Like so many others, I’ve seen enough to be convinced that AI is here to stay, that it will get exponentially more powerful over time, and that the technology will transform many areas of work.
Of course, document automation has been making inroads into the drafting of many kinds of documents for a long time. The value of automation, and the efficiencies and cost savings it can bring, are undeniable.
Now that AI is on our doorstop and bashing down the door, what does this mean for orthodox document automation? With orthodox document automation, typically we create docx templates with ‘direct replacement’ merge tags and ‘conditional content’ merge tags that are processed to produce a customised document when someone fills out a form or answers a questionnaire. Another way of doing it is to convert html output to a docx file. In each case, the process (when done properly) ensures consistent and predictable outputs. With AI, the question becomes whether this tried and true method will be overtaken.
My current view is that, at the moment, AI tools like ChatGPT are too variable and inconsistent in what they produce to completely replace orthodox document automation, at least for documents like medium to high risk contracts. That may change to a lesser or greater degree in the future when we’re better able to train AI tools on our current documents. At the moment, though, asking the likes of ChatGPT to draft something like a master services agreement for IT services for a government or commercial client is highly unlikely to produce what you need.
However, I believe there are potentially considerable advantages in amalgamating orthodox document automation with AI content generation. In other words, we can leverage the best of both approaches within a single document automation tool.
Recently I’ve explored this in detail in the context of WordPress:
- Hybrid orthodox+AI document automation with WordPress, Part 1
- Hybrid orthodox+AI document automation with WordPress, Part 2
Here’s a quick video overview too:
For more, see the GravityMerge website.