Inaugural Trade Member Think Tank: Key Insights from Market Leaders

I'm excited to share highlights from our first AIIM Trade Member Think Tank session, held on July 24, 2025. We launched this program to create a dedicated space for our vendor community to discuss market trends, share insights, and collaborate on advancing the information management industry.

Introducing AIIM Trade Member Think Tanks

What makes AIIM unique is we view everything through the lens of technology. How can we leverage technology to make information management, records management, and information governance more effective and strategic?

AIIM's Trade Members are valued thought leaders who help our community better understand and benefit from information management technology. To better harness this collective expertise, we've launched a new initiative: the AIIM Trade Member Think Tank. This virtual forum brings together our Trade Members to collaborate, share insights, and provide strategic feedback to AIIM in an intimate, focused setting.

By meeting virtually, we can bring together industry experts from across the globe without travel constraints, enabling more frequent and flexible collaboration.

Our inaugural session featured Rich Medina, co-founder and VP of Consulting at DocuLabs, who brought 32 years of industry expertise to guide our discussion on current market dynamics and emerging trends. Here's an overview of our conversation.

The Services Revolution and Its Implementation Challenges

Traditional platforms to decomposed services. One of the most significant shifts we discussed is the move from traditional platform suites to decomposed services. While Gartner introduced content services years ago, genuine buyer demand is finally materializing. However, the implementation reality is nuanced: vendors should start with service-oriented messaging while developing the underlying API architecture, allowing them to compete immediately while building toward true decomposition.

Modernize or replace?This trend connects directly to what DocuLabs' research revealed about legacy system replacement. Organizations aren't just seeking cost reduction-they're driven by the business case for AI enablement. The challenge of modernizing legacy ECM systems in place has become so complex that complete replacement often proves more viable, especially when the end goal includes AI integration with content repositories.

Cloud-Native as Competitive Advantage

The shift to cloud-first architectures continues creating market differentiation, particularly for newer vendors competing against established platforms. Legacy vendors face substantial challenges with containerization and cloud migration, creating opportunities for more agile competitors. However, our discussion revealed that success requires more than just cloud deployment-it demands understanding of high-volume processing requirements and the operational realities of enterprise-scale implementations.

AI Beyond the Engine: Framework-First Thinking

While AI adoption appears widespread, our conversation highlighted the gap between AI marketing and AI reality. Successful implementations focus on frameworks and orchestration rather than engine horsepower alone. The most effective deployments combine multiple engines with proper governance, logging, and human-in-the-loop validation.

This framework-first approach addresses several practical implementation challenges that emerged from our discussion:

• Risk Management and Confidence Thresholds: Organizations are establishing clear accuracy requirements based on risk tolerance-high-risk applications might demand 80% confidence levels, while lower-risk use cases accept different parameters. The key insight is that these thresholds must be defined upfront, not discovered during implementation.
• Human-Centric Automation: Despite the allure of straight-through processing, the most successful implementations maintain human oversight. This approach enables continuous learning and quality improvement while managing the false positive rates that have caused project cancellations in recent years.
• Business Impact Beyond Efficiency: Modern ROI calculations extend far beyond operational metrics to include line-of-business KPIs. For insurance companies, this means measuring claim settlement times and customer retention rates alongside traditional processing metrics.

Barriers and Strategic Opportunities

Several implementation barriers emerged that also represent market opportunities:

• Regulatory and Compliance Constraints: Particularly acute in government sectors, these constraints are creating demand for solutions that can operate within strict AI governance frameworks.
• Data Quality Prerequisites: Poor data quality delays AI implementations, creating opportunities for providers who can address data curation and cleansing as part of their AI offerings.
• Skills Gap: Organizations need expertise that bridges AI capabilities with compliance requirements-a combination that remains scarce in the market.
• Standardization Needs: The absence of informal and formal standards for AI implementations creates confusion and project delays. Just as everyone understands the classify-extract-validate pattern for IDP, the industry needs similar frameworks for AI applications, particularly RAG implementations.

The conversation also revealed emerging opportunities around repository fragmentation and the critical need for better integration between mail workflows, document processing, and downstream business systems-areas where established expertise in high-volume processing creates significant competitive advantages.

Looking Forward

The inaugural Think Tank demonstrated the value of bringing trade members together for substantive industry discussions. If you're an AIIM trade member and want to participate in future sessions, or if you're interested in learning more about our trade member benefits, please contact us.

As we continue this Think Tank series, we'll explore early insights from our Industry Watch research in September and discuss AI regulations in our December session. These discussions reinforce AIIM's role in helping our community navigate technological change while maintaining focus on practical, business-driven outcomes.

Together, we're working toward a world where organizations truly benefit from technology-driven information management-and conversations like these are essential to achieving that vision.

The next AIIM Trade Member Think Tank will focus on early insights from our Industry Watch research on September 18, 2025, followed by our AI Regulations Think Tank on December 11, 2025. Both sessions run from 12:00-1:00 PM EST. AIIM Trade Member Think Tank sessions are an exclusive member benefit for members of AIIM's Leadership Council and Preferred Provider Members. Learn more about trade membership.