DM Jan-Feb 2024

Dm TECHNOLOGY: CONTENT SENTIENCE
Content sentience:
the natural next evolution of enterprise AI
Deep-learning expert Dr John Bates of SER asserts that the technology is already close to
taking over the chore of reading documents, handling emails and more
It's only a matter of time before
documents and content more broadly
develop 'consciousness'. ChatGPT and
other Generative AI tools have already
made it much more intuitive to interact
with large banks of knowledge, as deep
learning algorithms distil key points with
increasing accuracy and present them to
users via the medium and format of
their choosing.
The next obvious step is for enterprise
documents to carry a built-in understanding
of what they are and what they contain, so
they can 'speak' directly to recipients or
processing teams (or their automated
proxies). They could even file themselves
based on their identified properties, telling
relevant IT systems about themselves.
Already on the near horizon, this
development could arguably become the
most important advance in the automation
of documents since the invention of the
printing press. That's thanks to the potential
to revolutionise enterprises' comprehension
of content in all of its available forms, and
the knowledge it contains.
Consider the potential for visual
walkthroughs of entire company
information libraries. Language, meanwhile,
will become seamless. Very soon, teams will
be able to ask English questions of a
German document, for example, and the
same in reverse.
ENDING ENTERPRISE EMAIL
TEDIUM
As content becomes more 'conscious'
and able to relay information about
itself, the need for overstretched human
professionals to visually scan,
respond/address, or discard individual
email messages will go away.
Business email is already on a sharp
downward trend, having been
superseded for many exchanges by
more spontaneous and collaborative
chat and content exchange platforms
such as MS Teams. In due course, for
still-entrenched triggers of email
communications, including requests
for information or actions, or
attached invoices, contracts, or
applications, those items will simply
announce and identify their
presence and file themselves or trigger
automated processing, according to their
type and priority level.
BOTS AS HUMAN PROXIES AT
MEETINGS
Next-gen AI also promises to remove the
pain of attending meetings. Just as virtual
meetings were boosted by the pandemic,
the obvious next development is for teams
to send bots to these sessions - to witness
what's being said, take notes and inject
points to consider.
In the new paradigm tools will only
bother people when their expert input
or a next-level decision is needed. In
the meantime, AI/deep learning tools
will do the heavy lifting, freeing up
people's valuable time for higher-level
tasks and decisions.
Certainly, algorithms are improving all
the time and as long as teams devote the
time to training their bots, the results will
be swiftly honed, steadily lightening the
manual workload. We might say we've
entered an era of "institutional memory";
of content collaboration - where AI draws
all the findings together and reports the
lay of the land, while humans focus more
on the implications.
SUPERFICIAL RPA WILL BE RETIRED
AI is likely to see off robotic process
automation (RPA) too. Although RPA tools
can accomplish routine tasks very well, this
value is now being surpassed by that of
real, adaptive machine intelligence.
This is about discerning new and better
ways of doing things, rather than merely
replacing a human-based set-up with one
managed by technology. Again, nextgeneration
AI provides the key here -
learning from and responding to the data
being fed back from current processes and
their outcomes.
More info: www.sergroup.com
26 @DMMagAndAwards January/February 2024 www.document-manager.com