Gartner recently reported that 85 per cent of a company's information is unstructured and that the amount of a company's information doubles every 18 months. Moreover, according to research, nearly 50 per cent of professionals struggle with documents and content scattered across different applications and storage locations. How are we ever going to tackle this?

To keep up with this exponential growth in the amount of information, the paradigm of knowledge and information management in today's digital workplace must shift towards contextual understanding. Artificial intelligence (AI) plays an important role here, and the industry is moving in three steps towards fully automated digital assistants enabling an intelligent workplace.

Three steps closer to a working environment with AI.

Step 1: Context in content

The quest for an intelligent workplace starts with the information itself

An intelligent workplace should not be so much about where (or in which system) information is stored, but rather what information is and what that information relates to. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can automatically determine the key characteristics of each piece of information. For example, the customer, project or case the information relates to. But also the type of document or information, such as a contract, an invoice, a sales order, etc. With this, organisations organise and process information according to the needs of the different people working with it.

With this identified context, one takes an approach that is more dynamic and flexible than the traditional map- or library-based hierarchical method. Combined with a modern metadata-driven approach, AI can automatically generate the metadata and contextual relationships of a piece of content. Here you can think about the role of an individual user, the lifecycle of information or, for example, the urgency of certain information. Put simply, AI gives context to documents and content. With this approach, information will 'appear' in more than one search and pop up when it is relevant. For example, a contract will not only be found when searching for the parties in the document, but also when searching for contracts expiring this year, for example. After all, AI reads the data from the content and creates the context. Thus, information becomes easily findable and one is not dependent on one top-down determined structure.

This approach also minimises the hurdles of data migration and change management. Moreover, this approach gives scope for organisations to adapt to how they use information to drive innovation.

Step 2: Logical helpers

Once AI adds context to content, logical helpers set content in motion. Early examples of logical helper applications are actually the familiar spelling and grammar checks. These applications later evolved into systems that give users useful prompts. Everyone is familiar with notifications such as "Send without subject?" and "You may have forgotten to add a file".

Recent developments even produced logical helpers designed to support everyday activities. Consider our daily commute, navigation systems can tell a driver 'Your ride home will take 38 minutes with normal traffic' and suggest alternative routes. There are even tools that automatically record where people park.

It is only a matter of time before that level of intuition translates from your commute to your working day.

Step 3: Proactive digital assistants

Thanks to advances in AI, in the next two or three years the digital workplace will not only have reactive logical helpers, but also proactive digital assistants. To store and manage content intelligently, AI will automatically create metadata for each piece of information, so users will not have to manually categorise their content. From there, AI will analyse metadata tags and relationships to proactively perform actions. For example, systems can display relevant documents and business objects (such as a customer, account, contact, project and/or case) without explicit search.

AI-based systems can also provide suggestions to attach or share relevant content via e-mail or prompt users to view related content as a deadline approaches. They may even be able to prevent employees from sharing confidential documents externally or engaging in other behaviour that does not leave company policy too late.

New tools can also refine workflows. For example, by managing information on the back end automatically and bringing relevant content with intelligent suggestions to the user at exactly the times it is needed.

AI will lead us to the intelligent workplace

The exponential growth of information in today's economy necessitates smarter, more flexible and dynamic information management. A key to efficient business process and workflow automation is determining what information is most relevant in a given context and ensuring that the latest and most accurate version of that information is always available to those who need it, when they need it.

In addition, people expect simple and smart user experiences. Are these expectations not being met? Then you automatically see a growth in uncontrollable shadow IT through BYOB (Bring Your Own Device). No organisation wants that.

AI has enormous potential to create an intelligent workplace, automate common tasks, optimise workflows, reduce errors and simplify work for everyday users. And the day when that potential becomes a reality is not far away. People want to work in their own unique way. In a way that is simple, useful and familiar to them. That is exactly what AI will bring about in the road to the intelligent work environment....