At the start of summer 2025, the general public is talking about generative AI as if it has superpowers, as if Skynet is coming online in seconds (that’s a Terminator reference, for those born later than, well, me). Marketers, however, know genAI can’t take us to the moon—but they might create an excellent picture of it.
GenAI is still far from perfect. It can still give us a bartender with eight fingers or a sunflower floating out of our vase of daisies, but those errors happen less often. And that’s far from all. Its improved capabilities can help you jumpstart digital transformation throughout your enterprise.
Here are three must-have new AI features:
Cataloging with OCR and object recognition
Despite its value, most word-processing software neglects optical character recognition (OCR) technology. OCR lets your DAM scan text in a document or image asset. That adds related information to the DAM catalog and makes the text searchable. OCR will speed search for marketing and other users. It also lets you allow users to update assets rather than designers, freeing creatives up for more challenging tasks.
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Object recognition can aid in asset reuse. A photo used in a campaign for mocha lattes might also have a pumpkin latte in it. You can now find it instead of making or buying another asset. Your processing workflow could start by performing OCR and/or object scans, then auto-tagging the asset(s) to update similar or related searches immediately.
Enhanced metadata generation and management
Updating metadata, especially on older assets, is near and dear to my martech heart. You want to fill out and add rich context to all new metadata fields to the furthest extent possible. You also want to add to older assets for reuse, saving money and time and boosting ROI.
Cascading metadata is one way to automate metadata creation. It does this by creating a workflow process that completes a set of metadata fields in a certain way based on the primary field input. So, if the primary input is that this asset is for X Brand, I might set fields for brand location, brand campaign and brand manager to be filled in immediately after the input for X Brand. When those inputs change, I would only have to change the inputs in my workflow, not in all the DAM assets for that brand — what a time saver!
However, that’s only the start of what’s possible by having AI assist with metadata tasks. Another is predictive keyword tagging. AI can check the web for the newest keywords matching your main tag for an asset and then provide keyword suggestions for SEO. Once the keywords are chosen, you can create an SEO keyword workflow for auto-tagging. You can also add the send-check-approve cycle to the DAM to save time.
Advanced workflows with auto-detected content
Almost every tool I know offers a genAI add-in or API for image generation. You can and should ensure that those and other generated assets are described automatically. They should also be added to the asset description when they match specific criteria. For example, if the asset uploaded to the DAM is a photo of an organization’s executive, an automatic workflow can search employee files, find that executive’s bio and relate it to the image. It can also insert a content block into the photo metadata, such as a caption or short description.
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Your workflow can also include instructions to scan uploaded blogs, press releases, menus and other texts that will be added to websites according to the corporate style guide, glossary and approved vocabulary list. Your DAM can now have a corporate editor as a second, third or even fourteenth, corporate reviewer. This reviewer will help all other reviewers if there is a misspelling or unexplained acronym.
Even more features available or coming soon to your DAM
Among other new capabilities coming to DAM platforms are auto-captions of images, auto-transcriptions of videos, facial recognition, speech-to-text conversion and virtual agents that can answer questions about the DAM for searchers who might not know how to phrase what they are looking for.
I am excited to see what the future holds and hear how your DAM is transforming your organization. But just in case Skynet turns on, I have sent a metal Arnold Schwarzenegger into the future to save us all (just joshing; I don’t even have him in my DAM).
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