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Among the major problems in content management going back to the appearance of the first document management systems in the 1990s is managing unstructured content and taking meaning from what is one of an organization’s most valuable assets. One of the objectives of these systems now is to automatically understand and take meaning from unstructured content, transforming it into structured data that can be connected into various systems and processes.
This has always been a challenge. However, with the introduction of artificial intelligence into these systems many of the time-consuming processes in managing content can be done quickly and accurately, eliminating errors and speeding up processes. So, what exactly is the role of AI in content management systems?
Matthew Baier is COO and CMO of San Francisco-based Contentstack. He pointed out that AI is a key technology that helps marketers make better decisions and helps content managers better engage their audiences through content. AI can turn uninspiring, generic content into personalized, content-driven experiences that are more meaningful to audiences. Since the field of AI is evolving rapidly, companies need the flexibility to use the latest and greatest tech as it becomes available.
In the case of headless CMS, which is much better suited for AI than the old in-the-box suites because it allows users to integrate with the latest and greatest quickly and easily (and keep upgrading so you always tap into the best-in-class), it also means that users are not limited by whatever the vendor decides to make available as part of an artificial intelligence plugin/add-on.
Artificial Intelligence Advantages
AI is changing the world. For some people, it reduces costs through automation and for others it enhances customer experiences, Sanjay Patel founder of India-based Teclogiq, said. AI can be used everywhere. In content management systems, AI can be used for content processing and analysis.
There are several ways in which AI has already begun to impact today’s content management systems. Below are the most notable ways.
Related Article: 7 Signs You Need a New Content Management System
1. Automatic Image Tagging
Image tagging is an important task especially for e-commerce platforms or royalty-free stock image sites where hundreds of images are uploaded every day. Success depends on displaying results that are both accurate and highly relevant to the searched keyword.
Until recently, automatic image recognition lacked the precision required for the task. However, the next generation of AI-powered image recognition and tagging tools can analyze images in seconds. Many platforms have started embedding these tools for keyword metadata enhancement, and this trend is likely to accelerate.
2. Personalized Content and Marketing
AI algorithms are capable of tracking individual users’ behavioral patterns and can use such data to predict future needs and expectations. This capability is helping marketers deliver personalized content to boost customer engagement, satisfaction and revenue.
3. Text Intelligence and Analysis
AI can analyze the tone and sentiment of content and suggest if it is suitable for the intended audience.
Related Article: 24 Headless CMS That Should Be On Your Radar in 2019
4. Accelerated Content Creation
AI cannot yet create completely original stories. However, its capabilities, including those of natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG), can help accelerate the process of content generation. Some of the areas where AI is already helping is content translation, video and audio transcription, auto-tagging and metadata creation, grammar check and content protection.
5. Voice-controlled Platforms
AI-assisted voice services have gone from fantasy to reality in less than a decade. Services such as Apple’s Siri, Google Home, Amazon Echo (Alexa) and Microsoft’s Cortana are increasing the productivity of millions of people every day. Many content management platforms provide voice-assisted services, including voice-to-text and voice commands.
Changing Content Management Systems
That’s not all though. Patel argues that AI is likely to even change the systems themselves. There are few ways that will happen.
1. Real-time SEO Recommendations
Imagine a content management system that can identify your content in real time for SEO. AI suggest whether your content is better than your competitors’ in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). It might highlight terms that you should or shouldn’t use and provide recommendations to get listed on the first page of target search results.
2. Advanced Analytics
As businesses become more customer-centric, the analytics that content management systems provide will likely become more sophisticated. Enriched with data on past behavior, content management systems will be able to understand the entire customer journey and may be able to predict the type of content that leads to the most engagement and the highest likelihood of a conversion.
3. Interaction With Other AI systems
As we know how voice-activated devices (e.g., smart speakers) connect with other smart devices (e.g., LED lights, air-conditioners, etc.). With the pace of development across the AI space, we are not far away from the day when content management systems will be able to connect to these devices. Ultimately, AI will be able to optimize not just the content, but also the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) for the best possible customer experience and satisfaction.
Intelligent DAM
When it comes to AI for digital assets, content management systems don’t have much to offer right now except for automated image tagging and categorization. However, with new sophisticated AI tools, one day you may be able to offer intelligent services like searching content within videos, automatic (and accurate) voice-to-text transcription of video content or identifying moments of high interest in videos.
In fact, Raj Vardhman, co-founder of Goremotely.net sees one of the major advantages of AI is the way in which it can be applied to visual content. Image websites can’t possibly tag and categorize every single image that is updated daily. So, this is where AI takes over, performing tasks that would require several hundred employees.
Content management systems that integrate AI can make business processes more efficient, allowing companies to save time and money. In the future, organizations could see AI advance into real-time SEO recommendations, which would be a game-changer. Imagine a content management system that can identify keywords in real-time, making suggestions that are based on your competitors. It could tell you, for instance, what terms or keywords you should use and which ones you should avoid. Or even better, you could trust the CMS system to automatically update keywords without your content, saving you even more time.
AI agents now process content more efficiently and at greater scale than ever before, Dave Jones, the VP of Marketing at San Francisco-based AODocs added. This “repaving of the cowpath” approach is simply applying the latest and greatest technology, i.e., AI, to an existing and well-known field of technology. While this reboot can provide an improvement over existing automations, it is a step change, not a radical change.
In certain domains, such as digital asset management and digital rights management, being able to automatically extract image tags, like “car,” “blue,” or “male,” is incredibly useful. Previously, these capabilities could only be achieved by humans and were consequently very expensive. Using AI for this is allowing even the more “traditional” domains, such as case management, claims processing, and identity and security, to get value from non-document-based content.
The predictive aspect of AI or being able to potentially “know” something even before the human operator does. This is AI’s holy grail,” he said. A classic example of this can be seen in the marketing space. Imagine a scenario where a marketer is writing a blog. While writing that blog, an AI works in the background to identify stock images that would be suitable to illustrate the blog’s content, author, and so on.
This combination of predictive AI with integrated automation adds a level of value to the user beyond anything we are used to seeing. When AI starts delivering against this type of scenario, then we will truly understand and appreciate the role that AI can and will play within content management.