With the integration of AI into today’s digital workflows, organization and efficiency are key to working smarter Whether accessing important documents or keeping track of paperwork to support a hybrid workflow, it’s important to maintain a system to locate digital documents and minimize the time spent searching for or manually entering data. According to a recent Adobe Acrobat study, 47% of employees noted that their company’s digital organization system was ineffective, and 1 out of 10 employees spend more than four hours a week searching for digital documents. Moreover, with the evolving integration of AI assistants, digitizing documents is becoming even more critical for modern-day information management, and when done correctly, offers many productivity benefits.
By converting piles of paper into smart digital assets, home offices can quickly access documents, manually or through an AI assistant, whenever and wherever they need. While a multifunction printer or smartphone can scan documents, a dedicated document scanner incorporates advanced feeding mechanisms and a variety of dedicated features that enable businesses to scan, process and organize larger volumes of documents at varying sizes, streamlining the digitizing process. As small businesses look at ways to future-proof their digital workflows, the combination of a dedicated scanner and today’s AI tools can provide a range of benefits:
- Increasing efficiency and productivity while decreasing physical storage needs
- Supporting mobile team members in today’s hybrid office settings
- Streamlining data accessibility for integration into AI-assisted workflows
A Dedicated Scanner for Digital Workflows
Cloud storage provide access to documents from anywhere with an internet connection, ideal for supporting today’s hybrid work environment. However, the way in which these systems are set up can make or break a workflow. According to a 2019 IDC report, “The Migration from Paper to Digital: Why Digitization Remains Elusive,” 40% of office workers spend nearly 30% of their week on document-related tasks. While digitizing and organizing documents can be time-consuming, incorporating the right solution for your small office can streamline processes for long-term productivity and accessibility. While multifunction printers handle multiple tasks, a dedicated scanner generally offers faster, double-sided scanning and organization features that speed up the digitizing process and help free up time for other responsibilities.
Conveniently, today’s compact document scanners are designed to handle considerable stacks of paper at a time, as well as capture both sides of a sheet of paper in one pass. Some dedicated document scanners offer advanced paper feed mechanisms that reliably scan stacks of papers, receipts and invoices, regardless of size, with no interruption. In addition, many dedicated scanners offer scanning speeds of up to 30 to 60 pages per minute, making it easy to digitize years’ worth of paperwork and maintain a fully digital workflow.
Smart Digital Assets
Managing how documents are added to and organized within a digital system directly impacts usability, searchability, and productivity, as teams leverage search and find functions to locate files. In addition to speed, today’s dedicated scanners are equipped with features that produce high-quality scans and help streamline digitizing, such as automatic cropping, paper skew correction, and bundled software that allow users to create editable documents and quickly access the latest versions of important documents.
For example, OCR technology can be essential to digital workflows by reducing the amount of manual data entry required. In addition to making documents easy to find with a simple search, advanced OCR software recognizes and extracts printed or handwritten notes and converts it into searchable and editable text. OCR technology can also help with automating data entry and extracting text from images, improving the accessibility of files that are notoriously hard to search. Teams can instantly search specific words or phrases within the document, helping to save time when dealing with large files.
Digital Office Mobile-Readiness
Another aspect of today’s digital document organization is the mobile convenience of accessing and working with office files. There are dedicated scanning solutions that can scan directly to cloud-based platforms and mobile devices, including phones and tablets, making files and documents instantly available from any device with an internet connection. These cloud-based platforms are ideal for documents that require signatures or extra security as they support encryption and access control. When uploading a cloud-based planform, users can tag, sort an search through scanned files, making it simple to keep documents organized and quickly accessible. This offers a secure way to to store sensitive documents without worrying about physical storage risks.
AI-Ready Digital Workflows
As AI continues to integrate into daily workflows, and small businesses prepare for the next generation of AI technology, it’s crucial to plan to ensure access to the right data for optimal performance. A dedicated document scanner offers features to quickly and accurately convert scanned information into smart digital assets, making documents AI-ready for Microsoft Copilot, Apple Intelligence, and ChatGPT workflows.1
Small businesses can use AI tools across a range of functions including accounting, customer relations, recruitment, and more. By integrating a dedicated scanner with AI integration capabilities, small businesses can save time searching, collecting and organizing data.
Imagine telling the AI assistant to “consolidate all business receipts for Q1 and send them to the accountant,” or “outline the last five years of tax returns,” and within seconds, all documents have been located and turned into actionable data. By leveraging modern scanning technology, small and home-based businesses, as well as home-based employees, can create a future-proof digital system to enhance productivity, reduce office paperwork, and improve overall workflow efficiency.
