AI-powered search: The future of digital asset management

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we all do business. And while many, regardless of profession, may be worried about how AI will impact their future, we’re not. AI is changing the way organizations manage their overflowing content libraries. This isn’t with generative AI, like ChatGPT, but with intuitive, AI-powered solutions that eliminate manual tasks and can change the way your organization manages content forever.

But don’t worry if you haven’t jumped on the AI train just yet. In fact, only 29% of professionals surveyed for Canto’s State of Digital Content 2024 said they use an AI-powered solution to organize, search, or distribute their content. It’s time to get ahead of the curve and not only solve your content chaos but do it with an AI-powered solution that will revolutionize your team’s efficiency, boost your content ROI, and help expand your business’ reach.

 

What are the challenges of managing your digital assets without marketing tools powered by AI?

Every organization must manage its digital assets, from a local non-profit to the largest enterprise company with offices all over the world. In our digital age, your digital assets (your brand’s photos, videos, sales presentations, and more!) define your brand and how prospects and customers perceive you. But, as mentioned in the State of Digital Content 2024 report, only 33% of respondents were very satisfied with how their content is managed and distributed at their organization.

Since your organization has likely tried every file storage solution available, from cloud storage (like Google Drive or Dropbox) platforms to on-premises servers, you know they all have severe limitations in managing content effectively. These limitations overcomplicate the management and distribution of assets, amplifying your challenges. These primary challenges include:

• Lack of organization: Your digital assets are disorganized, perhaps spread across different computers, file managers, or other locations. Many organizations lack a single source of truth to organize their files, with no folder and metadata automation or AI-powered search capabilities.
• Increased volume: The number of digital assets you have continues to grow, thanks to generative AI. That includes new videos, images, PDFs, vector files, and more created by your teams with or without the help of generative AI. As you produce more content, you can quickly become lost in the sea of content without workflows that can keep up with your pace of production.
• Inefficient collaboration: Your organization needs efficient ways for employees to collaborate, whether working from home, from the office, or across the globe. Without a central location for all your assets where your team can collaborate, assets might get lost in the email shuffle, or old and off-brand versions may be used.
• Scalability challenges: As your digital assets and team grow, you’ll need a more robust system to help you scale your AI content creation and distribution. That means more storage capacity, better ways to manage assets (such as categorization and metadata), advanced searchability, enhanced collaboration, and a variety of ways to distribute content across your digital channels.
• Limited insights: You consistently distribute your content across your channels to your internal teams and external partners. But even though your assets are available, you have no idea who is using them, how often they’re using them, or if they’re using them at all.
• Off-brand content: Between branding updates, different offices, and content saved in many different places, teams across your organization may have access to off-brand content that they keep using, even if on-brand content is available.

AI-powered digital asset management: How artificial intelligence can help

It’s absolutely everywhere: artificial intelligence (AI). There’s no denying that AI is here to stay, but how can AI marketing technology help us manage our content better? Digital asset management (DAM) solutions are the best way to organize, find, and share your content. And now, DAMs use AI to better manage your content by improving discoverability, streamlining organization, automating workflows, and more.

A DAM with AI-assisted search makes your business better

Traditional digital asset management platforms make organization effortless, with one caveat: it’s still a manual process. For example, your digital assets must be manually tagged with metadata to make them discoverable. So, while a traditional DAM platform changes how your teams work, an AI-powered DAM like Canto revolutionizes your team’s efficiency by eliminating mundane and manual tasks. That way, they can focus on high-value work, not metadata management and organizing folders.

What are the business benefits of implementing a DAM powered by AI?

A DAM improves your business by bringing a solid foundation to any marketing stack. A DAM ensures that your teams are all on the same page regarding branding, content, and workflows. And with AI enhancements, a DAM can transform more than just your content and creative teams—it can improve your business.

With AI, a DAM transforms into a tool to bring order to your organization. You can go from being behind the eight ball and constantly working to catch up to having a clear path to digital asset organization with DAM and AI.

This path is about improving scalability, cost savings, return on investment, and efficiency.

Scale using AI-powered search

Having a DAM in place allows you to scale. Scaling is absolutely crucial as your content needs to grow to meet evolving market demands. With AI enhancing your DAM, you can scale your content discoverability, management, and operations. Thanks to AI-powered search enhancements, DAM workflows, automatic organization, AI face recognition, and more, everything you need to create, curate, or reuse content is at your fingertips.

AI-powered automation for greater cost savings

A DAM ensures that your team can access the content they need immediately and isn’t duplicating any work that might have already been done. A DAM with AI enhancements can easily automate repetitive tasks, such as finding duplicate assets and organizing and formatting images. Plus, AI-powered search is faster and more accurate than traditional search, bringing you the most relevant content faster. And that means more cost savings as content gets found with less effort.

Maximize content ROI with a DAM powered by AI

Having a DAM with AI enhancements can bring new value to old content, ensuring you’re getting the most out of the content you already have. Older assets that may have gotten lost in the shuffle, haven’t been appropriately tagged, or have strange naming conventions (we all have that one file named “deck_final1_finalFINAL022021” in our content libraries!) can now be found and reused easily. When you reuse your content, it gains more value as it gets reused in new ways across new channels.

Improve efficiency with AI-assisted search

A DAM improves efficiency, ensuring no one spends hours in the content library. Now, all your teams, from creatives to sales, can move faster and do more. AI can automate workflow tasks and improve asset discoverability to help your team spend time on higher-value work that can help your brand and organization thrive.

Changing the game: Why AI-powered search engines and other tools will change the way you manage assets

From unfindable content to compliance, your current content library leaves much to be desired. The way we need to manage our digital assets is changing radically, and an AI-powered DAM has the many revolutionary features you need now and hope to see soon.

Metadata tagging and organization powered by AI

Most businesses seek a way to organize their assets better when looking for a DAM. While a DAM provides ways to organize, an AI-powered DAM streamlines and automates the organizational process by analyzing your assets, automatically generating tags and metadata, tagging individuals using facial recognition, and categorizing similar assets.

Pro tip: Canto offers Smart Tags, Smart Albums, and facial recognition features to help you automatically organize and tag your digital assets as they are uploaded into your content library.

Search with an AI-powered boost

Metadata has helped make searching your content library easier, but what if AI could help you find content whether it has metadata or not? With AI-powered search capabilities, you don’t have to worry about whether the metadata was filled out when the asset was added to your library. There are tools available that improve how organizations search, thanks to conversational search (like what Google or IBM uses in some of their models) that uses natural language processing (NLP). NLP allows the use of natural language to search instead of trying to focus on keywords, helping you find the best results the first time.

Pro-tip: Canto AI Visual Search is the most robust AI-powered search available in the DAM market. Media asset discovery will never be the same. Find exactly what you need the first time!

AI-powered workflows and automations

Ensuring that your teams collaborate well, no matter where they are, means having effective workflows. Now, thanks to the latest cutting-edge technology, AI helps bring new levels of automation to DAM. An AI-powered DAM with customizable workflows that make those repetitive tasks, such as file organization, formatting, and distribution, a thing of the past. These will allow you to keep projects moving from team to team without oversight, increasing focus and productivity so you can go to market faster than ever.

Predictive analytics built into your AI-powered DAM

Marketing and creative teams are always looking for a piece of content that can outperform everything else and bring in more prospective and future customers. They always want the best piece of content that will help the company grow, please customers, and help draw in prospective customers. AI models are designed to look at the behavior of audiences, from customers to prospects, and the analytics a DAM can provide goes much more in-depth than just what your internal users are downloading.

AI-powered DAM analytics provide insights like performance, usage, and engagement. This allows you to use that data to create more content that will delight and engage your audience, and with the other AI-powered tools mentioned, you can find and repurpose similar content for maximum impact. All this data will further fuel your future content strategies, too.

Quality control for best-in-class AI-powered digital asset management

What if you never had to fear your teams accessing low-quality video from your content library and posting it to your organization’s social media platforms? Or what if you could stop wondering if the digital rights for the assets you purchased were appropriately managed? Maybe you dream of a world where you don’t lay awake at night wondering if that banner was approved and on-brand.

An AI-powered DAM can help with these quality control issues and alleviate some of your work-related nightmares. Not only will you be able to find and remove duplicate assets, but these AI models can alert you to assets that may be out of brand compliance and raise the red flag for assets with copyright issues. Audits for on-brand content just got a whole lot easier, and your creative team can spend more time creating valuable content instead of playing brand police.

Canto: The AI-powered industry leader in digital asset management

AI is radically changing how organizations can manage their digital content. The AI revolution is here. While any digital asset management platform could be helpful to your organization, if you’re not looking at an AI-powered DAM, you’re missing out on the greatest tools for managing your digital assets.

Canto is a leader in digital asset management (DAM) software, empowering over 3,000 customers worldwide with an intuitive platform to centralize, organize, control, and share their digital assets. By harnessing the power of AI, Canto provides brands with powerful solutions to enhance collaboration, streamline workflows, and extract more value from their digital content.

Key benefits of Canto include:

• An easy-to-use platform to manage your content library
• AI-powered tools to instantly find your photos & videos
• Advanced content controls to manage your brand identity
• Collaboration features to improve productivity
• 40+ built-in integrations
• Best-in-class implementation and support
• State-of-the-art security and encryption

Interested in learning more about how Canto’s AI-powered DAM can help you radically change the way you manage your assets? Click here to sign up for a demo.