What is intelligent content?

Intelligent content is digital information structured to be easily discoverable, adaptable, and reusable across different platforms and contexts. It’s often enhanced by metadata and automation through AI-powered tools to streamline processes and deliver personalized experiences that drive business value.

According to a Box-sponsored IDC white paper, 90% of business information is unstructured, hindering effective data management, search, and analysis. Content intelligence requires organizing and analyzing large amounts of data, so you need a strategic approach to turn raw information into actionable insights that help you manage and use your information more effectively.

Imagine, for example, a contracts manager quickly gaining insights from multiple long documents, identifying which ones are incomplete or determining those that don’t contain specific clauses. This scenario leverages content intelligence to boost efficiency and ensure thorough, consistent analysis across all documents.

But what makes intelligent content “intelligent”? Let’s explore the innovation behind this concept, along with benefits, use cases, and practical steps to get started.

Understanding content intelligence

Content intelligence is the use of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze content performance and impact. It involves collecting, processing, and interpreting raw data to extract actionable insights that drive your content strategy and optimization. Simply put:

• Content intelligence is about employing technology to understand data
• Intelligent content is the use of these insights to enhance messaging creation, distribution, and performance

Why you need content intelligence: Benefits and use cases

The content intelligence market was valued at $1.5B in 2023 and is projected to achieve a CAGR of over 26% between 2024 and 2032, according to Global Market Insights. As businesses recognize the potential of AI-driven insights to optimize content lifecycles and enhance customer experiences, the demand for intelligent content solutions in management, creation, and automation is rapidly increasing. 

Here’s a breakdown of the benefits for your business.

• Deeper audience understanding: Unstructured data is difficult to find, analyze, and reuse, hiding opportunities to identify audience segments, understand customer journeys, and personalize experiences. With content intelligence, you extract user preferences and behavior patterns from customer support, social media, and website interactions, gaining a clearer understanding of your audience.
• Enhanced content performance and efficiency: By analyzing vast amounts of content, AI-powered tools identify what aligns with your audience, enabling you to refine your production. This streamlined process allows for faster content creation while improving engagement and conversion rates.
• Message consistency: Ensuring your brand messaging aligns across all channels and touchpoints involves adapting content in format, tone, and language. With artificial intelligence in content creation, you generate, customize, and translate texts in seconds while keeping your brand voice consistent across channels. 
• Innovation and growth: A McKinsey survey shows that 65% of organizations regularly used AI in 2024, nearly double the 2023 percentage. AI helps to generate, optimize, and personalize content for both internal and external purposes. It empowers you to automate enterprise workflows, scale content creation, and enhance collaboration, driving innovation and business growth.

Let’s review the best use cases for content intelligence:

Explore the top use cases of AI for business.

Where to start with intelligent content

You may be drafting the strategy for your next retail campaign or summarizing a meeting transcription. In either case, you can leverage intelligent content strategically. Follow these steps to get started.

1. Understand how content intelligence works

Content is everywhere in your business, and intelligence means making it more effective, actionable, and aligned with your goals. The content intelligence process involves:

1. Data collection: Some intelligent content platforms gather data from your documents and spreadsheets, while others from CRM systems and website analytics
2. Data processing: The system cleans and structures the collected data to make it suitable for analysis
3. Content analysis: Using algorithms and machine learning, the platform analyzes the content, identifying keywords, sentiment, topics, and patterns
4. Findings: Based on the content, you can extract AI insights on audience preferences, content performance metrics, competitor analysis, and more
5. Content optimization: Use these insights to refine your strategy and generate new ideas for your content creation and optimization
6. Performance measurement: Keep track of content performance and make adjustments as needed

2. Audit existing content

Run an audit of your current content to understand what you have, what’s working, and what needs improvement. For larger organizations with content scattered across departments, an intelligent content management platform helps you centralize this process. 

Choose a system that offers portal creation so you can organize all the files, documents, and assets per department — ensuring better visibility, control, and collaboration across teams.

3. Develop an intelligent content strategy

• Goals: If your strategy aims to increase website conversions or improve the satisfaction rates in your onboarding process, add these metrics to your plan and track progress to make sure your AI content delivers the outcomes you expect.
• Audience: Understand your target audience’s preferences and pain points to create content that resonates with them. You can use AI to analyze customer feedback, summarize team member reviews, or extract insights from market research reports.
• Pillars: Define core content areas and topics where AI can provide the most value, such as product information, customer support, marketing campaigns, and internal communications.
• Lifecycle: Consider the entire lifecycle of your content, from creation and distribution to data storage. Can you use existing information to create new pieces? If so, adopt a best practice of content repurposing, such as generating ideas for social media based on comprehensive blog posts and ebooks, for example.
• Governance: Implement clear processes and practices for content creation, review, and management to ensure consistency, compliance, and quality. For example, you can use AI tools to adjust the tone of a copy, create a workflow for efficient co-editing, or detect inaccuracies in contracts based on pre-built guidelines.

4. Choose the right intelligent content solutions

• Automation capabilities: Consider solutions that facilitate the content creation process, as well as the translation, editing, and review practices at scale
• Collaboration tools: Platforms with document-sharing capabilities and version control empower teamwork and make the content process more efficient
• Security and compliance features: To ensure you make the most of AI without compromising sensitive data, choose platforms that offer robust encryption, granular access controls, and compliance with industry regulations 
• Scalable data storage: As your content library expands, it allows you to manage large volumes of content effortlessly, ensuring smooth access and retrieval 
• Technology integration: Add platforms to your tech stack with robust integration features to support intelligent content creation, document management, and collaboration on apps you already use

While we maintain our steadfast commitment to offering products and services with best-in-class privacy, security, and compliance, the information provided in this blog post is not intended to constitute legal advice. We strongly encourage prospective and current customers to perform their own due diligence when assessing compliance with applicable laws.