From Expertise to Intelligence: The Impact of AI on ECM Consulting

Last week, I wrote about the importance of soft skills in the daily lives of ECM consultants (link here, but sorry in french): communication, empathy, influence, active listening, and all the human elements that determine whether projects succeed or fail.
These skills remain essential, and no amount of technology will replace them (at least in a near future).
Today, however, I want to flip the perspective.
While soft skills form the backbone of our profession, another force is quietly reshaping the consulting world: Artificial intelligence.
Not as a buzzword or a distant promise, but as a practical, everyday accelerator for our Enterprise Content Management work.
In this article, I will explore what AI can bring to the job of an ECM consultant, how it can support us, and why embracing it is becoming a competitive advantage.

AI: the co-pilot for ECM consultants

Consulting in ECM has always required a mix of technical understanding, process analysis, and organizational awareness. But our work also involves a lot of repetitive, time-consuming tasks that don’t necessarily add value.
This is precisely where AI shines, it accelerates the tasks that slow us down:

Document analysis at scale

Reading through hundreds of PDFs, contracts, policies, emails, and procedural documents can take days.
AI can summarize, classify, extract metadata, and identify anomalies in couple of minutes.

Requirement analysis and synthesis

Whether we gather input from workshops, interviews, or existing documentation, AI helps consolidate insights and reveal patterns we might miss.

Drafting deliverables

Solution designs, user stories, process diagrams, business cases, AI tools can generate solid first drafts, which we then refine using our expertise.

The magic is not that AI does our job for us, but that it removes the friction around it.
It lets us do more of what matters: thinking, advising, guiding, challenging, and designing solutions with real impact.

Enhancing Quality and Consistency Across Projects

Every ECM consultant knows the challenge of keeping documentation consistent across different project phases, clients, or solution components.
AI helps bring a new layer of quality assurance and standardization to our work.

Examples:

• Reviewing solution specifications for inconsistencies
• Checking that user stories follow a structured pattern and include all acceptance criteria
• Ensuring that terminology stays aligned with the client’s vocabulary
• Detecting redundant requirements or conflicting processes

AI doesn’t replace our judgment but it acts as a second pair of eyes, tireless and unbiased.
For complex ECM projects, where the devil is often in the details, this is incredibly valuable.

Bringing More Value to Clients Through Data‑Driven Insights

ECM is no longer just about storing documents, it’s about managing information, leveraging knowledge, and enabling automation.
AI allows us to elevate our consulting work from operational support to strategic advisory.

Here’s what AI makes possible:

• Understanding how information flows within an organization by analyzing content patterns
• Identifying high-volume, high-risk, or high-cost processes suitable for automation
• Predicting the impact of governance or structural changes
• Supporting compliance assessments with automated document classification

This transforms the conversation with clients.
Instead of:

“Here is your current process, and here is how we can optimize it.”

We can say:

“Here is what the data reveals, here are the risks and opportunities, and here is how ECM supported by AI can strengthen your business in concrete ways.”

It raises the level of our recommendations and positions us not just as implementers but as strategic partners.

Freeing time for the part that will never be automated: The Human Touch

Ironically, the more AI enters our daily life as consultants, the more space it creates for… soft skills.
The very ones I wrote about last week.
AI gives us time to focus on what truly differentiates us:

• Building trust with clients
• Guiding stakeholders through change
• Mediating conflicts and aligning priorities
• Understanding corporate culture and political dynamics
• Facilitating workshops and unlocking tacit knowledge

AI may handle information, but we handle people.
And people will always be at the heart of ECM projects.

AI Is Not Replacing ECM Consultants. It’s Elevating Us

Let’s be honest: AI won’t replace ECM consultants anytime soon.
However, I believe that consultants who use AI will replace those who don’t.
The difference won’t be, only, in who has the best technical knowledge. It’s in who can leverage AI to:

• move faster,
• deliver higher-quality insights,
• reduce project risk,
• and focus on strategic value instead of mechanical tasks.

The future ECM consultant is not just a subject matter expert.
He is an orchestrator using human skills, domain expertise, and AI capabilities to deliver better outcomes. The difference won’t only be in who has the best technical knowledge. It will be in who can leverage AI to do so.

The Best of Both Worlds

Last week, I wrote about the human skills that make a difference in ECM projects.
Today, I presented the other side of the coin: how AI can strengthen our work and enable us to become better consultants.
The future of ECM consulting is mastering both. Of course, it is also necessary to maintain high expertise in the products and concepts themselves in order to challenge, on the one hand, what the customer wants and, on the other hand, what IA suggests to achieve it.

Let’s discover how we do it every day at dbi services!