Have we come full circle? Just 30 years ago, office supply cupboards were filled with copy paper, and communication among colleagues relied on phones or internal memo envelopes. Filing cabinets overflowed with folders, typed correspondence and invoices. If you placed a Gen Z or even a millennial in that office environment, they would likely say they couldn't function.

With tools like email, Zoom, Teams, the cloud, laptops and smartphones, the modern office appears "paperless" by nearly every meaningful metric. But as is well known, hence the industry term, “paper-lite,” physical paper never truly disappeared — especially in sectors like legal and government. While we no longer type directly onto paper, laser printers have ensured that we continue to print in massive volumes.

In the United States alone, nearly 3.7 million tons of paper — equivalent to over 700 trillion sheets — are consumed each year. Additionally, a significant amount of information is still transmitted electronically, such as the use of the fax machine by the UK’s NHS.

In the US, totally digital banking remains a distant goal. While Europeans no longer write paper checks, they are still standard practice in the US, as there is currently no direct equivalent for free and instant transfer of funds to third-party accounts, as is common in other regions. Americans are still often required to sign with ink on paper in bars and various businesses, even though signatures are no longer legally necessary for credit card transactions. “Traditions have this odd way of sticking around,” noted Doug Kantor, general counsel of the National Association of Convenience Stores, in a recent Wall Street Journal article discussing the persistence of wet signatures.

Companies that specialize in physical paper archiving and storage continue to thrive. For instance, Iron Mountain reported over $5.5 billion in sales in 2023, with a market capitalization exceeding $33 billion.

Consequently, the discussion about realizing the “paperless office” ideal that Xerox envisioned in the 1970s persists. Currently, we appear to have reached a balance — moving away from typewriters and postal mail while primarily relying on digital technology. Organizations now operate as hybrids, blending traditional paper methods with inherently digital, paperless practices by default.

However, paper is an expensive commodity. Even in the 1970s, the high costs associated with storing large volumes of paper posed a significant challenge, leading to the adoption of alternatives like microfiche and microfilm. Today, with the dramatic decline in digital storage costs — 256 gigabytes, now standard in most laptops, would have cost around $20 billion in the 1950s when adjusted for today's value — it’s difficult to envision any organization opting to store its data primarily in anything other than electronic form, particularly in the cloud.

So much for those remaining filing cabinets, then. Closer to home, despite the billions of packs of copy paper still being purchased, there’s a decline at last here, too: shipments of hard copy peripherals like printers and copiers fell by 15.5% between 2023 and 2024, according to IDC. After literally half a millennium, paper is finally losing its dominance. And I’m going to argue the ongoing shift away from paper is accelerating, because an even more immediate catalyst for change has emerged, which is the remarkable advancements in the functionality and utility of next-generation, AI-powered, digital document management.

What do I mean? Today's digital content services tools are not just replacing paper but, perhaps for the first time, significantly enhancing our work processes and collaboration capabilities.

Specifically, next-generation document management systems have evolved to integrate capabilities for storage, searching and sharing of documents, with automation of document processes, such as automating invoice payments or managing contracts. And most recently, the incorporation of AI — through deep learning for smart document recognition and large language models for intelligent interaction — brings a genuinely new level of what I term “intelligent content automation.”

These innovations are ushering in a new era of business content, providing a contextual understanding of “paper” that approaches a level of self-awareness. By automating critical business processes and making document discovery more intuitive and responsive, these advanced systems are transforming how we interact with information. Software solutions are helping organizations in the public and private sectors manage vast information repositories more effectively.

Most interesting is the opportunity to use conversational AI to interact with a document or a corpus of documents. This document “sentience” has the potential to significantly enhance productivity. Imagine interacting with an entire corporate knowledge base through conversational queries — interrogating and dialoguing with documents in natural language, asking complex business, legal, engineering, financial or medical questions in everyday terms, and generating new applications in seconds using verbal instructions. Interactions can include “Does this contract conflict with any existing contracts?” / “Who is the current policyholder of this insurance” / “Is there a purchase order to match this invoice?”

The long reign of paper and its counterpart, paper-lite, is finally coming to an end, giving way to profound yet invisible AI document enhancements. This is why we haven't come full circle; documents are back — only now, they are intelligent, connected and reside in the cloud.