Central to the mission and ethos of enChoice is helping government and commercial enterprises navigate their own journeys through the world of unstructured content. Our approach is to bring a foundational set of technologies and best practices to bear in helping clients pursue value-based outcomes as they tame the rising tsunami of digital content growth and effectively channel that content in the service of efficiency, business insight, enhanced citizen experience, and compliance.

Recent breakthroughs in Generative AI and Large Language Models have dramatically enhanced the value of getting this journey right. Once-static image repositories can be transformed into living sources of information and insight. Citizen engagement with government services can become more intuitive, automated, and efficient.

We are excited to be part of this moment and the almost unlimited potential it promises.

Of course, the nature of the underlying challenge is well-chronicled :

1. Unstructured Data Explosion – Over 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, including emails, documents, images, videos, and social media content, and this figure is expected to grow exponentially.
2. Massive Growth Rate – Unstructured data is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 30%, outpacing the growth of structured data.
3. Dark Data Challenge – Gartner estimates that 90% of unstructured data is “dark data”, meaning it is collected but not used effectively for decision-making.
4. Government Data Growth – Public sector agencies generate and store petabytes of unstructured data, from surveillance footage and body camera recordings to reports and citizen communications, posing major management and compliance challenges.
5. AI & Automation Response – 90% of business leaders believe AI and machine learning will be crucial in managing and extracting value from unstructured data in the coming years.
6. Rising Compliance Risks – With data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, enterprises and governments face increased pressure to manage unstructured content securely, or risk heavy fines.
7. Content in the Cloud – More than 60% of unstructured business data is now stored in cloud-based solutions, up from less than 30% a decade ago.
8. Collaboration & Remote Work Impact – The shift to hybrid and remote work has led to a 400% increase in unstructured content creation through collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.

The imperative for governmental technology and operations leaders is to reimagine a modern and sustainable content automation framework that sets the stage for AI enablement while addressing legacy requirements for managing scale, security, and compliance.

While there are certainly nuances of the content automation journey that vary by organization and department, we have found the following table to be a useful way of broadly framing the conversation.

Having refined this chart through dialogue with leaders from a broad spectrum of organizations, we’ve found that those leaders tend to quickly map their current states against these stages, and then often have clear, intuitive insight into how particular areas of progress should be prioritized.

It is important to note that the latest AI technologies are not a replacement for the earlier maturity stages depicted in this table but rather are optimally enabled through effective execution of those stages.

As described in the “Accessibility” stage, content needs to be housed and indexed in a repository that is cost-effective, performant, secure, and compliant. In the “Acceleration” stage, Intelligent Capture tools have been employed to eliminate manual involvement in the separation, classification and metadata extraction associated with content. In the “Automation” stage, content and its associated data is made available to business applications and to support automated workflow and decisioning.

Then, in the context of such a mature content automation environment, AI tools can be orchestrated and consumed to maximum effect. The extraordinary data, compute power, and cost requirements for building proprietary LLM’s are prohibitive for most organizations. Capabilities such as Chunking, Vector Search, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and Prompted Queries are how most organizations will leverage the power of AI against their unstructured content, and the better curated your content to begin with, the more effective these capabilities will prove to be.

The enChoice team would love to explore with you how our technologies and services can make the full content maturity journey a reality in your organization. If your goal is to extend the life of legacy content automation investments into a more integrated and supported framework, our Knowledge Capture solution might be right for you. If you’re ready to consider a next-gen, cloud native SaaS framework that supports the entire maturity path described here in a single framework, we’d be pleased to demonstrate for you our Encore platform.

This is an exciting and transformational time in the world of content automation, and we’d love to join you in your journey.