Sentient documents, the death of email, and bots as proxies at meetings: 2024’s big enterprise shake-up
By Dr. John Bates 18 December 2023
Since AI is here to stay, it might as well make itself useful. Visionary and deep-learning techie Dr John Bates of SER sees humans being freed from the tedium of reading documents, processing emails, and attending meetings over the year ahead. Here are his top 5 predictions for the year ahead for the enterprise, and the wider economy.
1. Content sentience
Over the next year, we can expect to see content develop its own ‘consciousness’. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have already made it much more intuitive to interact with large libraries of knowledge, as deep learning algorithms distil key points with increasing accuracy and present them back to users in the medium and format of their choosing.
The next obvious step is for enterprise documents to exist with a built-in understanding of what they are and the type of content they comprise, so they can ‘speak’ directly to recipients or processing teams (or their automated proxies), and even file themselves according to their identified properties, telling relevant IT systems about themselves. They’ll become characters that people and applications interact with and even develop attachments to (so that saving a document to ‘Favorites’ assumes a whole new meaning…).
2024 will arguably be the most important year for the automation of documents since the invention of the printing press, because of the potential to revolutionize enterprises’ comprehension of all forms of content and the knowledge it contains. Visual walkthroughs of entire company information libraries will become a reality, meanwhile language will become seamless – in that teams will be able to ask English questions of a German document, or the other way around.
2. The end of enterprise email.
Enterprise email has been on a sharp downward trajectory for some time now, usurped by more spontaneous and collaborative chat and content exchange platforms like Microsoft Teams.
As content becomes more ‘conscious’ and able to relay information about itself, the need for busy and jaded human professionals to have to visually scan, respond/address, or discard individual email messages will cease. Emailed requests, and attached invoices, contracts, or applications will simply announce and identify their existence and file themselves or trigger automated processing, according to their type and priority level.
3. Bots will become our proxies at meetings.
Just as virtual meetings have replaced the real thing, particularly since the first mass-scale lockdowns in 2020, in 2024 we’ll be sending bots to witness what’s being said, take notes, and inject points to consider.
None of this is to say that humans will become redundant. Rather, that tools will only bother people when their expert input or a next-level decision is needed. In the meantime, AI/deep learning tools will do the heavy lifting.
There are bound to be some teething troubles, just as early-generation customer service automated loops have driven a lot of people to the edge. But algorithms are improving all the time and as long as teams devote the time to training their bots, the results will be swiftly honed, delighting everyone whose precious time will be saved and work-induced stress reduced.
Essentially, we’ve entered an era of “institutional memory”, of content collaboration, where AI draws all the findings together and reports the lay of the land, while humans ascend to a higher plane of blue-sky thinking.
4. Surface-level RPA will be left in the dust.
Robotic process automation (RPA) tools are great at doing routine things very well. But, superseded by real, adaptive machine intelligence, RPA as a technology has largely outlived its usefulness. Scraping information from the screen of one app and pasting onto the screen of another means that the technology doesn’t ‘understand’ what it is doing, preventing it from making an intelligent decision about what to do next. To perform a next-level content task requires intelligent insight into the information’s properties and relative importance. In 2024, intelligent content automation will increasingly replace RPA, enabling smarter processing/more advanced automation.
After all, why keep doing mundane things over and over again, when there are ways to run and manage them in more efficient and dynamic ways, aided by AI? Increasingly now we’ll see process automation incorporate deeper learning from content and data. Intelligence which will feed continuously into a growing and ever richer corporate knowledge base.
5. The world won’t end because of AI. Not in 2024, at least.
World politicians are missing the point about AI, deep learning, and its potential to do harm. The technology’s great at understanding language, deciphering images, and comparing, cross-analyzing and drawing first-line conclusions from the contents of large libraries. It’s also excelling at translating these into easy-to-digest prose and images. But, as far as the technology has come, AI hasn’t yet passed what could be deemed the new Turing test of modern-day machine intelligence – the ability to do the ironing and put clothes away. So we’re not at risk of an AI-driven nuclear war. For now, anyway.
What we can expect is that new AI applications will be ‘crash-tested’ for safety before being unleashed. This is how real-time environments like foreign exchange trading desks will be protected. Currently, around 75% of all AI applications risk being stifled by government over-regulation, an anti-innovation stance that must now be challenged if we are to reap the fuller benefits of AI as a society and global economy.
About the Author
Dr John Bates is a former Cambridge Don who became addicted to starting and growing businesses, often linked to his primary research field of AI, smart algorithms and intelligent analytics. Today he is the CEO of SER, which specializes 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.
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