The pressure to digitally transform operations only intensified after the start of the pandemic. Customers today have more digital interactions with businesses—and higher expectations for each one. And let’s not forget another major impact of the pandemic: hybrid work models. With the workforce spread out like never before, many businesses had to scramble for the right tools and rethink processes to get their teams access to the information and systems they needed without missing a beat. Hybrid work is here to stay, and so is the demand for information management and connected workflows that empower collaboration among employees no matter where they are.

Companies understand that to thrive in the post-pandemic world, they need to deliver better customer experiences, simplify regulatory compliance, and be more agile in the face of disruption. To succeed, they’ll need to rapidly identify and automate as many business processes as possible, focusing first on high-value workflows—such as customer engagement, finance and operations.288

The problem is many of these workflows are still punctuated by time-consuming, inefficient and manual sequences. A key obstacle to full automation is the difficulty in extracting and processing unstructured information—such as emails, financial documents, forms, contracts, images and digital assets. Without this capability, businesses will find it challenging to develop collaborative working relationships between human and digital workers or build connections between systems.

Further complicating matters is the relentless surge of incoming information that has been buffeting organizations in recent years. And it’s likely to get worse. The Association for Intelligent Management (AIIM) reports organizations expect the volume of inbound information to grow 4.5 times in the next two years. That same report also says organizations “expect more than 57 percent of this information to be unstructured (like a contract or a conversation) or semi-structured (like an invoice or a form).” So, not only will businesses be receiving much more information, but that information is going to be of greater complexity and variety.  Read On: