Do we have to tag everything by hand?

Manually entered metadata decays reliably: optional fields skipped, mandatory ones guessed, and within a year nothing built on those properties can be depended upon. Routing defaults, retention clocks never start, and filters return nothing useful.

Centralpoint infers descriptive properties from the content itself, a practice that long predates its AI layer. Those derived properties drive retention triggering, routing, entitlement and index membership — and the vector index consumes the same derivation. One inference serving many consumers, none of them dependent on a user completing a form at upload.