11 AI/ML Benefits for Enterprise Content Management in 2024

An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system provides an automated and digitized information management system to companies. If you want to first understand how an ECM works, feel free to read how AI is changing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and use cases of AI-powered ECM.

Quantitative benefits

Financial benefits

ECM helps companies to save costs, preserve critical data, and produce value throughout the lifecycles of contents. With ECM, companies store generated content in digital environments which reduces costs of printing, shipping, and storing documents:

• Nissan saved $500k p.a. in agency costs by being able to manage all website changes in-house after implementing ECM.
• Greenbank RSL’s processing costs decreased by 50% after implementing an AI-powered ECM.
• Cato Inc. eliminated at least 60% of paper and toner costs companywide by adopting an ECM.
• A financial settlement company serving the travel industry, ARC’s financial analysis on the ECM implementation project shows a net present value over 5 years of $185k and an internal rate of return of 15%.
• An oil and gas division of a Fortune 50 company improved its accounts receivable (A/R) collections by 65% over the prior year after implementing Maana‘s knowledge management tool. Management estimates that by expanding the use of Maana to all A/R agents in that division, cash collections would accelerate by $600k per day.

ECM systems can also support the creation of new revenue by monetizing company’s information assets however this is less frequent.

Reduced processing time

Companies can automate some processes to reduce processing time and costs. As document processing will be automated, employees of different departments will no longer need any other tool to share content with each other. For example, if an employee needs to send a document to another by email or with any other appropriate sharing tool for the business process to continue, this extra process of sending a document will be eliminated. Elimination of such processes can reduce process workflow times significantly.

• Greenbank RSL’s invoice process workflow time reduced by 84%.
• A global investment bank reduced process time by up to 60% per contract by implementing an ECM tool.
• Maana Founder and CEO Babur Ozden pointed out in an interview that just a few years ago, geologists and technicians would spend months studying data from a potential drilling site, where today the same work can be done in a matter of hours or a day.

Improved Decision-Making Processes

ML implementation

Machine learning algorithms can be used to extract valuable, actionable information from the content data silos. For example, customer profiles that are more prone to churn can be identified by employing clustering and classification algorithms.

Natural Language Processing

Maana implemented a solution where Natural Language Processing was used to extract information from historical documents about geological basins. The oil and gas data was studied by the company’s basin screening team to support decision making about whether investments should be made in certain geological basins in the future.

Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics tools integrated into ECM can provide forecasts by extracting historical data from content silos. For example, time-series analysis, tree-based machine learning algorithms, gradient boosting algorithms, or neural networks can be used to provide sales or inventory forecasts.

Qualitative Benefits

Continuity

ECM provides a data skeleton for companies that generate data through different technologies. IoT sensor data, SaaS content, file platforms, cloud servers, and legacy systems existing in data silos across the workflow are mapped to a single skeleton which makes it easier to manage the data and content types.

ECM can make automatic document version control. By searching through documents and labeling dates of information, an ECM tool can compile reports that consist of most recent information in the category of interest.

Compliance

ECM gives businesses the power to sift through data and regulate it according to the level of necessity as ECM opens up regulatory pathways by archiving content and data automatically by need. ECM also promotes consistent data retrieval and safety within the company facilitating compliance with government and industry regulations:

• Greenbank RSL’s data accuracy, integrity, and accountability for department managers have increased by implementing Kyocera’s AI-powered ECM.
• Newgen archived more than 250 million policy dockets (i.e. summary of proceedings in a court of law) with 7 billion documents while implementing an ECM to a leading energy company.

Collaboration

Legendary business figures like Steve Jobs placed significant importance to effective collaboration and designed physical layouts that helped employees from different departments encounter one another. Using the same documents as sources of these projects is also crucial for collaboration. ECM provides an adequate data flow inside the company by ensuring that documents in the system are updated and duplicates do not exist.

• Greenbank RSL’s manual business processes and workload of the accounting department were minimized.
• Seed claims that implementing their ECM allowed Winder to improve their collaboration process with both Winder colleagues and external customers.

Improved Customer Experience

By using an AI-led ECM, employees can retrieve information quicker than traditional ECM. Especially employees that engage with customers should often retrieve information very quickly and take necessary action. Speeding up this process by employing an AI-powered ECM can provide a substantial improvement in customer experience.

Security Benefits

Advanced security

By scanning through documents, AI-led ECM can detect sensitive information and it can:

• Redact or mask the sensitive information and store the document that way
• Store the document in a more secure environment
• Give access authorization only to employees that are working on a relevant task

These preventions can be significant to avoid data leaks and to protect sensitive personal data.

Cloud Storage

Storing documents in hardware such as personal computers or hard disks have many risks as these devices are vulnerable to cybertheft. An AI-powered ECM can store sensitive content in the cloud.

As you probably know, cloud has numerous benefits over on-premise systems which is why most organizations are switching to the cloud. These benefits include:

• The files stored on cloud servers are encrypted.
• Servers are usually located in data centers with high levels of physical security.
• Some AI-led cloud storage software rely on built-in algorithms to seek out and identify possible vulnerabilities in security measures.
• Cloud storage software has built-in firewalls.
• Largest cloud providers copy your data several times and store them on many different data centers, which allows access to the data even when one server is down.
• Cloud providers are supposed to be tested by third-party security organizations regularly to make sure they are safe from hackers, cybercriminals, and the latest malware and viruses.
• By implementing an ECM, Cato Inc. reduced its number of warehouses from two to one and got rid of several hundreds of boxes of stored paperwork, where less than 50 boxes remained. (estimated to have a 75% reduction in paperwork alone)

For more detailed information about ECM vendors, please check our ECM vendor selection guide or contact us:

This article was originally written by former AIMultiple industry analyst Izgi Arda Ozsubasi and reviewed by Cem Dilmegani