Remember the days when we used to stand in a queue to get a copy of a document? Or when we discovered the magical-seeming invention of personal Xerox machines that later became an office necessity?

When it comes to document management, we surely have come a long way from using physical documents. Now, everything is created, stored, and shared virtually through emails and various messaging platforms. Still, there are a few bottlenecks like limited accessibility, ease of sharing, and management. 

Additionally, there are many issues related to document management that employees face on a daily basis that affect their productivity and, in turn, the overall quality of customer support. Documents are considered among the most treasured company assets since they enable collaboration between individuals and teams and also contain sensitive information about the company. So, in addition to the matters of sharing and accessibility, document management should be collaborative and secure.

By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), organizations can redefine their traditional document management systems and make them faster, smarter, and more efficient.

In this article, we are going to explore the current applications of AI and ML in smart documentation management. 

AI Is Making Document Management Smarter

Here are a few ways AI is helping to improve document management:

1. Clustering

Imagine having to look in five different folders to find two documents that ideally should have been in the same folder. This is one of the many problematic scenarios professionals face on a daily basis. 

A smart documentation system powered by AI would be able to analyze the documents and group them by categories or topics. This means your employees won’t have to waste any more of their time in searching for the right information in the sea of documents and Excel sheets.

What’s more interesting is that you could hire a decent AI and ML development company for developing the smart documentation system based on your requirements. Or you can also invest in a robust online documentation tool. So, for example, if you want document clustering around processes, the nature of the content, data sensitivity, or accessibility, then you can get that developed as well.

2. Extraction

Data, in general, is messy. And extracting particular information from heaps and heaps of data is tedious, time-consuming, and (mostly) unnecessary. The same productive hours could be spent in understanding the data that could help your organization make informed, data-driven decisions.

An AI-enabled documentation management system would have the capability to understand your data based on its intent. Moreover, such a system would also be able to analyze your specific search patterns based on which it can extract specific, useful information in a matter of seconds.

Finding the right document or even a piece of information would become a piece of cake, really.

To take it one step further, you could also customize your smart document system to copy extracted pieces of data in a particular place like a document or an Excel sheet in a required format. This would further reduce your time spent on tedious tasks like copy-pasting and you can get right into analyzing data to solve your business problems.

3. Analytics

Now that your smart documentation management has the ability to extract particular data and smartly cluster/group it, the next step is to analyze the data for better, data-driven decisions. Correct data analysis can directly contribute to the growth of your business.

Data analytics benefits significantly from AI and ML, as these technologies have far more advanced capabilities to recognize patterns and even randomness in comparison to humans. They are far more superior in processing information than the human brain. A smart document system equipped with AI-powered data analytics features like predictive analysis and data visualization can help you make smarter, better, and quicker decisions. 

Moreover, such a system would completely eliminate the losses and mistakes made due to human errors and negligence.

4. Data Quality

Have you ever written 62 in place of 26 while noting down your sales, expenses, or the contact information of an important client? It’s never intentional, but being a human means having a lot of limitations, and one of the limitations is being tired and brains turning to mush. No matter how careful you are with your work, some mistake is bound to happen that might directly affect the quality of work and, in turn, data.

When you leave your AI-powered document management system in charge of your data, the overall quality of data improves. Such a system is trained or built to find errors and discrepancies in the data and, if possible, correct them. It would also have the capability to minimize redundant data, reduce input errors, and decrease the occurrence of misplacement of files and important information.

Better Data Quality directly elevates the effectiveness of business decisions.

5. Structuring Data

Modern times come with modern problems like unstructured data. If you are running a business and are active even on two social media platforms and have a website, you might have tons of data on consumer behavior and their interaction with your brand. So, how do you make sense of all this data? How do you connect the data and the dots? How do you make the right business decisions?

The answer to all this is organizing/structuring your data. The collected data needs to be processed, filtered, structured, and categorized. An AI-enabled document management system has the capability to do all that and more. It can analyze your data files, fetch relevant data, and categorize files based on the relevancy of the information.

Smart, Smarter, Smartest

The value of smart documentation management is only going to increase with time based on the fact that data is the new oil. How you gather, store, share, process, and analyze your data can make or break your business. And as your business grows and matures, the complexities related to data are only going to become more complex, for which you will need a smart, integrated, and scalable document management system.

So, in case you are still stuck with the old ways of managing documents, today is a good day to lay out a plan for revamping your traditional document management system.