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. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted, from the dawn of humanity to 2003, we generated at most 5 billion gigabytes of information—only 0.5% of a single zettabyte. No wonder some fear an impending content tsunami we soon won’t be able to handle. That’s why many are looking to Smart Content as the answer to soaring content explosion forecasts.
Honestly, I think we’ll surpass that estimate long before three years are up. To take just one example, scientists have discovered a method to store hundreds of terabytes of data on a tiny crystal, a technique that could potentially lead to ultra-high-density storage systems capable of holding petabytes of data on a single disc. And for context, a petabyte is roughly the equivalent of 5,000 movies in 4K resolution.
In other words, we’re constantly improving our ability to store vast amounts of data—but are we getting any better at extracting, leveraging, and using it? Many believe AI will handle this for us.
I’m not so sure. AI’s primary function is to generate even more content, not necessarily help us make better use of what we already have. After all, approximately 80 to 90% of the world’s business data is stored as unstructured data in documents—much of it locked away in PDFs, a format that almost goes out of its way to resist extraction, and so traps the data inside.
What’s at the heart of any business process? The business document
The irony, of course, is that we created PDFs to make information sharing easier—Adobe still claims they help us “streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and maintain a professional image.” Likewise, we hold endless Zoom and Teams calls to foster collaboration and drive projects forward—only to store the recordings and almost never revisit them. In doing so, we’re only adding to what Gartner calls “dark data”—valuable information that remains unused and forgotten.
But we’re not really talking about data in the abstract—we’re talking about business documents, the foundation of every business process. Documents sit at the intersection of AI automation, collaboration, and the challenge of keeping ourselves from drowning in an ocean of bits, bytes, audio, and video files.
Every organization needs to make smarter business decisions while being exponentially more productive. Achieving that requires accurate extraction and strategic use of information. But we can’t offload everything to AI—at least not yet. Even if Agentic AI becomes mainstream, we’ll still need a human in the loop. Businesses have a responsibility to shareholders, employees, and customers to make decisions based on expertise, intuition, and sound judgment—not just the output of an opaque algorithm. At some point, accountability matters: How did we reach this decision? Who was involved? What was said? And the best way to preserve that clarity is through well-structured, accessible documents.
AI has a crucial role to play in helping us manage data, but we don’t want it running the show. The real solution to the data deluge, inaccessible information, and the need to keep humans at the top of decision-making isn’t more talk about data—it’s a return to the business document. AI speaks in data, but humans don’t. That’s why I see something new emerging and fast: what you might call Smart Content.
In practical terms, this means a new generation of document management platforms with intelligence and automation built in, end-to-end. Today, some systems offer smart features at the front of document workflows—handling tasks like routing, filing, and archiving based on basic understanding. But what if the entire workflow was smart? What if every stage of the process—from creation to collaboration to compliance—was seamlessly automated and adaptive?
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Smart systems create a ripple effect
In other words, we need document management that doesn’t just recognize a new input as a sales contract or an invoice—it needs to instantly capture and extract all relevant information so that nothing gets trapped in a silo or an inflexible data format.
Instead, this information should flow seamlessly through your metadata fabric, enabling the system to automate and act intelligently across your entire corporate ecosystem. It should access, inform, and trigger the right processes in the right systems, ensuring nothing gets lost in translation. Think of it this way: when everything is smart, whatever your system touches becomes smart, too.
If we could achieve this, we wouldn’t need to worry about the explosion of zettabytes of data. As data grows, so would our ability to unlock and leverage it for real business value. And if we can get there—and I believe we’re very close—Smart Content won’t just mean responsive documents that guide us (“Hello! I’m a resume of a qualified candidate for your job with Python skills and over 3 years experience. Shall I schedule an interview or make a job offer?”). 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. Instead of becoming black holes that drain productivity, documents will transform into active, intelligent assets that drive efficiency and decision-making.
If we can get the business dog wagging the data tail again, there’s no reason to fear the rise of the zettabytes. Instead of being overwhelmed, we’ll welcome every new digital asset those storage scientists can create—because with Smart Content, each digital file fuels a more intelligent, efficient, and high-performing organization.
