Welcome to Generation AI. Now What?

"I've never seen so much urgency from even the most conservative industries and customers that we work with to go adopt [AI] and deploy it."

Rob Howard, VP of Product Management, Microsoft 365 Platform, Microsoft  

Can there be any question about whether we have entered Generation AI? In a few short years, AI has gone from being a promising yet largely speculative technology to becoming an indispensable tool businesses rely on daily. Indeed, according to a recent McKinsey & Company study, 72% of respondents indicated that their organization had adopted AI to handle at least one business function—a 17% increase over the number of respondents who indicated as such only one year prior.    

For organizations large and small alike, the question is no longer whether AI can help—it is how AI can help. Yet all the conversation around AI can be dizzying for those looking for an on-ramp to this revolutionary technology. In a sense, the same rapid evolution of AI that serves as one of its main selling points for many can, for others, prove to be quite intimidating. 

At iManage, we have held a unique position in AI and knowledge workspaces that have helped us gain insight into how this technology can be incorporated into diverse workflows. Working closely with forward-thinking technology partners like Microsoft and customers across more than 4,000 organizations worldwide, we have been joined by both AI architects and implementers who, together, have inspired the development of our own AI services.  

Motivated by recent conversations we have had with these leaders in AI development and to help businesses chart a path toward AI adoption in the knowledge workspace, we have highlighted a few timely topics influencing AI decision-making processes in organizations of all sizes. 

AI is significant—and getting bigger 

"You can't walk 10 feet in Times Square today without talking about AI"

Neil Araujo, CEO and Co-Founder of iManage 

For as rapidly as AI adoption has already grown, industry experts remain optimistic that the impact we have seen is only a taste of what is to come. iManage CEO and co-founder Neil Araujo recently sat down with Microsoft's general manager of software and digital platforms, Jeff Markowitz, to discuss how AI continues to revolutionize the workplace. The data Markowitz shared was staggering; generative AI, he proposed, could one day automate employees' work activities that represent as much as 60-70% of their time, resulting in the addition of the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually across all industries.  

The benefits of AI as a means of simplifying workflows and removing the burden of time-consuming tasks have never been more apparent. Consequently, businesses that have not yet incorporated AI into their toolset risk falling behind competitors that have. The number of use cases for AI adoption has grown. It continues to do so, offering opportunities to test the AI waters to introduce efficiencies throughout workflows, but crucially, whatever the use case, it still has to make work flow.  

Those looking to dip their toes into AI may be suspicious of its potential to upset existing workflows. For them, solutions that are thoughtfully integrated within well-established tools like those offered by iManage can be more inviting to end users and encourage universal adoption.  

As iManage Vice President, Product Management, AI Services, Jan Van Hoecke recently noted in an article for The AI Journal, "AI is stepping front and center, assisting knowledge workers not just with the big, important tasks, but a million smaller ones as well – and that's good news for end users." 

Seamless AI workflow integration means built-in, not bolted-on 

The growth of AI can be attributed to more than just the rapid refinement it regularly experiences in handling tasks it is traditionally associated with, like generating text or imagery. The sheer breadth of novel applications in which AI has seen seamless integration has become another primary reason for its growth. This integration often takes advantage of AI technology in the background, automating tasks in an unobtrusive way that requires little, if any, additional training on behalf of end users.    

For an example of the seamless integration of AI into existing solutions, look no further than the implementation of AI within the iManage platform. Designed to work natively within the existing iManage platform already used by more than one million professionals worldwide, iManage AI solutions enhance the iManage workflow. This means that iManage AI solutions—such as Ask iManage, the tool that allows users to effectively have a conversation with documents in their DMS or knowledge within iManage Insight+ to quickly find specific data points within documents and ask follow-up questions—adds functionality within the existing interface users are familiar with, without demanding any extra attention from users.  

AI is like electricity  

"We are working on use cases that use AI to enhance and respect the cognitive thinking processes that our knowledge workers go through to deliver their work product."

Jenny Hotchin, Director of AI Solutions, iManage  

Speaking to an audience on the state of AI implementation today, iManage CEO and Co-Founder Neil Araujo used the analogy that AI is like electricity—impressive as it may seem, on its own, it has little value; it is only when used deliberately, in service of the proper application or to reach a given end, that its actual worth becomes apparent. 

This analogy perfectly encapsulates the iManage philosophy on AI as it is used to help make knowledge work. AI enhances creativity and empowers knowledge workers to focus on more meaningful work. To be useful, in other words, AI should supplement, not supplant.   

One notable example of this philosophy in action can be seen with iManage Mailbox Assistant. The situation is familiar: Faced with a steady stream of new emails to file and associated attachments to save in the appropriate places, the average knowledge worker must dedicate valuable time throughout the day to managing an inbox. Spread across an organization's workforce, this task represents a significant time investment and opens the door to risks of improperly storing information.  

Mailbox Assistant solves this issue by applying AI to automate and streamline email filing and attachment saving. Building on organizational and individual user behavior, Mailbox Assistant improves individual productivity, information governance, and organizational knowledge retention, all without imposing new workflows to adapt to or introducing additional software to learn.  

Grounding data: marrying artificial intelligence with natural intelligence  

"AI can now dig into the understanding of our world, which is something we've never seen before." 

Jan Van Hoecke, Vice President, Product Management, AI Services, iManage 

In many cases, generative AI trains on public data. For some of the most common applications in which AI is used, that pool of data from which it generates a response to a prompt—to write an email or transcribe a video, for example—is more than sufficient. Yet, AI must be grounded in its own data for organizations based on knowledge work to realize its true potential. 

Grounding data means ensuring that the data used by AI is relevant, accurate, and consistent with the domain and context of the organization. It also means that the data is organized and structured to allow AI to access, process, and analyze it effectively. Grounding data requires having a robust information architecture in place first and foremost, which involves defining the types, sources, formats, and relationships of the data and the standards, policies, and procedures for managing and governing it. A well-designed information architecture enables AI to leverage the data in the iManage platform to deliver meaningful insights and outcomes for knowledge workers. 

Grounding data for AI imparts many advantages. The most obvious benefit is that grounded data opens significantly more areas in an organization's workflow where AI can introduce efficiencies and opportunities for automation. AI that can draw from a grounded pool of data can also give users confidence that the results are accurate, eliminating frustrating AI hallucinations—instances where AI provides inaccurate or even outright incorrect responses.    

The importance of adequately grounding data used by AI cannot be overstated, and that thinking inspired the creation of iManage AI Enrichment. The document classification and information extraction service dramatically improves the quality and value of organizational data in the iManage platform, automatically identifying documents by type, extracting key information points, and saving the information within the document to enable more accurate searching and better answers.  

You can't automate Knowledge Work Maturity 

Laying the foundations, structure and information architecture for deploying AI are all prerequisitis for achieving organization-wide knowledge work maturity. Tech is part of the solution but never THE solution; it is the processes that drive an organization's culture in tandem with tech that will see organizations accelerate, advance and enhance their knowledge work with the new tools on the block. 

The best of AI is yet to come 

Our conversations regarding AI have been as diverse as the applications in which it is now being employed. Yet one common theme has remained consistent in every discussion: the excitement for AI to support knowledge workers is palpable. 

Perhaps the most promising aspect of AI is how adaptable the technology is, suitable for handling any task in any industry and at scale. As an organization dedicated to helping businesses make the most of their accumulated knowledge, iManage has a long history of offering better ways to use institutional knowledge. It is no hyperbole to say that AI represents the most significant technological evolution in the knowledge workspace we have seen, and as our daily conversations with our partners and customers around AI implementation make clear, even greater AI-facilitated advancements are just on the horizon.   

Want to know more about how iManage AI solutions are streamlining knowledge work? Visit the iManage AI page to learn how our approach to AI is introducing even greater value into our industry-leading knowledge work platform.