iManage will today (29 January) announce major new capabilities within its AI assistant Ask iManage, enabling users to ask natural-language questions across the entire iManage Work platform and receive cited answers from prior work within the document management system.
The update significantly expands the capability of Ask iManage, shifting from providing analysis within user-selected document sets, to analysis of the entire platform.
A further significant update will mean Ask iManage can provide natural language explanation, red line comparisons between documents ‘at the click of a button.’ The updated Ask iManage experience is now generally available to all Ask iManage subscribers at no additional cost, with new subscribers receiving this version by default.
In terms of natural-language questions across the iManage Work platform, Ask iManage will engage in a three-step process – understand and interpret the question; retrieve the content; and generate a cited, natural language answer. The citations link straight to the documents referred to, so that users can verify their content and relevance.
From the answer, users can create side by side comparisons and redline analysis, explaining what has changed and why.
Ask iManage was launched in 2024 and the first customer bought it at the end of that year. Speaking to Legal IT Insider, iManage global account director Paul Bower(pictured above) said: “This is the biggest transformational leap forward for Ask iManage since its inception.”
Diving into the new functionality, in terms of the ability to create redline comparisons, Bower said: “Natively, inside the document management platform, you can now use Ask iManage to serve you up a red line comparison between two documents or two separate versions of a document. And at the click of a button, that will basically deliver up a really nice, cited, natural language answer to say, ‘this is how the documents compare. Here are the red lines, here are the changes.’
He added: “That’s now available within the Ask iManage panel, and the potential of that is vast.”
With regard to the ability to undertake natural language search at scale, Bower observed: “It’s not just a step change in transformation for Work 10 and for Ask iManage. It’s a step change to the Work platform experience itself.”
Ask iManage is a native AI assistant within Work 10 and Bower said: “It’s turnkey, so if a customer is interested and wants to start leveraging it, it can be turned on in a matter of an hour. And once that’s on, they have the full power of Ask iManage that’s natively integrated into the work experience.”
He adds: “It’s transformational because what that’s going to enable law firms, corporate teams, and other customers that are operating on our platform to do is activate their most valuable asset. So that’s the oil in the platform: their data; their corporate memory bank; all of their historical information; all the deals they’ve worked on; all the contracts they’ve executed and drafted; all the history of how they got from where they started to where they ended up; all the operational dates within the firm in terms of practise management that’s been stored; all the documents; all the emails – it’s a veritable goldmine of firm knowledge and firm data.”
The news is being well received by customers, who are looking at different ways to leverage their data oil.
Customers will be reassured albeit not surprised that in terms of permissioning, users will only be given answers based on the access they that they have. Bower says: “From a firm perspective, and then obviously a risk perspective, we can be absolutely clear that if I ask iManage to tell me Neil Araujo’s salary, I’m not going to be able to see that, and therefore, that answer is not going to come back. So, this is very much about AI confidence.”
Although the new Ask iManage capability is built on iManage’s existing search index, it will achieve many of the objectives of semantic search. iManage has been working with customers involved in the Wayfinder programme and will continue to iterate through that group.
In terms of data processing, if a client is a US customer and their document management platform, Work 10, is hosted and running in a US data center, from an AI perspective, iManage is using Microsoft delivered Azure Open AI services inside their tenant.
Bower said: “We’re in a very strong strategic partnership with Microsoft for everything that we’re doing in terms of data storage; using containerization; using the global Fabric security and cyber protection that the Azure cloud provides. We’re using the AI capabilities within the Azure Cloud to then deliver this outcome and obviously, the models are changing all the time. They’re iterating, they’re improving, and we’re being very careful to ensure that we’re using the right models at the right time.”
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