John Bates
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Articles by John Bates
Is Voice Becoming the Front End for Agentic AI? Original
The medium is becoming an increasingly powerful control surface for enterprise agentic interaction, says software expert Dr John Bates Do you think voice technology is just for asking Alexa about the weather, putting on some Bach or Philip Glass while you work, or helping you navigate an unfamiliar motorway junction in a hire car? Most people would probably agree.
CW@60: Making the next 60 years of British tech as glorious as the last
Cultural differences This cultural difference in appetite for risk and enterprise has serious implications for Britain’s future; not just in technology, but in creating the next generation of IP-rich businesses that generate revenues, tax and meaningful futures for founders and employees. Britain once had role models in abundance.
AI without governance could come back to bite you
99% of the discussion around generative AI focuses on what the technology might achieve, rather than how to make it work effectively. Organisations are investing heavily in LLMs, PoCs and increasingly expensive tokens, impressed by AI’s ability to generate content, answer complex queries and summarise data. The bigger question is whether organisations are ready to make an AI into a trusted, business-as-usual infrastructure. The technology can advance rapidly; the challenge is making it trustworthy.
Why Business Leaders Should Focus on AI Enhancing, Not Replacing, Existing Systems
Opinion AI promises to transform document-heavy organisations, confirms document intelligence expert John Bates, but the winners will be those who treat AI as an enterprise capability, not simply another productivity tool By By Dr John Bates The excitement surrounding AI has encouraged many organisations to focus primarily on what the technology can do. The more important question is what it can be trusted to do consistently inside a live business environment.
AI and Document Management: Why Pragmatism Beats Fear and Naivety
Document intelligence expert Dr John Bates has been exploring what the ideal recipe for AI success looks like As we stand, the word is being rocked on one hand by global events and on the other by near-daily advances in baseline AI capability and hardware innovation. The business conversation around AI seems doomed to oscillate wildly between alarmism (we’re all doomed!) and utopianism (the singularity is nearly here!).
AI and Document Management: Why Pragmatism Beats Fear and Naivety
Document intelligence expert Dr John Bates has been exploring what the ideal recipe for AI success looks like As we stand, the word is being rocked on one hand by global events and on the other by near-daily advances in baseline AI capability and hardware innovation. The business conversation around AI seems doomed to oscillate wildly between alarmism (we’re all doomed!) and utopianism (the singularity is nearly here!).
Why We Don’t Simply Have One Office
Opinion Document intelligence expert John Bates agrees that agents are useful, but the front- and back-office divide is not going away anytime soon By By Dr John Bates The idea of separating our offices into a ‘front’ and a ‘back’ dates back to 18th-century finance in London and later on Wall Street, where revenue-generating staff were deliberately separated from those handling processing and settlement.
Is the Front–Back Office Divide Over or Is This the Latest Sales Narrative?
The distinction between front office and back office originated in financial services as far back as the 1720s—particularly in the City of London and later on Wall Street, where revenue-generating, client-facing roles were separated from the operational functions that processed and settled transactions.
Automated Document Understanding: The Real Vector for Enterprise AI
Intelligent document processing (IDP), an AI-powered technology that reads documents and extracts meaning, has quickly become the advanced successor to traditional document extraction tools such as optical character recognition (OCR). Expectations for IDP are high: the global intelligent document processing market was valued at just under $8 billion last year and is projected to reach around $67 billion by 2032, reflecting a robust compound annual growth rate of 30.1%.
Document Management Has a New Role in AI
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which boosts large language models with external data, is becoming a key strategy in generative AI, especially for critical real-world uses. You may already be familiar with that. What’s less obvious is the rebirth of a well-established technology: Document management (DM), which is now emerging as a crucial use case in the AI landscape. Let’s take a closer look.
Drowning in Data? Smart Content is Here to Help
Smart Content doesn’t just mean responsive documents that guide us. It will evolve into a dynamic corporate knowledge base and intelligent business process stack, one that’s far more proactive than today’s static PDFs and forgotten Teams files. Every week brings news of another astonishing AI breakthrough. Meanwhile, as our digital dependency deepens, global data creation is projected to reach 394 zettabytes by 2028—where one zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes.
Drowning in Data? Smart Content is Here to Help
Smart Content doesn’t just mean responsive documents that guide us. It will evolve into a dynamic corporate knowledge base and intelligent business process stack, one that’s far more proactive than today’s static PDFs and forgotten Teams files. Every week brings news of another astonishing AI breakthrough. Meanwhile, as our digital dependency deepens, global data creation is projected to reach 394 zettabytes by 2028—where one zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes.
Think AI will fix info overload? Think again Original
Enterprise content expert John Bates discusses how we're approaching a tipping point in how we work with information, where "Smart Content" is poised to make a big difference Today's document business systems often function more like filing cabinets than smart content experts. But what we really need are synthetic knowledge partners—not more office furniture.
Introducing WunderkindAI and Analytics
In today’s digital-first world, brands require advanced tools to engage customers with precision, optimize marketing efforts in real time, and drive measurable revenue outcomes. Wunderkind is proud to announce the launch of WunderkindAI and Wunderkind Analytics, key innovations within our Autonomous Marketing Platform that bring greater intelligence, efficiency, and control to performance marketing.
How dynamic digital documents enhance customer experience
Dr. John Bates In 2025, global content creation is projected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes, or 180 trillion gigabytes. In paper terms, that’s the equivalent of 122 million trillion pages. Even if everyone on Earth were reviewing documents nonstop, they’d still have billions of documents each to process — a task that is clearly impossible. Intelligent automation is clearly needed.
You’re closer to the vision of a paperless office than you think
Opinion Software CEO John Bates reflects on how a decades-old vision for enhancing knowledge worker productivity is being realised in unexpected ways By By Dr John Bates Almost all banking has shifted to paperless operations, and most organisations have followed suit. So, have we finally achieved the ‘paperless office’ vision that Xerox outlined in the 1975 Businessweek article? The paperless office never fully materialised.
Maximizing Customer Experience Through Personalized Document Communication
With increasing competition both in person and online, businesses have found a need to improve the customer experience throughout each transaction. Customers grow to expect a custom experience tied to their shopping habits, preferences and demographic information. If companies cannot provide it in every communication, the customers may go elsewhere for a more personal experience.
Has the AI Revolution Given Us the Paperless Office?
The enduring relevance of document management in today's business world is remarkable — so much so that it has led to a notable shift in market categories. Leading research and advisory firm Gartner had previously phased out the term "document management" in favor of broader concepts like enterprise content management (ECM) or content services.
What Truly Intelligent Content Automation Needs to Look Like
Organizations need to start strategizing now on how to leverage next-generation intelligent content automation platforms. These platforms are emerging as the most effective way to infuse intelligence into documents, automate critical business processes, and make document discovery as intuitive and responsive as the concept of “sentience” implies. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have significantly simplified the way we engage with large banks of knowledge.
What Truly Intelligent Content Automation Needs to Look Like
Organizations need to start strategizing now on how to leverage next-generation intelligent content automation platforms. These platforms are emerging as the most effective way to infuse intelligence into documents, automate critical business processes, and make document discovery as intuitive and responsive as the concept of “sentience” implies. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have significantly simplified the way we engage with large banks of knowledge.
Business Remains Paper-Lite, But Document Centric
Just 30 years ago, office supply cupboards were stocked with carbon copy paper and communication with colleagues happened by phone or internal memo envelopes. Filing cabinets, packed with folders, correspondence, and invoices, occupied every available corner. With the rise of email, video conferencing tools like Zoom and Teams, cloud storage, laptops, and smartphones, today’s office is almost entirely digital in most practical ways.
Opening the door to truly intelligent content automation
In the same way you might ask a ChatGPT Plus-based voice assistant for information, knowledge workers are asking business questions out loud, rather than typing them or framing queries, and getting useful replies. Clinicians will ask their patients’ clinical reports to discuss and organise themselves in priority order based on patients most at risk of cancer. Lawyers writing a contract will ask their legal documents if any of them contradict or conflict with this new contract.
Welcome to More Productive, AI-powered Working Lives
According to content services expert Dr. John Bates, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is ushering in a new era of highly responsive business systems Before long, AI bots will be sifting through a variety of content for you, some familiar, some of which is “dark” some of which is structured and some of which is unstructured. By extracting metadata and overlaying structure, these intelligent agents will connect various elements, uncovering insights and making them searchable.
Bringing Bridget Jones’ diary into the AI era
Why Bridget Jones’s diary may be a better version of machine intelligence than the famous Turing Test By John Bates Published: 09 Jul 2024 June 7, 2024 was the 70th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, whose wisdom still resonates in fields ranging from mathematics to biology.
First Step Towards Responsible Tech is Understanding the Baseline
The United Nations’ World Environment Day takes place on June 5, prompting organizations to work harder than ever on their environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments, which even the tech giants are at last taking seriously. The problem is that businesses generate lots of content about their operations but are overwhelmed by its sheer volume. This year 120 zettabytes of content will be generated and next year181 zettabytes. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.
Get ready for documents that will actively help you
Opinion Technologist and author Dr. John Bates on what is now possible when AI meets the enterprise content management space. But while the documents are more than ready, are we humans? By Dr John Bates By Coming to your business soon, today’s practical AI (Artificial Intelligence) is ushering in a new era of 'sentient documents'.
The next step in document management has to be true document intelligence
Opinion #other 23 April 2024 With sentient document-level AI, finding and accessing relevant information will become much more efficient, technologist and author of Thingalytics Dr. John Bates explains. SHARE REPORT AN ERROR DOWNLOAD PDF / EXPORT AI can now enable ‘sentient documents’—interactive documents that behave like intelligent beings or lifelike bots.
Could AI-Boosted Workflow Help Distill Actionable ESG Insights From Dark Data?
This year alone, some 120 billion terabytes of content will be created, captured and consumed by businesses – growing by half as much again by 2025. Locked somewhere within all of that potential business intelligence is an untapped opportunity to understand how well those enterprises are performing against their social and corporate governance (ESG) targets.
Unlocking ‘dark data’ to transform ESG outcomes using AI
Author: Dr. John Bates, CEO of SER Even today, the vast majority of the knowledge in an organization is locked within static documents, emails, or some other unstructured state. Worse, over half of all enterprise information qualifies as ‘dark data’ in that it is currently undiscoverable by any digital search.
Can AI help companies transform their ESG performance?
The latest cloud-based AI capabilities could be used to track patterns across diverse, previously untapped environmental, social and corporate governance performance data – from signs that valued employees are burnt out to insights into resource wastage in the supply chain. Here, Dr John Bates, AI technologist and CEO of SER, considers where those insights might be buried and how to surface and harness them. It’s no secret that today’s businesses are being swamped by a deluge of data.
Adding the human touch to content automation
Intelligent content automation platforms will harness different forms of AI to enhance the overarching enterprise narrative about an account, or other scenario, over time. Better still, it will automatically link that knowledge to each business process in context, says SER’s Dr John Bates The trouble with best-of-breed business ecosystems (e.g. SAP, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Microsoft) is that they have created new silos.
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Protected: Enter The “Holiday Gift of Family” Carson November 22, 2021 Uncategorized Enter your password to view comments.
Next-Generation Content Automation: Intelligent and Context-Aware
Business output is directly proportionate to how well teams are supported to do a good job. If they can’t complete a task because they don’t have all the information at hand, teams become steadily less productive. Yet, ironically in this digital age, this situation still prevails across all kinds of enterprises. This is usually because of still-present silos across extended business processes.
Contextual AI holds the key to its business value
Today, content management systems or services that claim to use AI typically have the memory of a goldfish. That is, they apply image or pattern recognition very well, but beyond that the value of the AI application is very limited. As each document is scanned and its content ‘read’ and input into the target system (e.g. invoice details into the relevant accounting system), this knowledge is treated as brand new: there is often little, if any, contextualisation.
The Memory of a Goldfish
There’s a whole plethora of unicorn companies (mega-valuation start-ups) out there, whose AI-based propositions are based on pattern recognition. Far from being unintelligent robotic process automation tools, their tools train and use AI to recognize and make sense of documents and their contents.
The Lawfare Podcast: Judge John Bates on FISA in the News
Published by The Lawfare Institute in Cooperation With At the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas, Benjamin Wittes sat down in front of a live audience with Judge John Bates, a senior district judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Bates has served on the court since 2001, and from 2009 to 2013, he served as the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court.
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