. So far, so good. But then it notices a pile of onboarding training documents from a completely separate “Falcon Security” course in HR’s library. Since both sets of content share a project name and some overlapping terms, the AI assumes they’re related. Now the topic card is split between two very different worlds, and users searching for one get smacked with the other.Mechanically, it’s not magic. Microsoft’s AI is looking at content titles, file metadata, authorship patterns, link structures, and how often certain terms appear together. In Teams, it can watch how a phrase is used in chat threads and who it’s associated with. When enough signals line up, it generates a topic. The process works well for straightforward, unique points of reference. It’s less reliable when names or concepts overlap, or when documents are poorly tagged.Leaving that process completely unchecked is like telling your email service to auto-file every message by its subject line. Sure, some will land where you want them. But you’ll also have meeting invites mixed with marketing newsletters, and bank alerts sitting next to cat meme threads. Without oversight, the order turns into noise faster than you think.And that noise isn’t just an annoyance — it’s a trust problem. If employees click into a topic card and 4 out of 10 times it’s irrelevant, they start ignoring it entirely. That drops usage of Search features and erodes any return you hoped to get from activating Viva Topics in the first place. AI can scale faster than any human could manage, but the minute accuracy dips, the credibility gap widens.The good news is you don’t have to choose between full automation and full manual control. There are ways to shape the AI’s output so it remains a net positive. In the first week of running Viva Topics, it’s worth doing a quick sweep based on clear criteria. If a topic is tied to active projects, repeatedly accessed documents, or critical business terms, it’s a candidate to keep. If it’s vague, built on outdated files, or has obvious content mix-ups, flag it for review or dismissal. Start by focusing that lens on just the top surfaced topics; you’ll get the most return for the smallest effort.Once you’re clear on which topics deserve to live on, the real work starts: making those cards not just accurate, but genuinely useful in daily workflows.

Curating for Accuracy Without Overkill

Some admins look at the AI-generated topics in Viva and think the only way forward is to manually rewrite every single one. That’s fine if you have unlimited time and no other projects — but most of us don’t. The problem is, you can easily spend hours polishing up topics that nobody ever tries to search for. It feels like progress in the moment, but in reality you’ve sunk time into something that changes nothing for your users.Manual curation isn’t complicated work, but it can be deceptively broad. You’re confirming that a topic actually represents something meaningful in the business. You might rewrite the description so it’s clear and uses the right business language. You could add alternate names so people can still find “HR Onboarding” if they search for “New Hire Process.” These are all valid steps, but it’s easy to get caught in the trap of perfectionism while updating each field.The challenge is balance. Too little curation and bad data stays in the system, confusing users and eroding trust. Too much curation and you waste resources fixing topics that aren’t driving any engagement at all. What matters is targeting your effort where it has the most impact.Here’s a concrete example. An AI-generated topic for “Quarterly Review” in one tenant was little more than a generic description scraped from a file title, with no linked resources and no context for who to contact. After targeted curation, the topic clearly defined the scope — performance review meetings for sales teams — and linked the standard slide deck, policy documents, and the process checklist from SharePoint. The updated topic was actually useful in search situations because it answered who, what, when, and how within a single click.A smarter way forward is to start with high-traffic or business-critical topics first. If a topic card appears frequently in search results or relates to a key initiative, it’s worth the investment to refine. That immediately increases the odds that someone will get relevant, trusted answers the next time they search.You don’t have to guess which topics matter most either. Viva and Microsoft Search analytics can show you the terms people are actually querying, how often those cards are being viewed, and whether they lead to further clicks. If a term has consistent search volume, that’s your signal to confirm and optimize the card. If it’s barely touched, there’s no point in spending your best curator’s time on it.And don’t make IT the bottleneck. Subject Matter Experts — the people who actually own the knowledge — are better at spotting whether a card is accurate. They know if a linked document is outdated or if an alternate name will actually help people find it. Assigning curation to SMEs also spreads the workload so you’re not dependent on a single admin to keep everything in check.One of the biggest time sinks you’ll run into once you start cleaning topics is duplication. Multiple cards can pop up for the same concept with slightly different content sets. Without a system, you’ll end up spinning cycles on cards that really should be combined, and your users will waste time wondering which one to click.A simple triage framework can keep this under control. Start by approving anything accurate and high-value as it stands. Edit cards that are useful but need clarity or scope adjustments. Merge duplicates when they overlap but contain complementary resources. Reject topics that are irrelevant or tied to outdated content. When you apply that decision tree to your priority list first, you make the fastest progress without falling into the infinite edit loop.And once duplicates become the main roadblock, it’s worth switching focus entirely to handling them well — because combining them wrong can be worse than not touching them at all.

Merging Duplicates Without Losing Context

You open the Topics admin center and there they are: five separate “Marketing Playbook” topics. Each one has a few good references, maybe a contact or two, and some decent linked files — but none of them are complete on their own. Picking which to keep isn’t the problem. The real challenge is figuring out how to combine them without losing the good stuff along the way.Duplicate topics aren’t always a sign you did anything wrong. Viva Topics creates them when similar terms exist in multiple places, each with enough unique content to trigger a new card. It happens when teams store files in separate SharePoint sites without consistent naming. It happens when a project name is reused for unrelated initiatives. And it also happens when early versions of a topic weren’t confirmed or edited, so the system just kept generating more. Left alone, this confuses users and creates unnecessary clicks, especially when the cards look almost identical at first glance.On paper, merging sounds easy. Click a button, choose the “main” topic, and everything supposedly flows into a single, unified card. In reality, rush the process and you can drop valuable resources entirely. Alternate names might disappear. Linked people can fall off if they weren’t connected to the chosen primary topic. In some cases, documents don’t migrate at all because they were linked only through the card you chose to discard.I’ve seen this play out. One team merged “North America Marketing Playbook” with “Marketing Playbook – NA” without looking closely at the linked materials. The result? Four key sales training decks, all still in SharePoint, were no longer discoverable through the topic card. They weren’t gone — but anyone relying on Search to find them assumed they didn’t exist. Usage of the topic dropped immediately, and no one realized why until someone dug into the file libraries weeks later.The safest route is to review each duplicate in full before you merge. Check the linked files, people, pages, and suggested connections. See if any of those links point to resources missing from the primary topic. If they do, manually add them first so nothing gets lost in the merge process. Pay attention to alternate names — they’re critical if people use different terms across departments. You want the merged card to respond to as many relevant search queries as possible.In the admin center, the merge process is straightforward once you’ve done your homework. From the Topics list, select the duplicates to combine. Choose the primary topic to keep as the “winner.” The system brings in some content by default, but that’s where your pre-merge review pays off — you’ll know what needs to be added manually after the merge runs. When it’s complete, double-check the resulting card just like you would after major edits. It’s better to catch missing links immediately than after people start searching.Think of it like merging contact records in a CRM. If you just pick one and hit merge, you might drop half the relationship history. But if you compare them side-by-side first, you can keep the most accurate data and enrich the final record so it’s better than either of the originals.If you’re not the SME for the topic, loop in the people who are. They can tell you which resources are critical and which alternate names drive actual usage. It might feel slower in the moment, but it prevents rework later when users complain about missing files or broken connections.Done right, a merged topic card should feel more complete than any of its predecessors. It should combine the strongest descriptions, the most useful links, and the broadest set of search terms — all in one place. And with that foundation in place, you can finally focus on making these cards something people actually want to click.

Custom Topic Cards That Drive Engagement

Most topic cards look like half-empty business cards. They show up when you search, but they don’t exactly sell you on the value of clicking through. You get a title, maybe a short description, and a handful of “suggested” documents that feel like guesses. It’s enough to signal something exists, but not enough to convince someone it’s worth opening.When Viva Topics generates a card from scratch, the default layout is simple. There’s the topic name, a line or two pulled from the first decent description the AI found, and some auto-linked files or pages. You might see a person listed if the AI linked an owner by document association, but there’s no guarantee that person is actually the go-to SME. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not exactly a resource hub.That lack of depth is why so many topic cards fail to drive engagement. People look at them, don’t see what they need immediately, and move on. The AI doesn’t know which files are authoritative. It doesn’t understand that the outdated PowerPoint buried in “Archive” isn’t worth highlighting. Without human guidance, the card ends up as a loose index rather than a trusted entry point.Imagine two cards side-by-side. The first is the plain AI-generated card for “Incident Response Plan” — short description, random PDFs, maybe a policy doc that’s half out of date. The second is a curated version where the description clearly spells out the scope (“Steps and resources for responding to IT security breaches”), the SME contact is listed with live Teams presence, the top three linked documents include the approved playbook, escalation checklist, and post-incident review template, and there’s a process flow diagram pinned right on the card. Which one are you more likely to explore? The second one doesn’t just tell you a topic exists — it delivers the exact next step.The good news is you can build that second version without much technical gymnastics. Topic cards let you pin specific files so they always show first, even if the AI wouldn’t have chosen them. You can link to videos, add URLs to external resources like vendor portals, and insert organizational context that helps users understand how the topic fits into their work. You can also control the display order so the most important, most used assets are literally at the top.One organisation took this seriously for their “Regulatory Audit” topic. Alongside the usual documents, they added the annual audit timetable, the compliance officer’s contact details, a short explainer video on how to prep, and a link to the intranet page with historic findings. They also pinned live Power BI dashboards showing audit readiness metrics. Within a month, usage analytics showed a 40% jump in interactions because employees could get everything they needed directly from the card without asking around or digging through old emails.The trick is to limit yourself to content that matters in the moment of search. If someone clicks “Incident Response Plan,” they likely need the current procedure, the escalation contacts, and perhaps the forms they must fill out. They don’t need the archived project proposal for buying the firewall that’s already in place. Overloading a card is just as bad as leaving it bare — it hides the good stuff.If you take only one tip here, make it this: put the most actionable element at the very top. If that’s the SME contact, list them first. If it’s the latest approved process, pin that file above all else. That way, even if someone never clicks further, they leave with the most critical piece of information in hand.Once you see a visual before-and-after of a bland card transformed into a genuinely useful one, it’s obvious why engagement goes up. The curated version earns trust because it saves time and reduces guesswork — and that trust is exactly what makes people keep coming back to Search rather than abandoning it for ad-hoc workarounds.

Conclusion

The real measure of Viva Topics isn’t the number of cards it generates. It’s whether your people trust those cards enough to act without second guessing. That trust comes from consistent accuracy, clear scope, and the right resources front and center. So, here’s your next step: audit your top ten topics. For each one, make at least one curation improvement and one card customization. Keep it targeted, not exhaustive. In a hybrid world, building trust in Search is a competitive advantage. Done right, Viva Topics can quietly power that trust, becoming an invisible engine for faster, smarter work across your organization.