Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of innovation in just about every kind of software and system these days. The ability to automate processes that only humans could have done until recently is making waves all over — but especially in the area of enterprise content management.
An ECM system is the sum total of an organization’s strategies, tools, and methods used to gather, store, generate and utilize documents and other file types that provide key data for your operations. AI in ECM makes document-based processes and workflows much simpler and efficient for your human workforce.
AI-powered ECM tools contribute to improvements in data capturing, search and discovery functions, content creation, and more. By examining artificial intelligence’s contributions to content management, we can see how it can help expedite the transition from data collection to the creation of actionable insights.
While things like optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) are not exactly new, using AI in enterprise content management helps make better use of those tools and others.
AI facilitates intelligent document processing. It not only functions alongside tools that can pull relevant information from key documents, but it can also help deliver that information with context. That means that information from structured contracts or even unstructured, handwritten notes can be processed and incorporated into searches.
That’s important because your relationships with your partners involve more than just the deliverables you’ve agreed to. They include the conversations in meetings, pitches for future projects, and everything in between. AI helps ensure that you have all of that information at your fingertips as soon as you need it.
The way that AI makes the data that it captures from your documents and other files more easily and comprehensively discoverable is through metadata enrichment. As your artificial intelligence tools extract data, that data and the documents from which it came are labeled and stored according to metadata.
And just as AI in ECM can help automate the data extraction process, it can be used to automate metadata categorization tasks. Basically, AI takes information and categorizes it based on its content instead of its file type so that one search can bring you all the information on a particular subject that you need to implement business strategies or gain insights.
One of the greatest strengths of artificial intelligence is its ability to read through massive amounts of content in an instant. The AI is then able to identify patterns and extrapolate trends moving forward.
This is also where the implementation of AI for content creation begins to help your team. Your artificial intelligence solution can take the information that it has gleaned from your documents to identify key points that your human writers can expand upon. It allows your workers to vastly reduce research time without sacrificing accurate information.
Oracle WebCenter has demonstrated how well AI can be utilized throughout the lifecycle of important content. They have embedded generative artificial intelligence into their document workflows, which can then factor a document’s data into predictive models and update your insights in real time, as more information becomes available.
We’ve looked at some general functions of AI-bolstered ECM automation tools, but it never hurts to examine specific use cases. Artificial intelligence can improve your organization’s content management along several important vectors. Here are a few examples:
When people talk about the functions and potential of generative artificial intelligence, they rarely get into the benefits of AI for compliance. Every industry has its legal requirements surrounding content management — for example, HIPAA in the medical industry — and AI can help navigate the potentially choppy waters of industry regulations.
Tools such as M-Files’ MENT AI engine not only help automate your workflows via smart content recognition, but they are also able to include regulatory steps in that automation. Having a tool that recognizes key data and automatically ensures that it is run through the proper compliance steps gives the user valuable peace of mind.
Anyone who has managed a CRM can tell you that long periods of manual data entry can get exhausting to the point that mistakes can happen. A value can get placed one cell over and the whole spreadsheet gets thrown out of whack. And the longer that error goes without notice, the longer it will take to fix everything, leading to more potential human error and the cycle repeats itself.
AI in enterprise content management automates those kinds of time consuming, labor-intensive processes, allowing your human team members to spend more time on the kinds of tasks that artificial intelligence can’t do — tasks that require original thought and outside-the-box ideas.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t just use machine learning for document classification. It can also learn to adapt to an individual user’s tendencies. Where this is most apparent is in search functions and interface layouts.
AI in ECM allows for semantic searches — searches that don’t necessarily have to be structured according to specific language and keywords. So the more a user searches with an AI tool, the more the AI learns what kind of content the user wants, even if the language in the search isn’t perfectly accurate to specific metadata tags.
Another benefit of cognitive content services is the way in which AI can make an individual user’s interface more efficient. That isn’t necessarily something a human thinks about. But an AI assistant can place a search bar in a spot that works best for you or make sure that the display of results from a search are presented in a way that works best with how you operate. Essentially, your AI tool can analyze your patterns and adjust its layout to optimize your activity.
As your organization makes the digital transformation that brings artificial intelligence into more aspects of your enterprise content management, you will want to be sure that you choose the right tool for your needs now and for the needs your future growth will introduce.
The AI tools that have been introduced as part of industry leading ECM platforms like Oracle WebCenter or M-Files will be able to integrate with the other applications in your technology stack through out-of-the-box APIs or, in some cases, custom API development. So, really, you just need to look at the features to decide what is right for you.
Oracle AI is a strong tool, though it does not yet have a robust metadata automation function. M-Files has two different options for AI in enterprise content management. Aino is not as strong as Oracle AI or MENT in predictive content modeling, while M-Files MENT offers all of the functions of the other two tools.
In order to figure out which would work best for your organization, a more detailed look at functionalities and licensing fees would be wise. Talking over your options with the experts at TEAM IM can help you weigh the pros and cons of each AI tool on the table.
Artificial intelligence is not a magical solution with no possible issues. Whether you use AI for content creation assistance or only for process automation, there are potential pitfalls that you need to be aware of and monitor as you go forward.
Artificial intelligence is here and it can make your enterprise content management processes work much more smoothly and efficiently. As time goes on, AI will continue to refine and improve and continue to make your workforce’s day-to-day operations much easier than they have ever been.
AI in ECM is not meant to replace people, but to free people to use the skills they’ve honed for their entire careers to innovate and ideate in a way that only a person can. TEAM IM can help you incorporate AI into your ECM stack seamlessly so that you can experience the benefits of the AI revolution for yourself.
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