If your business cannot strike a chord with customers, they will soon move away from competitors. 

To strike a chord with customers, getting the right content across to the right people matters more than ever now. But in today’s digital age, enterprises grapple with content overload. They struggle to curate or identify the right content for the target audience. 

Enter digital asset management (DAM). Enterprises use DAM platforms to manage and streamline digital asset creation, storage and retrieval. DAM optimises storage and makes categorisation, manipulation, approval, search, and delivery easy. 

Digital Asset Management is not a new concept though. From its origins as a basic media library, DAM has evolved, over the years, into a dynamic media platform. The scope of DAM systems has also expanded over the years. The latest DAMs have advanced from managing standard documents to supporting GIFs, vectors, and other file types.

But conventional DAM cannot keep pace with today’s requirements. Today’s digital age requires more dynamic DAMs, capable of meeting high volume, high velocity and flexible demands.

Leading DAM platform providers have found Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a solution to overcome the challenges. The latest AI-powered DAM systems: 

• Connect to internal and external platforms to create a consolidated ecosystem. Users get a seamless, consistent experience cutting across channels. 
• Provides a single source of truth 
• Caters to the need for centralising data assets, an essential prerequisite for effective Big Data analytics. 

Many enterprises have DAM upgradation as a key focus of their digital transformation initiatives. 

Here is how AI-powered DAMs help enterprises manage their digital assets better and fulfill customer needs without a hitch.

1. Automating tagging and metadata management

AI-powered DAM improves metadata management and enables the dynamic organisation of digital assets. Accuracy improves, and things get done in a jiffy. 

The efficiency of any DAM depends on the descriptive tags or metadata added to the content. The content filing, search, and filtering all require metadata. The search efficacy depends on the accuracy of these tags. 

Manual tagging of content is slow and error-prone. Worse, it is subjective, and the tags depend on the perception of whoever does the tagging. Such inefficiencies negate much of the benefits of the DAM system.

Artificial Intelligence offers powerful, automated tagging and metadata management capabilities. Custom-trained ML models apply tags based on context and other desired identifiers. The enriched metadata allows users to search and retrieve the media asset easily. 

AI-powered algorithms apply a mix of recognition capabilities as identifiers. The algorithms:

• Scan and identify image categories to locate specific objects in the image. Each recognition triggers specific tagging or metadata addition. 
• Use natural language processing (NLP) to decipher speech patterns and classify content.

Automation spares marketers from repetitive and time-consuming chores and speeds up the process. McKinsey estimates AI to cut the time employees spend on menial tasks by 40%. Thousands of digital assets get tagged in a few hours. Manual tagging for the same volume would take weeks on end. Human users only need to cross-check the algorithm and can spend the time saved on higher-value things. 

2. Improved search and discovery

Digital asset management platforms with AI capabilities allow faster and more efficient searches. AI’s self-learning capabilities analyse user behaviour and preferences. Every subsequent interaction becomes more relevant and personalised than the previous one.

One big impact of AI is enabling voice search. AI-powered DAM platforms scan audio files using natural language processing (NLP). The algorithm co-opts deep learning neural networks to recognise words and sounds within the audio file. 

AI’s advanced search capabilities identify patterns that enable:

• Detailed customer insights that power predictive analytics.
• Intelligent AI-powered content recommendations. 

State-of-the-art AI-powered DAMs such as OpenText take search functionality to the next level. Consider a scenario where the user’s search does not find anything relevant within the DAM-connected repositories. The search extends to a connected Shutterstock or another relevant website. 

3. Optimised asset use

AI algorithms monitor the performance of the digital assets connected to the DAM platform, and offers data-backed recommendations such as: 

• Assets to combine for best results.
• Best performing content.

The AI-powered system even provides edits based on historical data, audience reactions, and trends.

4. Streamlined Workflows

AI streamlines creative workflows and facilitates easy collaboration. The digital assets move efficiently through an integrated pipeline, from creation to distribution. Automation of repetitive and rule-based tasks improves process efficiency and speeds up things.

The last-mile delivery of personalised and optimised assets to end users has been a historic pain point for DAM. Integrating AI capabilities removes the pain point. 

AI equips DAM platforms with visual storytelling capabilities and personalised user experience. AI algorithms scour through data to identify user preferences and general trends. It becomes easier to personalise the delivery of digital assets such as videos and images. Brands can deliver such content on a sustained and consistent basis and optimise the experience for their customers. 

5. Better control of digital assets 

Digital asset management platforms centralise storage and allows for easy search, share, and organisation of digital assets. Artificial Intelligence makes DAMs faster and enables real-time data processing. 

Computer vision capabilities:

AI-based DAM applications use object, image, and face recognition to detect different objects on images. The algorithm 

• Analyses the content and monitors patterns to recognise embedded artefacts and human characteristics. 
• Predict the age, gender, and location of human subjects. For instance, it searches millions of databases to identify the speaker in a video.

Combining such capabilities enables organising and managing content more efficiently. For instance, the algorithm filters reject content outside the curation guidelines.Enterprises may use such technology to blur personal information, such as car licence plates, or deny explicit content.

Image manipulation: 

Modern DAMs make content manipulation easy. The DAM’s inline image editor applies AI algorithms to crop, trim, or resize images or change image design and dimension according to context. It can also:

• Compress the image to optimal proportions without quality loss. The algorithm detects the image’s compression level and visual complexity and automates changes.
• Adapt the image to the size and screen resolution of the user’s device and browser. 
• Remove the background to clean product images. 

Video transformation: 

Artificial Intelligence also transforms videos dynamically. AI algorithms:

• Transcode and optimise uploaded videos for web browsers and mobile devices. 
• Automates routine tasks, such as resizing and cropping videos to fit websites and embedding videos with HTML5 video tags in web pages.
• Stream videos during encoding. 
• Deliver videos through a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

File identifier: 

AI-integrated DAM identifies the content type on upload to:

• Apply preset rules to moderate the content.
• Convert file formats according to the context, such as converting PDF files to images for thumbnail display. 

These control functionalities offer a significant productivity boost for employees curating content. Customers get enhanced insights, which is impossible through conventional tools. The ability to draw on high-quality content fast enables enterprises to communicate concepts better and impress new clients. 

Leading DAM providers such as OpenText have co-opted AI to help businesses manage digital assets better. OpenText Rich Media Asset solutions help enterprises manage the ever-increasing content formats and types effortlessly. Enterprises using OpenText’s DAM platform can set clear and realistic goals for their AI initiatives and succeed in their digital transformation initiatives.

Artificial Intelligence enables digital asset management platforms to overcome technical limitations and curate their data and content needs much better than before. Enterprises can maintain brand consistency, increase customer loyalty, and enhance employee experiences.