AI-powered intelligent documents: The future of HR workflows?

With a modern document management and content services solution you can handle and process everything digitally, whether it’s addressing job applicant criteria for the hiring department or managing severance agreements for the legal team. You can seamlessly route documents and tasks to the right colleagues, streamlining workflows every step of the way.

But imagine taking it a step further. Just as you might ask a voice assistant like Alexa about the weather or if you’ll need an umbrella, you and your HR team could simply ask questions about an employee record out loud, without typing, and get accurate, useful answers in return.

The employee record could even be in Mandarin from your office in China, while your questions and responses are in your native language, seamlessly adjusted for dialect and accent. Now, imagine going even further: you could ask your employee records to prioritise those most at risk of churn. In the same scenario your head of recruitment could query legal documents to ensure that there are no conflicts or contradictions with a new contract they’re drafting.

When an email lands in your inbox you could simply ask what it’s about – is it related to an employee, a payment issue, company policy, a holiday request or perhaps a complaint procedure? The system would not only categorise the email but also assess whether the request is reasonable, saving time and ensuring accurate responses.

Essentially, we’re talking about HR documents that ‘know’ how to route and file themselves and collaborate with other HR systems and business applications. How much more streamlined would your workflow be?

What I’m describing is a world of truly intelligent documents – self-aware and communicative files whose insights and content are so interconnected that they could almost be considered “conscious,” capable of sharing information about themselves and interacting seamlessly within your workflows.

A new paradigm for both search and office work itself

The evidence points to sentient documents becoming an increasingly tangible reality. The forces behind this transformation are clear: deep learning is swiftly advancing the automated understanding of documents, while large language models and generative AI are enhancing the dialogue between humans and machines. When integrated with intelligent document management platforms these technologies will enable us to engage with corporate repositories in natural language – empowering us to query, search and automate document workflows seamlessly.

Instead of simply searching for information we can now ask business questions of billions of intelligent documents and other organisational content, receiving summarised, insightful responses. Documents are no longer static and inert – they’ve become much more interactive.

In many ways a significant part of this is already here. Our customers already rely on automated systems that read incoming emails, categorise and understand embedded documents and act on them intelligently. 

If we could embed this level of intelligence or ‘sentience’ into our HR content much of our processes – from performance appraisals and employee feedback to contracts, onboarding forms and more – would work alongside us, rather than just waiting for us to do all the work. In fact, the rise of the sentient document couldn’t come at a more crucial time. By next year global data creation is expected to exceed 180 zettabytes – equivalent to a trillion gigabytes – highlighting the urgent need for smarter, more efficient systems.

But the real challenge isn’t just the sheer volume of data – it’s figuring out how to make it work for us. Estimates suggest that up to 54% of information stored in business systems is ‘dark’ – unstructured and inaccessible. Emails are often considered part of this ‘dark data’, and even more so are the countless hours spent in Teams and Zoom meetings. This hidden data contributes significantly to the estimated $3.1 trillion in lost revenue due to poor data quality in the U.S. alone. Given the overwhelming amount of information, advanced AI assistance will be essential for HR leaders to navigate, process and extract valuable insights from this data.

Why HR is crying out for smart documents 

This is a widespread business challenge but it’s a particularly pressing issue for HR managers, who continue to grapple with productivity hurdles—especially when it comes to locating the right HR documents. A 2023 Gartner survey revealed that 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information or data needed to perform their jobs effectively. 

With true document intelligence the era of fruitless searching will be over. HR professionals will be able to directly query billions of intelligent documents and business content, no matter where they're stored, and receive insightful, summarised responses to guide decision-making.

As these documents become more ‘sentient’, able to autonomously share information or engage in document-to-document exchanges, the burden of managing thousands of daily emails will significantly decrease. This breakthrough will not only improve the accuracy and efficiency of HR workflows but also free up valuable time for more strategic, high-impact tasks.

And let's not overlook the fact that business email usage is already on the decline – giving way to more dynamic, collaborative platforms like Teams for workplace communication and content sharing. For the communications that still rely on email, such as requests for information, leave notifications, contracts or applications, imagine a future where these documents autonomously organise, categorise themselves, route to the correct folders and trigger automated workflows based on their type and urgency.

Meeting management

I’ve referred to all this as sentience, but what I’m really talking about is AI. Offering tremendous potential for efficiency, AI could eliminate the hassle of travel and the time spent in back-to-back Teams and Zoom meetings. Just as in-person meetings have largely shifted to virtual ones, the next step for HR could be sending bots to less critical meetings. These bots could observe and summarise discussions on your behalf, take notes and even raise the points you would have made if you had the time to attend in person.

In this new era of more efficient business meetings your presence would only be required when your expertise or critical decision-making is truly needed. Meanwhile, AI and deep learning tools can handle routine tasks like note-taking, summarisng discussions and raising basic points—freeing up your time to focus on higher-level priorities and strategic decisions.

My contention is that with next-generation intelligent content automation platforms just over the horizon HR document management has entered a new era of seamless human-robot-content collaboration.

Let AI take charge of organising key insights into a comprehensive ‘map’ of business information, while we, as humans, retain control – deciding the best path to navigate and act on that data.

Practice: Beyond AI-driven efficiencies there are significant advantages in document management today

Centralising documents and data in a single, secure location has always been a game-changer for streamlining document-heavy HR tasks. Many organisations now depend on document management systems to ensure that their files are easier to retain, readily accessible and managed with far greater efficiency. For instance, leading European IT service provider Adesso Group has dramatically accelerated the creation and digital signing of employment contracts. This customer also overcame the challenge of migrating 5 TB of HR documents from legacy SAP HCM to SAP SuccessFactors, navigating complex legacy integration hurdles with success. 

Similarly, the world’s leading talent company, Randstad, is archiving 27 million HR documents with our solutions, demonstrating not only the vast volume of HR data modern companies manage but also the transformative potential of intelligent, self-guided navigation to harness this data effectively.