By Richard Huff

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes for big headlines. Applications such as ChatGPT offer the ability to “write” term papers and also stand as one of the drivers behind the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. AI impacts all aspects of modern life. In the context of customer communications, AI provides a number of benefits and its integration into applications can deliver remarkable results.

For an enterprise seeking automated document processing, AI uses advanced versions of optical character recognition (OCR) to classify a document by reading metadata and eliminating the need for manual verification and sorting. In addition, an AI-powered document scanning solution accurately extracts the contents and automatically converts the documents, which then enables users to access the document on any platform. The joint power of OCR and AI speeds up the document management process and reduces human interaction and error.

Once the document has been captured and categorized, AI-driven systems streamline and automate business workflows by routing documents to the necessary departments or individuals. The elimination of paper-based workflows enables enterprises to support work-from-home and distributed workplace environments. Industries with the highest percentage of paper-based workflows, including healthcare and insurance, faced the most difficult challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, when employees were unable to come into the office.

For enterprises with volumes of legacy documents, new AI-driven software analyzes existing documents with unsupervised algorithms that enable the software to create new content using existing content. Alternatively, the software can devolve the legacy documents into content elements and organize the content for re-use. For example, a collection of claims approval letters, which share a significant amount of the same legal language, can be converted from a dozen or more unique document templates into a single template with a small set of selectable text.

AI-driven software tools also transform content. The tools proofread the text to ensure it is grammatically correct and also simplify the text by tuning it for a given reading level, streamlining the formatting and suggesting alternatives. These tools enable enterprises to quickly refresh decades-old content without laborious manual editing processes.

For digital-first customer communications, such as blogs and chatbots, AI tools analyze content and customer data across business lines and generate communications for the topics in which most customers would be interested. AI tools also cleanse customer data by merging data and preferences from multiple sources to deliver a single view of the customer. The result is more effective customer interactions and improved click-through rates.

With new and emerging AI-powered software, enterprises will be able to create an improved customer experience while, at the same time, reducing the manual labor involved in CCM. By investing in AI-powered CCM tools now, enterprises can both reduce costs and grow market share through an improved customer experience.