From SharePoint archive to knowledge tool
Flanders Investment & Trade advises Flemish companies on export and investment from 70 offices worldwide. Their knowledge lived in 15,000 documents on SharePoint, growing faster than anyone could organise. We built FIT Enterprise Search on Azure AI Search: automatic metadata extraction, image analysis, and semantic search that turned the archive into a live knowledge tool.
An agency built on knowledge
Flanders Investment & Trade is the Flemish government agency responsible for supporting international business. From its headquarters in Brussels and 70 offices worldwide, FIT advises companies on export opportunities, conducts market research across sectors, and tracks global economic trends. The agency handles 10,000 client enquiries a year. Every one of those enquiries depends on experts who can access the right knowledge quickly. That knowledge is extensive. FIT's analysts produce detailed reports on sectors from food and agri to quantum computing. Over time, this built into a SharePoint archive of 15,000 documents — with no sign of slowing down.
The limits of folders and keywords
FIT's existing setup relied on folder structures and keyword matching. Both required the user to already know roughly where to look and what to call it. For a new analyst, or an expert working outside their usual domain, that was a genuine barrier.
Manual categorisation overhead
Every document entering the archive had to be tagged and filed by hand. 'Structuring, categorising and archiving data is a very labour-intensive affair,' said Yves Ruland, Data Project Manager at FIT. The time spent maintaining the structure was time not spent on analysis.
Knowledge silos across the organisation
FIT's knowledge was distributed across departments, geographies, and years. There was no reliable way to surface connections between pieces of information, or to find expertise buried in a document from a different team and a different year.
“Arinti stood out thanks to their pragmatic approach.”
AI-powered enterprise search on Azure
Arinti built FIT Enterprise Search on Microsoft Azure AI Search, integrated directly with FIT's existing SharePoint environment. The core of the system is automatic metadata extraction: when a document enters the archive, the AI analyses its content and generates tags without any manual input.
Beyond text: image and entity recognition
The extraction goes beyond text. The system identifies locations and company names mentioned in documents, and analyses image content to generate additional metadata. A photo taken at a trade mission — with no caption — can still become a searchable, tagged asset in the archive.
Hybrid search: keywords meets semantics
Search works as a hybrid: keyword matching combined with semantic understanding. A query doesn't need to use the exact terms in a document to surface it. The system reads intent, then filters results using the auto-generated tag layer.
Metadata-driven, not folder-driven
The classic folder tree gave way to a metadata-driven approach. Documents no longer need to live in the right folder. They need good tags, and the system handles the tagging. 'Everything is so fleeting now; if you structure things too much, the future catches up with you,' said Ruland.
From search engine to knowledge tool
Bulckaert calls FIT Enterprise Search a knowledge tool, not just a faster search engine. Experts preparing for a client meeting can pull relevant market data in seconds. 'FIT Search acts as a virtual, extra brain,' said Bulckaert. The graphic search results — which surface connections between related documents — also enabled discovery. Experts found relevant material from different teams or previous years that they hadn't known to look for. Automatic tagging reduced the manual overhead of categorisation. New documents could be added faster, with less friction. 'The improved search function means we can now add to our research faster and more intelligently,' said Ruland.
“With Arinti we took a close look at our knowledge and business databases.The company developed an intelligent search robot that automatically uncovers patterns, connections and derives information within the many thousands of FIT documents and data related to export and foreign investments. In this way, our employees can make knowledge and expertise from within and outside FIT available to the business world even faster.”
Building on the foundation
At close of the engagement, FIT's roadmap included personalised marketing and lead generation as the next AI focus areas. The search tool had demonstrated that machine learning was a practical option inside FIT's infrastructure — not just a concept.
