M-Files to Apply AI to Enterprise Content Management

Later this year, M-Files Corp. plans to embed support for artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing technologies within its enterprise content management (ECM) system following its acquisition of Apprento.

Greg Milliken, chief marketing officer for M-Files, says Apprento provides M-Files with access to an Apprento Business Context Engine that understands natural language processing. At the same time, Milliken says M-Files has licensed AI technologies developed by ABBY. Collectively, those two sets of technologies will be infused in an upgrade to the company’s namesake ECM platform later this year, says Milliken.

Milliken says M-Files as an ECM differentiates itself in that its content repository is neutral. That means it can be layered on top of repositories such as Microsoft SharePoint and Box to unify the management of documents. Soon end users will be using voice commands to access those files in addition to making use of a variety of algorithms to identify their relationship to each other and optimally store them, says Milliken.

“The system will be able to suggest what other content is related to a type of document,” says Milliken.

Naturally, M-Files is not the only provider of an ECM racing to add AI technologies to their core platform. What IT organizations should start taking note of now, however, is just how much document management is about to be advanced in terms of how documents are not only used, but stored. It would appear that the day when IT departments spent huge amounts of time and effort manually managing files across multiple content repositories may be about to come to a merciful close.