This week we published a new report looking at how generative AI (genAI) can bring fresh energy to an enterprise content management (ECM) program.

Unlock The Potential of Your Documents With Generative AI is a call to action for content management leaders to explore new ways to engage with and exploit the value of their managed content. 

Vendors in this market have been on an innovation hot streak, as evidenced in our recently published report, The Forrester Wave™: Content Platforms, Q1 2025. All evaluated vendors had genAI capabilities and roadmaps to support genAI’s ongoing evolution.

Bring AI To Your Content Instead Of Bringing Your Content To AI

Enterprises with well-governed content repositories should have an unfair advantage with genAI success compared with businesses with poor content hygiene. Benefits include: 

  • Protection of corporate content from training models. ECM vendors are adopting retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures to shield internal documents and avoid copying or uploading them to external models. 
  • Respect for existing access controls and security policies. ECM systems provide access controls and other security policies to restrict access to roles/groups. Embedded genAI from ECM providers respect these existing permission structures and ensure that users get responses to their AI queries only if they have rights. 
  • Reduced inaccuracy with AI queries and actions grounded in context. Vendors are exposing their genAI interfaces in workspaces, folders, or search results to ground a query or prompt in a subset of the content, providing more specific responses and links to source documents. 

GenAI Can Create Value Across The Content Lifecycle

Where do we even start? Customers are still in early days of adoption of genAI in the context of their content management systems. This report provides specific examples of how genAI can add value across the content lifecycle, including: 

  • Creation and collaboration
  • Review and revision
  • Approvals and publication
  • Querying and consuming
  • Archiving and disposition

Want to talk further about genAI in the context of ECM? Or looking to invest in a modern content platform? Forrester clients are encouraged to set up a guidance session or inquiry to learn more.