Everyone in document automation keeps saying they’re AI-first. Here’s the thing though, I’ve watched a lot of AI-first projects quietly die after the demo.
Back in the ECM days of the late 2000s when I started my career, we had systems that technically “worked,” but only if your documents behaved. And documents never behave. Different layouts. Different vendors. Different eras. Same business process.
Fast-forward to today, and we’ve replaced rigid rules with giant language models. That’s progress. But it doesn’t magically solve the hard part.
The hard part is getting your AI to understand your business process.
AI can read a document. Understanding what that document means inside a business process is a different problem entirely, and it isn’t solved by claiming AI-first. It’s solved with context. Context that is often trapped inside the heads of users, living somewhere in the documentation spectrum between “none at all” and “spotty at best”.
An invoice isn’t just numbers indicating an amount owed. It’s a payment obligation, a compliance artifact, a liability, sometimes a legal risk, depending on where it shows up and who’s touching it next.
So I keep wondering: Are we building AI that understands documents… or AI that understands decisions?
At BIS, our AI-driven platform, Grooper, layers the best AI has to offer with the controls that let it work within your business processes. Including human oversight.
If your AI gives the “right” answer for the wrong reason, do you trust it?
