Workflow Automation Software

Millennia Group Blog

Endnote, what’s that?

Created by Millennia Group with Adobe Acrobat Comment Tools

The internet is amazing and it seems will shortly be even more amazing when Bing and Google fully deploy their AI powered search engines.  Finding information quickly is already simple and fast, especially if you have a pretty good idea of what it is you are looking for.  When AI enters the picture, the picture literally could be significantly better.

Simple and fast search is great.  But the degree of trust in the search result is based on the effort you make to get comfortable with the answer.  A few clicks to alternative information maybe or just some level of trust in the source website.  As the level of sophistication and depth of the questions being asked of AI increase, so too will the degree of trust needed in the result.  And hence the need for endnotes.

Ok, so now its time to define endnotes.  Endnotes are exactly that, notes at the end of an article or publication that provide support for the content throughout the publication.  You can see this illustrated when you are reading something and there are little numbered superscripts at the end or part of a sentence or paragraph.  That number is indicating that you need to read the corresponding endnote to ascertain the source of the information. 

Think of endnotes as the cousin of footnotes.  Footnotes typically appear at the bottom of the page and provide additional information or the source of the information in the content on the page.  The only real difference is one appears on the page you are reading and one appears at the end of the entire publication.  Still the purpose is the same – to provide support for and sources of the content you are reading.

Now doesn’t that sound like the perfect compliment to AI.  When we start to rely on AI for answers to complicated or significant questions, not “where can I find the cheapest flights?”, then having convenient access to the support seems like a good idea.  If the question is “which of my vendor contracts have an auto-renew clause?” – it would be amazing to have a link to all of those vendor contracts so the information could be confirmed before the next steps are taken. 

When AI becomes part of corporate information management systems, the best answers will come from information that has been accurately identified and validated previously by humans.  That means data and documents that have been routed through a review and approve type workflow, documents that tie to the source business data and a continual process of data validation.  AI knows that 2 + 2 is not 5, but it may not know exactly which contract is the fully executed version from which it is pulling answers.  In that case, having the “endnotes” available would prevent some costly mistakes.

Millennia Group provides workflow and critical document archive solutions that provide trusted sources of information.  www.mgdocs.com, info@mgdocs.com, (630) 279-0577.