AIIM in Transition

I had the opportunity to attend close to my 25th AIIM Conference in New Orleans last week. My big takeaway is that the Conference and the organization is in transition. This is not just due to the organization’s having a new president and CEO, Tori Miller Liu, who took over six months ago and by all accounts is doing a fine job. It has more to do with what the organization stands for and who it is targeting for membership.

AIIM’s history is in Information Governance, which dates back to its founding some 80 years ago as the National Microfilm Association. Since then, microfilm-focused professionals have largely become obsolete and the current fear is that the records management professionals who made up the bulk of end user attendees at this year’s event may also be going by the wayside. That’s not to say this year’s event was not well attended. The 600 reported attendees was up significantly from last year’s conference in Denver. There was however grumbling about the need to attract younger attendees with job titles that will shape the future of the market.

While ruminating about AIIM, I came across this article yesterday, which discusses the impact that AI will have on the job market going forward. It cites the results of surveys of more than 800 companies taken by the World Economic Forum related to the deployment of AI technologies. The WEF reports, “Employment of data analysts and scientists, machine learning specialists and cybersecurity experts is forecast to grow 30% on average by 2027. At the same time, the proliferation of AI will put many roles at risk, as robots replace humans in some cases. There could be 26 million fewer record-keeping and administrative jobs by 2027.”

This is not a great projection for AIIM’s current attendee base. To their credit, many people associated with the organization clearly recognize this danger, and there certainly was more of a focus on AI content in the Conference sessions. Of course, the value of this content may have been lost on many attendees who had a lot of questions about how AI was relevant to their jobs and the challenges they currently face.

From a Capture and IDP standpoint, Infosource has been pushing the transition from records management and transaction processing for many years as the future of the market. In fact, our most recent figures show transaction-driven processes (Accounting and Case Management combined) outselling Records Management by almost three-to-one as the primary driver for Capture implementations.

AIIM’s biggest challenge is the same as many of its long-time vendor members— staying relevant in a rapidly evolving market. The idea of Intelligent Information Management, which AIIM pivoted its acronym to reflect a few years back, is still a good one with the idea of substituting “Artificial” for Association as the first letter at least being joked about at the event. One goal for AIIM should be to develop messaging and content that attracts more of these “data analysts and scientists, machine learning specialists and cybersecurity experts,” that seem to represent the future.

As always, there was a lot of good conversations at AIIM and my goal as an industry analyst is to keep those conversations going—especially those that pertain to the future of the market. About the only thing I can guarantee is that the future market is not going to look the same as it does today and that the interjection of AI is going to accelerate change.

Many Capture vendors had been utilizing early forms of AI even before IDP was launched.  Capture and IDP became one of the first markets to successfully deploy AI in business applications. So, as AI’s use expands into wider realms, many professionals in our industry have a head start and forums like the AIIM Conference and Infosource’s upcoming Capture & IDP Conference are great forums to discuss how to leverage that advantage.

It will be interesting to see how AIIM and rest of the industry evolves over the next year, but the spread of AI and its potential to drive automation should be a positive trend for many of those involved in Capture, IDP, workflow and other areas of content services software. Yes, we will likely see a changing of the guard when it comes to who is serving as Information Management professionals. The key challenge for AIIM and those associated with the organization (and I count myself among its supporters) will be keeping up with these changes and evolving AIIM's messaging, content and membership to better address what lies ahead.