How To Simplify Document Management With Generative AI

Ravi Dharmavaram is Founder and CEO of Exafluence, an IT services and data analytics firm utilizing GenAI to transform data into decisions.

It’s no shock that document management is not a hot topic to talk about in any business. It’s time-consuming and often ill-managed, and its success is too reliant on individual contributors following company guidelines. This unavoidable task eats into a company’s capacity to scale, with the potential for delays caused by everything from document access to sifting through entire knowledge bases to pinpoint the correct document.

If you ignore most of the hundreds of different file types and focus on common ones used by businesses today, including text documents, images, CSV or Excel and videos, the complexity of any given search quickly becomes exponentially tricky.

Digital transformation has unlocked the ability to expand globally for most companies outside the Fortune 500 list. However, an inadequate ability to manage the ever-increasing volume of documents necessary to scale today in any industry will hamper these efforts.

Inefficient document management hinders growth more than leaders realize.

For years, reports have shown that heuristically, people feel that they’re wasting a truly monumental amount of time tracking down documents. In 2021, at the peak of remote work, a survey from Wakefield Research and Elastic found that more than 50% of professionals felt they were spending more time searching for files than working.

With the high premium placed on workplace efficiency today and the multitude of digital knowledge bases available to enterprises, it is hard to believe the high statistical value. However, the average American today is reported to still spend an average of 2 hours per day searching for documents, nearly 25% of their total time over a 40-hour work week.

The information age has enabled organizations to stay competitive. They rely on individual executors across every department who depend on data to make day-to-day decisions. That said, if employees spend a significant amount of time per day, week and year tracking down and verifying the information to do their job, business growth will be stunted, and scalability is unlikely to be achieved.

Here’s the bottom line: Innovation in document management may not be a "hot" initiative to bring up at the next executive leadership team meeting, but it’s a necessary discussion.

Information silos are bad, but universal access isn't necessarily good.

No matter how your workforce is structured, every employee requires a different slice of information from data collected and generated within a company to do their job well. The consolidation of so-called data or information silos is one of the top best practices within IT today.

When done correctly, the effects are felt across the entire organization. However, companies that do this the best aren’t simply giving every employee access to every piece of information. This is a security risk and simply not a practical approach to making information access easier.

The best approach is to centralize documents and knowledge where possible, tying sources of information from every department to a centralized knowledge base. This accomplishes two things. First, it allows employees to quickly tap into the vast information gathered by any one division or solution.

Second, it enables the IT department to get a more comprehensive understanding of the information types and volume the company is currently handling and implement solutions that make accessing the correct information easier. This second benefit is where generative AI is particularly suited to improve a business’s capacity to manage documents and knowledge.

How can you tap into the right 'slice' of information with generative AI?

As I’ve discussed, several innovations are already driven by generative AI. They are focused on scalability, optimization and expanding the capabilities of existing solutions. The same is true with document management.

The human language understanding and generation capabilities of LLMs can be used to source information beyond traditional searches. Applications powered by LLMs understand the context of user queries, ensuring that results are more relevant to the actual inquiry, no matter the phrasing of the request.

LLMs can also help verify content within documents against a predefined checklist, pointing out the absence of specific content and highlighting inaccuracies that might be occurring in available content. Why leave document "moderation" in the lurch?

It is nearly impossible for a human being to read through piles and piles of digital documents and carry out moderation manually. Here are a few examples where LLMs are already starting to impact processes centered around document management.

• Consumer: Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant enhances document management by allowing users to interact conversationally with PDF content, efficiently summarizing, navigating and generating content across various formats, including Word and PowerPoint.

• Accounting: PwC's partnership with OpenAI allows the firm to integrate ChatGPT’s enterprise product into accounting functions, helping finance teams streamline tasks like invoice and contract management.

• Legal: In a recent partnership, vLex and iManage have integrated Vincent AI with iManage’s document management platform, allowing users to access public legal resources and internal work products in a single workflow.

AI is here to stay, so inefficient document management is free to leave.

When all businesses were reliant on paper and filing cabinets as their system of document management, the amount of time spent tracking down information was an accepted waste of business resources. However, this is no longer the case. While many modern enterprises may already have a digitized knowledge base, such as Zendesk, Confluence, Sharepoint or even Google Drive, these are merely today’s version of a filing cabinet.

Streamlining the processes of searching for, retrieving and validating information in any given document is something all businesses must go through before the end of the decade if they want to stay competitive. The age of AI has started to change the competitive landscape for businesses everywhere.

Utilizing the technology to gain a scalable advantage will be the differentiating factor in employee and overall business efficiency. Getting information to internal and external stakeholders faster will always be a primary driver of business growth, and generative AI will unlock a new level of efficiency for those who tap into it.

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