To share my feedback from our production intranet: A surprisingly amount of users aren’t thinking like „I want to search where is the search button“ but rather look what they directly see in front of them and use that way. So if they can‘t directly see the search they will never get the idea of simply searching.
For us it’s also very interesting to make the search more prominent. It is extremely important to make the correct / best / most efficient way the one that is also the most direct and convenient one, so the users are encouraged to use that.
In the future I can see how the AI search / LLM chat interface could possibly take the very prominent space in the middle instead.