Artificial Intelligence in Document Management
Documents are a critical aspect of any business. Keeping them organized while balancing accessibility with security has been a core concern for centuries. In the past twenty years, document management has expanded and refined its capabilities tremendously. Today, businesses leverage sophisticated tools like cloud services, artificial intelligence, and automation to achieve full operational efficiency with their documents.
Document management strategies are now common throughout the office world, but every office should also revisit their strategies periodically to ensure they’re taking advantage of the latest technology available. Among the newest technologies, artificial intelligence represents an especially exciting frontier in terms of security, accessibility, and efficiency. Read on to discover how artificial intelligence has shaped document management, and how companies can benefit from deploying it to manage their paperwork.
Document Management for the 21st Century
It’s 2019, and filing cabinets are rapidly on their way out of the building. Ugly, space-intensive, and prone to filing errors, tech-savvy businesses have recognized that the manual processes around physical filing simply won’t do.
The latest technology in document management brings the company’s critical information into the digital environment, delivering several advantages to businesses. These advantages include:
- The ability to maintain operational efficiency. Digital technology applied to document management lets companies keep the processes efficient.
- A competitive advantage in the market. Data-driven decision making is a crucial advantage to staying nimble and responsive to changing market conditions. Often, the company that succeeds is the one which can access and act upon its information first.
- Increased integration and interoperability. Today’s businesses operate across a constellation of platforms and services. They need to be able to move data from one service to another without compromising its quality or accessibility elsewhere.
It’s not enough to simply have a document management solution. Like with other mission-critical parts of a business, it’s necessary to keep the technology involved in document management up to date.
Benefits of AI for Document Management
Artificial intelligence is reaching its maturity, bringing with it a whole host of new capabilities for the business world. Document management, in particular, benefits from the use of AI in several ways. These include:
1. Increased Security.
AI has all but transformed the field of cybersecurity and with it, data security. From 24/7 monitoring to biometric access techniques, AI helps companies achieve increased security in their document environment. Likewise, by learning patterns and normal traffic patterns, AI can accelerate the detection of problems or breaches before they have the chance to cause any damage. It’s already being used in this capacity by e-commerce companies to detect credit card fraud.
2. Improved Automation.
Automation helps streamline processes, but only if the precise processes to automate are identified first. In contrast, AI helps automate processes by identifying those instances on its own. For example, AI can “read” documents then decide which processes or people to send them to based on the content. In this capacity, AI is known as robotic process automation, and it’s rapidly changing the way businesses think about process optimization.
3. Deeper Analytics.
Technology, like optical character recognition, has been around for a while, but AI takes it to a new level. In addition to being able to spot specific keywords or phrases, AI can identify patterns, create new classification levels on its own, and more readily spot the data critical to driving analytics.
4. Better Classification and Processing.
In a modern business, data moves quickly – misclassified documents mean it might get missed entirely. For a data-driven environment, that can result in costly miscalculations. AI corrects and prevents this problem. By following a base set of rules, AI can learn when new classifications should be created to help keep data organized. The result is a more nimble and flexible data architecture which keeps documents organized, accessible, and streamlined even as they’re archived.
5. Reduced Overhead Costs.
AI delivers all of the advantages of having an extra employee in the office sorting files – with the benefit of never needing to eat or sleep. Leveraging AI for repetitive, laborious tasks helps employees stay focused on higher-level work while ensuring that these critical tasks still get done.
AI for Document Management: Step into the Future with a Smile
Artificial intelligence represents an exciting frontier for many parts of the business world, especially document management software. As this technology makes its way into the office workflow, it will become an increasingly critical element to remain competitive and keep overhead costs low. AI is a powerful tool, and one which offices can – and should – put to work.
Smile helps companies achieve operational efficiency through the deployment of modern technology. Start a conversation with us today to learn about what AI can do for you.
