Automate Document Templates in SharePoint with AI (Content Assembly Deep Dive)

Say goodbye to copy/paste and hello to automation. In this episode, we take a full tour of Content Assembly in SharePoint Content AI.

You’ll learn how to:
✔️ Build modern templates for contracts, invoices, and more
✔️ Use metadata, lists, and conditional logic in your templates
✔️ Generate documents automatically from Word files
✔️ Integrate with Power Automate to take it even further
✔️ Enable the feature with Pay-as-you-Go settings

Perfect for organizations looking to streamline document creation and boost productivity with AI-driven templates.

🎬 Part of “The Ultimate SharePoint Content AI Series” — check out the playlist for more episodes

Video Summary

• Conditional sections make templates smart: You can set document parts to appear or disappear based on specific values, like showing VAT only for certain customers depending on region..
• Publishing templates is straightforward: Once your fields are set, saving and publishing them adds your new template directly into the document library for quick reuse.
• Live field updates create instant previews: As users fill in values like invoice number or customer name, the document visually updates in real time, making it easy to verify before finalizing.
• Documents are always Word files—by default: Templates generate Word docs, not PDFs. But with Power Automate, you can build a flow to automatically convert them if needed.
• Governance applies at the library level: Content assembly must be enabled for an entire document library. You can’t selectively turn it on for individual sites or sections.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

Are you tired of copy-pasting content into templates? Content assembly, part of SharePoint Content AI, lets you generate ready-to-use documents fast and accurately. Welcome back, everyone, to the Ultimate SharePoint Content AI Series. I’m again joined by my good friend Gokan Ozcifci. Welcome back. This is the 11th episode of the series. For those of you who have watched everything, thank you so much. We’re glad you’re still here. For those of you who are new, well, welcome to the series. We hope you’re going to enjoy this episode and all the other ones.

Gokan, what are we going to cover in this episode? Yeah. So, you did an amazing job. You already introduced the tool, and we’re going to talk about content assembly, where we actually automatically will generate standard documents, statements of work, and contracts by just uploading them to a SharePoint document library, adding some fields, and then saving them as a modern template. So that’s what we’re going to see today. Are you ready? That sounds awesome. And you know, I introduced it, but I have no idea how it works. That’s why you’re here. There you go.

So here are the requirements and limitations. You can see in the image how that works. We have to upload the document to create a modern template. Then we will associate fields with different data sources. In the next slide, I’m going to explain to you what kind of data sources we have. We can add conditional sections if needed. That’s something that you can use and say, like, okay, show me that section only if a certain value is met. We’ll publish that, and then we’ll create new documents within our document library. It only supports Word files: DOC and DOCX. Nothing else. No PDFs.

The document should not contain any comments or track changes. If you have those comments or track changes, you should remove them from the document, upload them, and then create your modern templates. A few other things to know: the template and the document are associated with your document library. So, it is not because you create your template that in another document library you can use it. You have to recreate that, unfortunately. SmartArt and bulleted lists are currently not supported yet.

As for data sources, you can either write a piece of text, use managed metadata, or a SharePoint list item. You can also use the Power Automate connector to create those modern templates. I know you love Power Automate, so you can go to Power Automate and use that connector to grab information and create your document. So, all that is possible, and that’s already a lot of slides. So I would say let’s go for a demo. I’m already surprised you had just that many slides. Let’s get started.

Here, as you can see, I have a standard out-of-the-box document library within SharePoint. When my SharePoint Content AI is enabled, you will see that I have the “Create modern templates” option within my New button. When you click on it, it will ask you to upload an invoice or a statement of work or a contract that it could use as a foundation to build the templates.

I just want to say something really quick. You said when content assembly is enabled. For those of you who are new to the series, we covered how to enable the SharePoint Content AI pay-as-you-go as well as how to enable features like content assembly on certain sites. You’ll have a link to that video in the comments below. If you need help on how to enable it, you have a dedicated video that covers all of that, because you need that setup to see what Gokan is showing you.

Now, within the Word experience, I see my invoice—your typical invoice that I use in my demos these days. Here on the right side, I can create a field. I could replace almost anything in my Word document. The first thing I’m going to replace is the invoice number. I can see it’s like 0476. I’m going to give it a name—Invoice Number—and then confirm. That’s it. You need to have already had content in there. It cannot be blank. You need to have fake data in there, right? It’s better if there is fake data. It’s way better.

Then you click on Next, and here you get the three options. Either I can go for text—single line of text, number, date and time, email, hyperlink—but what I always use is a single line of text to make it easy for my end users. Many companies have the client’s name on the invoice, things like that, so it makes sense. Then I can go for a SharePoint list, and finally I can go for managed metadata and select anything from my term store. For this one, I think a string makes the most sense. There we go. So I’ll go for the first one, for the single line of text, and then click on Save. That’s it. I just select, give it a name, confirm, and then just say what is the—you just keep adding them.

If you want to change Wing Tip Toys, you just select that one line and do it, and so on. Absolutely. So, if I want to change this because this is the company name, I’ll click on Field. You’ll see it’s selected. I’ll say it’s the Customer Name just here. Then click on Next. Here, within my managed metadata, I have something called SharePoint Content AI. I have my customers—yours and myself. I can easily click on Customers, click on Save, and now you will see that there is a reference made to my metadata. Every time I create a document, I can choose values from my metadata.

Awesome. That’s amazing because that’s why you can choose from pre-created customers, for example. There you go. Finally, the last thing I want to show is probably for the VAT, right? I know Canadians—you guys are crazy—have those very long numbers like TPS, TVQ, too much. But if I want to just replace that, I just choose the number, give it the name again, and here I can go for a list.

The bad thing with this is, Vlad, just tell me if you like this. This is the view on choosing columns. I have no idea what I’m looking at. There you go. That’s exactly what the end users are telling me, because you can see the columns. If you’re very well-versed with SharePoint or you are the one who builds that SharePoint list, you know exactly what’s in your Title or in Modified and Created. But a simple end user has no clue. Especially here—look, this is my list. The title has those pre-filled values. It’s easy. But what’s going to happen is if you have tens of columns, hundreds of columns, you’re lost.

Listening—please do something like show us the values as an example. There you go. What I’m going to do is just select the Title, click on Save, and then on Save again. And that’s it. Awesome.

They also have the conditional section where you can just say to your invoice, okay, this section is shown or hidden if a certain value is met. I can say “Customer outside of EU,” and then I can say, you know what, this section I want to hide or show depending on which value I’m showing or hiding. I click on Next. You see, “Show the selected content when…” I know I have two customers. I have Neoxy and V-Next. If I choose Neoxy, I should have VAT. If I choose V-Next, I should not have VAT because they’re from two separate countries, right?

So I’m going to choose Neoxy and say every time I create a template, and I choose Neoxy, show VAT. If it’s V-Next, well, no, it shouldn’t show. Makes sense. So you have the condition as “show.” You cannot just show and hide—it’s show and then you play with the condition. There we go. Awesome. Let’s say we’re happy with that. I’m going to save and publish this. I’ll give it the name “Template” and then save this. Awesome. Boom. Now, within a couple of seconds, my template will be saved and published within my document library. Then we can just create our new invoice here. Just refresh to make sure things are working. Good luck.

There we go. It created a temporary folder for a second while we were building it. There you go. And now I have that template appearing in my New button. Can you change the icon near the document or not? Not sure. It’s going to remain. I tried. And then you see on the right side I have the three fields: the invoice number—let’s go for 1998. You will see here when I go to the second field, it becomes green, and the invoice has changed. I can go to fora managed metadata field and choose Neoxy and click on Apply. Ah, now we see it. And now you see it.

If I go for anything else—it did already here—well, it’s going to be cool. It is an MVAT. It’s a list item. So I’ll choose my list. At least here we see it. And it’s funny. It has the Microsoft List. There we go. If I choose 15, you will see that now it is 15%. If I click on Next, create that document and say, “You know what, this is my invoice…” It’s not liking you today for typing. It’s okay. It’s okay. Invoice 001. I’ll click on Create. And now, within a couple of seconds, hopefully that document will be created. And it is created.

If I do a refresh already here, it’s already there. I have my 001 just here. And if I open it with all the correct invoices—15%—cool. The number and the value are hidden because there is conditional. That is awesome.

Can it create it as a PDF, or is it a Word template? It will always create it as a Word. Okay. I guess you could use Power Automate to then convert it to PDF automatically if you want to, from an extensibility point of view. You are the automation guy, so I’m pretty sure you can do that. Yeah. My head starts spinning like this. Those are all the things you can do.

Just before we end the video—to make that link because you’re again way too fast—I had that page open for it. You have that content assembly within the pay-as-you-go services as part of your governance. You can only do one thing: either enable it in libraries or not at all. So it’s all or nothing. You cannot enable it on only a few sites. There you go. Which we could do with other services, but not with this one. Not for this one.

Cool. Did you like it, Vlad? I love it. I think it’s amazing, and I think it’s a very easy way to get a lot of value out of templates. I wish we had had that for so many years before because people have been asking for this forever. There are even third-party companies that have created similar stuff. There we go. Awesome.

Well, Gokan, thank you so much for deep diving into this. It’s amazing. For everybody else, thank you so much. And if you want to see the next video, part of the SharePoint Content AI Series, you’ll have the playlist and the next video appear on your screen right about now. So, make sure you go check it out, and we really hope you enjoy it.