The union of AI and CMS will extract new value from content
Like a snowy summer day or working vacation, content management systems used to be a contradiction in terms at many enterprises.
As the volume of a company's digital content grew -- and grew and grew -- these sophisticated business applications didn't live up to their name. Content, whether destined for the web or used internally for the enterprise, remained unmanaged. Employees still struggled to find the information they needed to do their jobs. Online customers were not served up content that addressed their particular needs. CMS experts, meanwhile, were quick to point out that any failure of content management tools was due less to the technology than to human shortcomings like improperly trained users, a lack of executive support or poorly tagged data repositories.
But all that is about to change -- at least, that is the hope. A new era in content management is here. Artificial intelligence, the technology that thrives on data -- the more of it, the better -- is making content management tools smarter and enterprises better at generating value from content.
This handbook explores how a pantheon of AI technologies -- from machine learning and natural language processing to image recognition and video search -- promises to revolutionize content management workflows and personalize customer experiences. Some words of caution, however. These are early days for AI-infused content management.
Recent advice from Gartner analysts Irina Guseva and Mick MacComascaigh on applying AI to content management seems apropos: Keep your AI-driven capabilities in content management small, focused, targeted and of practical value; focus your new AI development on use cases involving large amounts of existing data that can't be easily analyzed by humans; and find people with the requisite skill sets, including data engineers, data scientists and linguists.
At the risk of using another contradiction in terms, make it a modest revolution.
