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In this article Technical Director – Infrastructure & Cloud at Information Leadership, Ian Morrish, looks at how AI Autoclassification is helping tame digital archives.
For years, organisations wrestled with the challenge of storing mountains of paper records. Filing cabinets spilled over, offsite warehouses became the norm, and locating a single document could feel likesearching for a needle in a haystack. Scanning these records promised asolution: digitise everything and reclaim precious office space. The physical storage problem was solved – but a new digital dilemma emerged.
As files migrated from on-premises servers to the cloud, tools like Microsoft 365’s SharePoint offered scalable, secure storage.However, this convenience comes at a premium, and customers quickly discovered that digital storage isn’t limitless or free. Now, identifying “low value”content – those files that are redundant, obsolete, or of low business value – is essential to avoid unnecessary storage costs and clutter.
Classic OCR (Optical Character Recognition) techniques helped convert scanned documents into searchable text, but they often fallshort, especially with handwritten forms or poorly scanned files. These limitations make it difficult to automate the identification and disposal of low-value content, leaving organisations with bloated, expensive digital archives.
This is where vision language models enter the picture. By reprocessing scanned PDFs with advanced AI that understands both visual layouts and textual meaning, organisations can extract richer, more accurate information – even from handwritten or complex documents. These models can flag documents with little business value, suggest retention policies, and automate disposal, transforming digital storage management from a headache into a streamlined process.
Here is an example of a pdf page that contains a photo of a form.
Photo of a form that was added to a pdf file.
Surprisingly, the vision model understood the intent of thelines with arrows indicating the incorrectly filled in data. It returned:
In the era of cloud-based storage, intelligent document processing isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s a necessity. Leveraging vision language models ensures that organisations don’t just digitise their history, but manage it wisely for the future.
At Information Leadership we are helping classify these archived files, apply specific retention/deletion policies and identify PII issues through our iWorkplace AI Autoclassification solution.
