How the rise in the use of AI chatbots is encouraging companies and design agencies to ditch PDF-first reporting processes.
Companies invest a huge amount of time, resources and money producing detailed and trusted annual reports each year, but few people read these reports in full. Most reports are used as a vital reference point for specific content about any topic a user may be researching.
In an AI world, the annual report has become more important than ever. It is approved by the board, audited and contains the deep information which investors and other stakeholders need, and which can’t be found in complete form anywhere else.
With AI searches now dominating most users’ access to company information, annual reports need to be published in a format where the content of the report is AI ready. But unfortunately, in most reports this crucial data is still locked inside PDFs which cannot be accurately searched by AI tools.
Regulators have introduced modern digital formats, based on HTML and enhanced with digital tagging (known as Inline XBRL), to help them supervise companies and to encourage capital market assurance. These new formats make annual reports easily readable by both humans and computers.
Today, most companies in Europe still begin the process of building an annual report by generating a PDF document and then converting it to iXBRL after sign-off. Unfortunately, in doing this, many of the PDF format’s underlying structural flaws and errors are being carried into the digital version.
So, why is annual reporting still so reliant on print-first PDF software and why is it taking so long to digitise the processes?
This article looks at the history, how the move to AI will impact annual report production, and the significant role of design agencies in digitisation over the coming years.
The rest of this article can be read on Medium for free – here