What if an organization’s greatest asset—its content—is also its Achilles heel?
Consider healthcare: The very content that is vital for patient care —medical records with images, doctor notes, diagnoses, and prescriptions—is often scattered across different formats and systems that don’t communicate.
Content has been a pain point for the enterprise because it’s unstructured data. While structured data fits neatly into rows and columns in databases, unstructured data or content—text documents, emails, images, audio, and video—does not have a predefined format or language. This makes it difficult to organize, search, and analyze such data using traditional database tools and methods.
AI changes how we work with unstructured data. With intelligent automation and the ability to scale, companies are using AI to extract greater value from their content.
Better metadata enhances an organization’s content and improves access, i.e., helping workers or systems to find it. It also boosts the context and connections between content, establishing relationships between different documents or database information.
Document understanding extracts content accurately. Instead of having to manually read and go through each document, picking out the important bits of information, document AI does it automatically and accurately.
AI also helps teams build content workflows and improve content analysis, uncovering valuable insights about the content and its usage. Does this content align with the voice of the brand? Is it accurate and effective, or is there missing content we need to create? AI can automatically route documents to the correct person or department within these workflows, and it can learn these routing rules over time, optimizing the flow of content.
AI writing assistants that can draft initial versions of emails, articles, social media posts, proposals, and presentations can significantly accelerate content creation, repurposing and fine-tuning a document. Models can be trained on a brand’s specific style and tone, ensuring consistency across all content outputs, even when multiple creators collaborate on a project.
Companies tell us that the top three benefits from investing in intelligent content services are:
- Increased visibility, auditability, and accountability
- Improved business decision-making
- Increased customer satisfaction and engagement
Figure 1: Benefits of Intelligent Content Services
n=714; Source: IDC’s State of Content Services Survey, June 2023
Let’s look at some examples for each.
Increased visibility, auditability, and accountability
Compliance and regulations shape nearly every aspect of how financial institutions operate. To strengthen regulatory adherence and reporting, some institutions are leveraging intelligent content services powered by AI.
AI tools automate repetitive and crucial tasks such as document verification, data validation, and report generation, freeing up employees for higher-value tasks like complex analysis.
To make unstructured data “structured,” intelligent document processing (IDP) uses document AI and understanding to extract and categorize data from diverse document types. IDP can take the newly-structured data for downstream workflows and identify and redact personally identifiable information, ensuring the data is in complete compliance.
Content applications also continuously monitor adherence to compliance policies in real time. By analyzing email, reporting, and communications, companies can proactively identify compliance and business risks.
Improved business decision-making
Organizations are strategically creating content for intelligent product design and expanding automation’s reach beyond operational use cases and into higher-value intellectual property and product development.
In this context, AI assistants serve as valuable deep research partners, tackling complex questions or prompts and then automating the time-consuming task of information gathering.
- AI efficiently gathers information from a diverse set of sources for faster results and increasing team productivity, eliminating hours or manual research.
- It connects themes and summarizes complex information into clear, concise reports. AI can reveal subtle patterns and non-obvious links in data, potentially leading to breakthroughs and uncovering hidden opportunities.
- AI can offer different viewpoints, overcoming team biases and knowledge limitations for a wider, potentially more objective exploration of information and better-informed conclusions. AI empowers people with access to synthesized insights so more team members can contribute, with less pressure on research time or resources.
- AI can adapt to specific domain or company knowledge, becoming a tailored expert. And multimodal AI tools go beyond text to analyze images, audio, and video to integrate diverse data for deeper, richer insights.
Increased customer satisfaction and engagement
By leveraging AI-powered content services, businesses can deliver personalized customer experiences across every interaction and channel. Dynamic tools equip customer service agents with the contextual intelligence needed for swift and effective resolutions, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction.
Across all industries, the top metric to show the value of an investment in a new knowledge and content solution is reduced time to problem or issue resolution, while the top metric to track usage is percentage of tickets closed with new knowledge added (IDC’S Knowledge Management Solutions Survey, July 2024).
AI tools can generate concise summaries and step-by-step assistance, driven by the most current content and documentation. This provides agents with faster and more digestible access to crucial information, helping them resolve customer concerns without compromising accuracy or regulatory adherence. Consider how streaming services enhance the viewer experience. They can analyze viewing in real-time and combine it with rich metadata about their content assets to provide relevant recommendations and streamline search. When a viewer asks what to watch next, AI personalizes that answer with context and better engagement.
AI makes content a strategic asset
An AI-fueled business leverages all of its data, from structured databases to unstructured multi-modal documents. With AI, the format of the data no longer determines its value to the business or its impact in decision-making. Modern content services help the enterprise structure and enrich its content, finding context and connections that improve and secure mission-critical workflows and enable new ways of working and engaging. AI presents an opportunity to make use of content as a strategic asset, which positively impacts employees and customers alike.
Generative AI can accelerate innovation, prototyping, and creative work, including accelerating drug discovery, product development, code generation, creative asset generation (images, animations, videos), and content creation. To learn more about the benefits of leveraging AI-powered content services, be sure to visit these partner collections: Checkmarx, Presidio, and Provectus.