Before I jump into this article, I want to say that I’ve thought a lot about the impact that AI has on content generation and this is something that I’ll write more about shortly. However, as I metaphorically wrestle with those thoughts, I have taken a conscious decision to write this blog without any AI-generated content within it. Whether you love, like or loathe it, that rests entirely with the author.
However, in full transparency, I never thought that the technology was cool. Without question it was important, necessary, even business critical and, at times, intellectually interesting but never cool.
In fact, when I was first immersed in the technology following the acquisition of the business I was working for by a document management provider, I was somewhat underwhelmed. The basic tenet was taking documents, be they electronic or scanned, finding a way of adding metadata to them with a view to storing them in what was essentially an electronic filing cabinet and then adding workflow automation of one sort or another to speed up business decisions. Filing cabinets are also not traditionally aesthetically pleasing. The same was true of the electronic versions with limited UIs that were cumbersome to adapt to user-specific tasks.
Whilst there were some advances, nothing fundamentally changed in decades evidenced by the fact that many organisations are still operating technology underpinned by architecture first conceived when the millennium bug was still a thing (click here if you’re too young to know what that was). Again, I am not questioning the criticality of doing this effectively, compliantly and at scale but it wasn’t ground breaking. AI changes that paradigm.
Rather than treating the document as an individual object with a few bits of extracted data which then go on to define it forever more, AI can deliver insight and actions because it considers the document as a whole, and in relation to other documents. AI can understand what the document is intended for, which other documents or data may be related to it, make deductions about how to act on it, check it for accuracy and completeness. All things that previously relied on human intervention and rigid workflow rules based on small subsets of data.
This significantly reduces the manual workload that document management systems and their adjuncts were traditionally focused on but, in my view, isn’t how AI makes content cool. AI now enables users to do so many things that simply weren’t possible before. Mass interrogation of huge volumes of documents with natural language queries to better understand your customers, automatic generation of dynamic data dashboards with actionable insight proposals, compliance monitoring with weighted risk scoring, marketing campaign ideation based on real time results analysis, things that simply weren’t possible before because of the limitations of working with unstructured documents are now ideas to be tested.
AI allows iterative development of ideas, concepts and applications as never before. AI is a force multiplier that removes the restrictions often previously imposed by manpower to allow organisations to genuinely focus on new business outcomes. That being said, the ability to take experiments to production at enterprise scale is one that many organisations have yet to figure out.
Yes, there will unquestionably be process efficiency benefits using AI but real transformation comes a different way of thinking to deliver genuinely new ideas as opposed to doing the same things faster with fewer touchpoints. That’s why I firmly believe that, for the first time in my career, AI makes document management cool!
The next question is how organisations pivot to take advantage of this potential and that’s something I’ll talk about in my next blog.
* ‘Understand’ is core to all of this and there is an interesting intellectual discussion to be had on whether AI truly understands anything at this stage. In my view, LLMs are highly complex probabilistic engines so don't understand anything. However, for the purposes of what this achieves, I’ve granted myself some flexibility here.