Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Aarthi Elizabeth, Senior evangelist & Strategy, Zoho
In the past decade, data creation has skyrocketed by a multiplier of 100, with 80% of a company’s data consisting of unstructured content, according to IDC. This data is spread across a wide variety of file formats, including PDFs, chat transcripts, videos, audio files, contracts, and social media. Although this data contains a wealth of valuable information, extracting actionable insights and understanding the context has long been a challenge.
As AI adoption continues to rise across business operations, the need to turn unstructured data into a usable format has become important. According to Grand View Research, the global document management system market size was estimated at USD 7.68 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach USD 18.17 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 15.9% from 2025 to 2030. This is driven by the increasing need for organizations to manage and store vast amounts of digital information securely.
We have seen that most file storage apps, used to store and manage company data, are transforming into a comprehensive and extensive intelligence content platform that brings together multiple apps across departments. This allows for extracting actionable business context, enabling employees to work both asynchronously as well as synchronously across geographies across teams to collaborate on content with greater clarity and efficiency.
2026 will see enhanced capabilities and deeper functionality of content management solutions across several key technology pillars:
Smart search and Content Intelligence: Unified AI-powered smart search helps retrieve data across any connected system. Widespread use of vision AI models will ‘truly see’ this content and immediately understand context – including OCR, multi-language text, images, videos, and graphs, and convert them into structured insights.. By applying vision models to business data and letting an LLM interpret the results, organizations can fundamentally transform how they search and access content.
Industry-specific AI vision models: Looking ahead, future enhancements to file management platforms will allow to recognize structured data within unstructured content and activate specialized AI models based on business context, trained for that particular industry. For instance, in terms of healthcare, a specialised vision model that understands scan images, will be able to generate summaries with references and find the anomalies when asked for. Similarly, customer support team storing call logs and queries will be able to detect patterns, such as identifying spikes in calls about specific issues using intelligent tools.
AI agents for employee productivity: AI agents will autonomously analyse unstructured content, automate repetitive tasks, and surface key insights employees can directly act on. For instance, when a legal contract arrives from a client, the agent can recognize the document type, summarise the case, highlight critical clauses, and present the key points to the team-enabling faster and more informed decision-making.
Data & Security Compliance: From real-time data loss prevention to granular folder level access control, organizations will be able to create customized team folders for sensitive files with controlled admin access. This also allows alerts to be displayed or specific actions-such as external sharing, downloading, copying, or printing-to be blocked, preventing accidental data breaches.
Unstructured data will take center stage next year, and specialized vision AI models combined with LLMs will be crucial to unlocking its full value. As long as companies maintain an updated technology stack, they will be poised to take full advantage of data-driven insights and endure for many years to come.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aarthi Elizabeth is Senior Evangelist & Strategy at Zoho. She and her team are responsible for strategic initiatives that empower businesses with the right tools to work together, better! She has been with Zoho for over 10 years, leading marketing and business development for the company’s productivity and collaboration products. Aarthi’s professional experience also includes key roles in manufacturing and finance. Outside work, she enjoys travelling, deserted shopping malls, and a good cup of coffee.
