A recent Forrester study shows a growing number of companies feel their workers spend too much time looking for information they need – 40% today vs. 19% just five years ago. A number of issues contribute to the problem, including a highly distributed workforce, siloed technology systems, the massive growth in data, and more.

But it doesn’t have to be that way because enterprise content management systems have made great strides in that same timeframe, including with new artificial intelligence technology that makes it far easier for employees to find and make the best use of all the content the organization owns, no matter if it’s text, audio, or video.

While ECMs have always been useful, in the past, they required too much effort from users. Intuitively, it’s easy for people to understand a piece of content and classify it according to some well-understood structure. But content management tools often asked users to do things they inherently don’t like doing, such as extracting information from a piece of content and entering it into fields and tables to describe what it is. The systems worked, but not without some manual effort.

AI and related technologies, such as machine learning (ML), enable content management systems to take away much of that classification work from users. Importantly, such tools can extract relevant data even from unstructured data – including PDFs, email, and even images – and accurately classify it, making it easy to find and use. Some ECM systems have intelligent document processing (IDP) capabilities that can mimic the way an employee would read a document, extract key information, and enter it into another system for processing.

“AI enables ECM solutions to unlock valuable information from unstructured data and maximize the value of their content,” says Ericka Morimoto, Product Marketing Manager, of Hyland, an intelligent content solution provider. “Users can get business-specific answers, not generic answers like with consumer large language models, to make better-informed decisions.”  Read On: