All posts filed under: Document automation

The next generation of document automation for WordPress is here

Published by Richard Best

GravityMerge AI What if every repeatable document your business produces could be generated automatically, from a form, in seconds, as an editable Word file? That’s the idea behind GravityMerge AI, a new suite of plugins for WordPress and Gravity Forms that GravityMerge has just released. It builds on the GravityMerge Classic plugin line, which has been providing document automation for Gravity Forms for years, but takes things significantly further. If you draft contracts, engagement letters, policies, proposals, or client reports with a similar structure each time, you’re doing work a machine should be doing for you. GravityMerge AI lets you build a form that collects the key details, link it to a Word template, and produce a polished .docx on submission, with conditional clauses, repeating sections, image insertion, and formatting preserved. The merge engine uses clean, readable syntax. Conditional logic works across entire paragraphs and inline within sentences and paragraphs. And there’s an optional AI field type that can generate additional content as part of the merged document, using Anthropic’s Claude. You can configure the …

A new era in document automation with WordPress

Published by Richard Best

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 …

Document automation is coming to a WordPress installation near you

Published by Richard Best

WordPress and Gravity Forms are both awesome. But, for a long time, there’s been a gap in what the ecosystem can do in the realm of document automation. This has been the case because either: you had to pipe your data to or otherwise rely on third party hosted services; or your options were limited to PDF output, or document output that did not accommodate conditional content. Solutions that require you to pipe your data to or otherwise rely on third party hosted services can result in a loss of control over your data, as well as potentially expensive monthly or annual fees. Solutions that limit you to PDF output restrict what you or your clients or customers can do with the generated output. And solutions that enable output to .doc or .docx formats but do not support conditional content are just too limited for any use case where chunks of content need to be included or excluded depending on what a person enters into a form. GravityMerge is changing all that, and it’s doing …