AI in Document Management: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Document Processing
Published: November 21, 2024
Reading Time: 5 min
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of most people’s lives. This applies to private life, but especially to business life. AI is already being used in numerous business processes – including digital document management.
A good document management system (DMS for short) is essential for efficient data management. Implementing AI models in your DMS can help to further improve its efficiency and automate business processes.
In this article, we give you an overview of the use of AI in document management, the benefits and possible future prospects.
What is a document management system (DMS) and why is it important?
A DMS is an efficient solution for managing information and documents electronically. This paperless process not only increases business performance, but also reduces your company’s environmental footprint.
In a DMS, all of a company’s documents are filed and stored electronically for years. They are categorized by document type and tagged with metadata. If someone is looking for a specific document (e.g. a delivery bill), this can be found with a simple search in the DMS. The search is based on the document content, the document type, the metadata or a combination of these criteria.
Document management systems are also used to carry out business processes, such as invoice management, personnel management or contract management.
Further Information
Why is AI indispensable in document management?
While a DMS can make your everyday business life much easier, the processes are often time-consuming and error-prone. This is especially the case when dealing with large amounts of data. Artificial intelligence uses technologies such as machine learning and optical character recognition to process documents efficiently and accurately.
Document management systems and AI in companies are made for each other. On the one hand, the documents stored in a DMS contain vast amounts of valuable, precisely structured information and data. These are perfect for training AI models. When these are integrated into your DMS, the AI can automate entire work processes based on the training sets, such as tagging and filing documents or assigning workflows to users.
What types of AI are used in document management?
Benefits of AI in Document Management
Less susceptibility to errors
The use of AI reduces errors and increases the accuracy of document processing.
Risk minimization and security
The AI automatically carries out compliance checks and ensures that legal and regulatory requirements are met.
Customer service
Thanks to the precise processing and organization of documents, customer inquiries can be dealt with more quickly and efficiently.
Time saving
Routine tasks can be automated. This leaves more time for more important tasks.
Cost efficiency
Optimizing processes also reduces the financial resources that need to be spent.
Transparency in real time
Faster processing times mean that documents are available to everyone centrally and up to date sooner.
Processes in which AI supports document management
There is a wide range of AI applications in document management. They range from document capture and classification to data extraction and process automation. AI can help to automate many manual and time-consuming tasks that previously took up a lot of time and resources.
Through the targeted use of AI, documents are not only processed more efficiently, but are also classified more quickly in the right context and can therefore be used directly in the corresponding AI application areas.
- Document capture and classification: In most companies, the capture and digitization of paper documents such as invoices or delivery bills is still done manually. Although this is often a tedious and monotonous task, it is nevertheless crucial to a company’s business process. AI technologies can be used to automate this process. The information contained in the documents is read, automatically sorted and tagged. For example, documents can be automatically separated or sorted by type (e.g. invoice, contract, etc.). This fast and uniform processing improves the organization in your company.
- Data extraction: Thanks to NLP, key information can be easily extracted from all existing documents. Data such as names, amounts, products and delivery data can be extracted and saved as metadata. This facilitates the organization and further processing of documents.
- Search and archiving aids: AI enables context-based search queries and therefore provides more accurate search results than a simple keyword search. By automatically capturing all relevant document data, AI systems offer optimized data access.
Is AI the future of document management?
Artificial intelligence can make a significant contribution to increasing the efficiency of your document management system. Technologies such as NLP and OCR make processes such as capturing, reading, indexing, assigning and storing documents much easier and can be automated. Enhancing your DMS with AI brings numerous benefits, such as significant time and cost savings, reduced susceptibility to errors, automatic compliance checks and more efficient customer advice.
AI in document management is already being used by numerous companies in all sectors. The ever-increasing numbers show that AI will remain an important part of document management in the future and will significantly change everyday business life.
