JFDI Reflections on ESPC 2025: AI, Community, and What Comes Next

This year’s European SharePoint Conference in Dublin reinforced just how quickly the Microsoft ecosystem is evolving. AI was unmistakably at the centre of the conference. Lectures moved from theory into practical applications which were then supported by Microsoft announcements that gave real substance to what attendees were seeing on stage. One JFDI Reflection sentiment on ESPC2025, would be: It was a conference that felt energetic but grounded in delivery rather than promise.

What is ESPC’s real value

As always, European SharePoint Conference wasn’t just about sessions and keynotes. The real value came through conversation. Below are two perspectives from the JFDI team, capturing different but complementary angles on what stood out professionally and personally. JFDI Reflection on ESPC2025 shows the importance of these interactions.

Ian’s Perspective

The community spirit is always a really positive element to ESPC, bringing with it the opportunities to chat with Microsoft staff and MVPs, to ask direct and specific questions. When else do you get to do that?

Of course there was a lot of focus on AI tooling and development of Agents, so I was really surprised when I overheard that SharePoint is no longer considered a development platform. 
Thankfully this was quashed by the lead figures from the development community, who set out the roadmap for the next few years.

One of my favourite moments was in the session on learning how to learn, delivered by Dr Seán Lally.
He explained we need to be active in our learning such as writing things down or explaining it back to ourselves. This helps because we can only keep a few ideas in short term memory. 
But at the same time it’s okay to not remember everything, the pressure we put ourselves under to jam pack an itinerary is too much. Prioritise self as well as sessions.

Essentially, a highly educated, highly experienced scientist and educator explaining, it’s okay… take a break.

As we continue to make extensive use of Power Automate, the reminder that Microsoft will be tightening our collective belts with regards to resource usage. We need to ensure our processes are fighting fit for our customers.

Karan’s Perspective

Overall, ESPC was a really positive experience for me. The atmosphere felt energetic and genuinely forward-looking. It was exciting to see just how quickly the Microsoft 365 and Power Platform ecosystems are evolving. One thing that really surprised me was how practically AI is already being woven into everyday workflows. Not theoretically discussed, but actively used in ways that feel immediately relevant.

My favourite moment was hearing real-world stories from organisations already scaling AI-assisted governance and automation. Those examples made the possibilities feel real rather than theoretical, and sparked a lot of ideas about how we could apply similar approaches in our own work.

The biggest takeaway for my day-to-day is the clear sense of where everything is heading: smarter automation and far better-integrated collaboration tools. It left me genuinely excited about how much more efficient, creative, and impactful our work could become as these capabilities continue to mature.

On a personal note, I found the session by Dr. Sean Lally titled “Brain Hacking for Data Pros: The Neuroscience of Making Knowledge Stick” especially fascinating. He explained that the amount of knowledge someone might have gained over an entire lifetime in the 14th century is roughly equivalent to what we now absorb in a single day. Our brains, however, haven’t evolved at the same pace. It means that we’re constantly processing far more information than we were ever designed for. It was a thought-provoking reminder of why focus, reflection, and intentional learning matter more than ever.

Looking Ahead

JFDI team’s reflections on ESPC2025 are aligned with something we see repeatedly in our own work: the technology is accelerating, but the fundamentals still matter. They don’t disappear just because tools become more powerful.

In the upcoming December edition of the JFDI Brief, we’ll be sharing a new whitepaper. It explores one of the underlying themes of ESPC; how low-code platforms fit into an AI-dominated development landscape? Where they fall short, and what “doing it properly” actually looks like in practice?

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