AI In Document Management 4 Things To Know

April 7, 2022 • 0 Comment

Before the development of digital document management systems (DMS), managing their inventory of files and documents was a nightmare for many companies. DMS software came in, and to their delight, heaps of files and folders have now been digitized, and they could now easily access files from their database servers without having to get the physical folder all the time. But then came the birth of digital data, and now offices are swamped with digital folders and documents.

The good thing is that AI programs are now being applied to enhance DMS software. AI applications have immensely helped in developing the capability of DMS to read and sort documents on their own. You might want to check out this and other similar sites to know more about how AI applications are enhancing the power of data capture software systems. And here are some of the things that AI can do for document management systems that are sort of revolutionizing the way documents can now be sorted and classified:

AI Can Automate Document Sorting And Processing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making an impact on the way that document management can sort, classify, and process documents. An AI sub-discipline and application called Computer Vision has led to breakthroughs in a computer’s ability to recognize what it sees from those documents and then make autonomous decisions on what to do with them. It has a tremendous impact on the capability of computers to sort, classify, and document on their own.

This capability is implemented through optical character recognition (OCR) technology. OCR makes it possible for a DMS to show the contents of a document and automatically classify it on its own. It doesn’t need the help of a human being to tell it what the document contains and how it should be classified. This completely does away with the need for human intervention in sorting and classifying documents.

Another staggering breakthrough about this technology is that the more volume of documents it sees, the better it becomes at identifying what the document contains and where it should go in the classification and storage system. In other words, the more documents you give it to work on, the smarter it becomes.

A practical application would be for an AI-enhanced DMS to sort through hundreds of resumes submitted by applicants for a job opening. The DMS would be able to sort the resumes and cull the information they contain. It could then classify who among the applicants is most qualified for the job opening based on the credentials they wrote down on their resumes.

AI-Powered DMS Can Extract Data From Documents

AI is powering DMS software applications to extract valuable data and information contained in hundreds of thousands and millions of documents. With AI, DMS applications can quickly extract more accurate information from volumes of documents.

There can be AI-powered DMS that allows large enterprises to extract all the data from the various contracts, documents, and forms that their people produce from all their transactions. The AI has been taught to make sure that it extracts key values such as paired variables, names of entities, and other special data. Some businesses can even avail themselves of customized services where they can come up with their schema and framework of attributes to extract.

A practical application of this has been used to further enhance and automate the processing of invoices. AI can further speed up the invoicing process.

Moreover, the AI-powered DMS can automatically recognize and extract critical data fields such as invoice number, client’s name, specific line items, breakdown of amounts, total amount, and terms of credit, among others, to identify bottlenecks in their process. The AI can process and gain insights from these data, which could help the company improve its Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC).

AI Can Easily Cluster Documents

AI has the power to take over the human task of clustering documents. It’s one of the office tasks that take up a lot of time, yet the results sometimes still lack sense and organization. Most employees have their clustering and organization system for their files, whether physical or digital. They’re also required to cluster these files and organize them into a team folder department library of commonly-used or shared files. And in some sectors, such as content production and legal services can affect productivity and efficiency.

And legal secretaries still find themselves jumping out of their seats whenever a senior lawyer is looking for an important file that nobody can locate. More often, work on other things has to be halted as the secretaries pull out multiple document boxes to look for that one file or folder, which for now is the urgent one. Content production companies sometimes encounter the same challenge when a specific project or file is given an unfamiliar file name buried deep in their archives.

Thus, an AI-powered DMS can put sense into this. Existing libraries and databases often contain folders and files designated and saved by human selection. Sometimes, the results lack the sense of why some files were saved in folders when they should be more appropriately saved in another folder. And with that, An AI-powered DMS can take this task to the next level. It has more processing power to sort, classify, and categorize documents not only based on file names but based on contents. And it does so at a very high level of speed, complexity, and precision.

Weaving Unstructured Heap Into Structured Data

Most of the data handled and produced by humans and stored in documents are made up of unstructured data. All the data frequently produced by offices every day, such as those contained in emails, office memorandum documents, letters, reports, comments, emails, and other common office communications are unstructured. The structure here means that there’s no imposed structure on the way the content is communicated in files and documents.

With the use of AI, companies can now scan their voluminous archives of documents, emails, letters, files, and reports without the aid of any human intervention or human interpretation. It is one of the biggest impacts of AI on company workflow and document processing. The AI-powered DMS can now decide on what to do with a specific document by reading the contents of such folders, files, and documents.

Conclusion

AI applications have been enhancing the capabilities of DMS software to perform functions and tasks which were erstwhile limited to humans. Most of these tasks involved decisions and discretion, such as sorting, classifying, and organizing documents not just based on their file names but also based on their contents. The results have been astonishing.

And using DMS software, it can now sort and process documents, extract data, and cluster documents, without the need for any human intervention.