According to content services expert Dr. John Bates, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is ushering in a new era of highly responsive business systems
Before long, AI bots will be sifting through a variety of content for you, some familiar, some of which is “dark” some of which is structured and some of which is unstructured.
By extracting metadata and overlaying structure, these intelligent agents will connect various elements, uncovering insights and making them searchable. They’ll integrate all your organisational metadata, creating a holistic, continuously evolving narrative that can serve as the foundation for more context-aware process automation.
This suggests that anyone dealing with content should be ready for AI capable of processing all kinds of documents—contracts, orders, policies, even handwritten notes—and helping you navigate them. Imagine being able to simply ask a document that has appeared in your electronic inbox questions like: “What are you?”, “What’s your subject?”, “What is this contract?”, “Who are the contracting parties?”, “What is your expiry date?”, and “What are the penalty clauses for breach?”
And the document itself understands and responds, almost as if it were a conscious entity. These same tools can then intelligently trigger subsequent actions, such as paying a supplier or even initiating a new project from scratch within your broader enterprise systems like ERP, CRM, contract management, and more.
There is immense potential for AI-enabled tools to “read” and interpret incoming documents. By allowing interaction through natural language instead of complex queries like SQL, this new generation of what I call “sentient” documents will overcome language barriers. Even if a document is in a language you don’t understand, you’ll be able to engage with it naturally in your native language—for instance, asking a question in English about a Japanese invoice and receiving an immediate, accurate response in either language, or even a third, as needed.
With these advancements in how we handle business information, the emergence of the sentient document marks a revolution that could be the most significant leap in document automation since the invention of the printing press. The reason: sentient documents have the potential to fundamentally change how enterprises understand and harness the vast repository of work patterns and corporate knowledge embedded within them.
The rise of document sentience couldn’t be more timely. By 2025, global data creation is projected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes, or 180 trillion gigabytes. The challenge isn’t just the sheer volume of data but our inability to effectively leverage it. Estimates suggest that about 54% of information stored on business systems is “dark,” meaning it’s inaccessible or underutilised. Sentient document technology will address this by ingesting and illuminating dark data, extracting descriptive metadata whenever content is created or ingested. This will form a centralised “metadata kernel” that powers AI bots and enhances analytics capabilities.
How do we get there?
Clearly, sentient documents will offer a crucial solution for managing the overwhelming flood of data inundating businesses today. Some of my company’s customers are already leveraging automated systems that read incoming emails, categorise and interpret embedded documents, and take intelligent actions based on them. For example, SEW-Eurodrive, a global leader in industrial automation, utilises a form of document sentience to expedite the processing of over 5,000 orders daily.
It also uses nearly 100 embedded “Content Apps” to automate order workflows, from creating CAD designs to scheduling the manufacturing and delivery of its products. This approach is thus automating critical business processes and making document discovery as intuitive and responsive as the concept of “sentience” implies.
So, how do we achieve this? Document sentience evolves from automating content processes, such as automatically responding to invoices in finance or applying business rules for employee onboarding in HR. The key breakthrough lies in leveraging a broad spectrum of AI capabilities, not just conversational AI. Sentience requires the integration of natural language understanding, generative AI, large language models, and machine learning for pattern recognition. This combination is what enables documents to truly “understand” and respond intelligently, transforming how we interact with business information.
The real magic lies in the synergy of these intelligent technologies, which together create a powerful framework for a next-generation content platform. Simultaneously, the rise of sentient documents will introduce an intuitive and familiar conversational interface, similar to what we experience with virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa. However, this interface will be specifically designed for intelligent document and content interaction, rather than everyday consumer tasks.
I am confident that document sentience will empower knowledge workers globally to make genuinely data-driven decisions. This advancement will save time, reduce costs, and enhance the efficiency of every knowledge worker.
Although often described as a serial entrepreneur or serial CEO, Dr John Bates is a former Cambridge Don who gave up the gown in the year 2000 when he became addicted to starting and growing businesses, often linked to his primary research field of AI, smart algorithms and intelligent analytics. After more than a decade in the US, in Boston and Silicon Valley, he moved back to London where he is now the CEO of SER, a leader and major player in enterprise content management, headquartered in Bonn, Germany. SER (https://www.sergroup.com/en/) specialises in intelligent content automation (ICA) - the convergence of content management (capturing, storing, searching, archiving, and managing enterprise content), business process automation and AI-powered content understanding.