Companies expect their investments in AI to unlock worker productivity, improve the customer experience, and boost revenue — but how, exactly, is this going to happen? The devil is in the details, namely, solving for inefficiencies in document workflow.
Oft-overlooked, everyday tools like document and PDFs are where AI can be transformational. A Forrester survey of 402 PDF and document tool users and 116 decision makers found that organizations leveraging AI realize higher levels of employee satisfaction.
More importantly, they spend less time on tedious work.
Put another way, 66% of respondents said employees spending time on manual work better left to AI reduces time spent on primary work. Further, 62% said this damages the customer experience, and 56% cited negative impacts to brand reputation due to document errors.
The Cost of Lost Time
PDFs move throughout an organization like the connective tissue of an organism. They are the vehicle for communication, collaboration and workflows that impact strategy, innovation and engagement. PDF workflow directly impacts the employee experience.
Unfortunately, projects aimed at improving the employee experience often fall to the bottom of the priority list. While nearly 70% of respondents admit that operational processes supporting document tasks are very manual, nearly half have not yet leveraged AI to fix this.
On average, survey respondents said they’re using eight tools for their PDF and document needs, many of them outdated, lack automation, and integrate poorly. Each tool has a learning curve and its own interface. An employee might have a tool for e-signatures, another to edit PDFs, another for document scanning, and yet another for collaboration.
As a result, employees are left to fend for themselves. Many employees spend their days doing manual, repetitive work. This adds up to roughly an entire day of the workweek lost, not to mention the toll on employee satisfaction. A majority of employees (56%) admit that this lost time means they don’t have enough time to do their primary work.
How Can AI Help?
The good news is that AI can pick up some of this manual work and free up employees. When asked exactly how AI can help, two-thirds of respondents cited document and text summary creation as the most valuable, followed by document redaction and content explanation.
Data Extraction: AI can interrogate blocks of data, extract relevant information, and summarize content or provide answers to questions. This will free up employees because 80% of data extraction is done manually today. Employees have to physically look at a document, extract fields, and enter them into another application.
Document Redaction: Employees also spend an inordinate amount of time manually searching documents and redacting sensitive information, such as personal identifiable information, credit card numbers, account numbers, etc. The stakes are high. Compliance failures, hefty penalties, and a brand’s reputation all hang in the balance — and human error is inevitable. But AI done right can automatically prevent sensitive information from seeing the light of day.
PDF Editing: In hundreds, perhaps thousands, of documents, inaccuracies and inconsistencies abound. They often come from sources themselves, where someone may indicate they’re married on one form and single on another. Employees are tasked with comparing documents and identifying problems, but AI that knows what to look for can catch them automatically.
Tackling the PDF Problem
Wrangling documents and freeing up employees to be more productive on things that matter requires organizations to recognize that they have an employee-experience problem and then commit resources to fix it. To be fair, this can be a challenge given that many companies are focused on sweeping, transformative projects.
How to get started? Companies should consolidate their PDF tools into one that leverages AI. A whopping 80% of respondents said an all-in-one platform would be valuable or extremely valuable. A single tool with AI automation features enables employees to do their best, most efficient work.
Companies, of course, will have to review and revise each piece of the document process before introducing AI. They’ll need a good handle on existing inefficiencies, from unnecessary and repetitive steps to overtly labor-intensive tasks, so that they can pinpoint areas to standardize and automate.
Automation Leads to Autonomy
Fixing the PDF problem with AI will lead to a lot of business benefits, but the one that sticks out the most is a better employee experience. AI will give employees more autonomy to develop automations, generate documents, redact documents, and summarize content. In essence, AI can become a kind of super assistant to offset labor-intensive tasks and help employees get their work done.
