Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are often working on a shoestring budget. The last thing they need is poorly managed workflows.
Without a unified platform, organisations spend more time searching for documents, contracts, invoices and policies, than completing tasks.
Lazhar Sehetal, Senior Director and Regional VP of Southern EMEA at intelligent content management platform Box, has witnessed first-hand how organisations are investing in AI before asking whether their content is trustworthy, current and governed.
“AI does not create value in a vacuum,” he says. “When that foundation of data is missing and content is scattered across shared drives, legacy systems and disconnected applications, AI has nothing reliable to work with.”
With AI adoption accelerating fast, businesses should be building a secure and governed content foundation for the technology to be used effectively.
Sifted sat down with Lazhar Sehetal to unpack how having streamlined data is helping businesses to turn fragmented information into organised workflows.
The need for consolidated data
One of the biggest issues organisations have is they spend too much time looking for information that should be easy to find, says Lazhar Sehetal.
According to a 2025 survey by Lucid, 47% of global organisations lack a standardised way to share documents across their tech stack. As a result, employees spend an average of five hours per week searching for information related to their projects.
For SMBs especially, the winning approach is not a highly complex stack, but a centralised content platform with simplicity, capability and enough flexibility to support multiple teams.
When content is spread across shared drives, collaboration tools and systems, teams end up working from different versions of the truth.
“A contract may be drafted in one system, reviewed in another, signed elsewhere and then stored somewhere disconnected from the rest of the business,” Lazhar Sehetal says. “The same pattern shows up in onboarding, procurement, invoicing and customer operations.”
In a fragmented data environment, AI also cannot distinguish between content that should be widely accessible and content that carries strict access controls, Lazhar Sehetal adds.
“The organisation ends up with a sophisticated AI tool sitting on top of a fragile information environment,” he says.
Lazhar Sehetal hopes to see a shift in the market from organisations focusing on what specific tasks AI can support to how the technology can help them scale faster.
“For SMBs especially, the winning approach is not a highly complex stack,” he says, “but a centralised content platform with simplicity, capability and enough flexibility to support multiple teams.”
From chaos to clarity: streamlining document-heavy workflows
In many organisations, contracts typically move through drafting, review, approvals, signature and storage.
An intelligent content platform gives teams one source for the full contract lifecycle, says Lazhar Sehetal. Instead of searching across folders and inboxes, teams can work from a central system with permissions and auditability built in.
“The real advantage comes when AI automation is added on top,” he adds. “Teams can search clauses across multiple documents, route approvals more efficiently and track key dates with greater confidence.”
AI implementation has led to a 39% reduction in contract lifecycle time, a report by the World Commerce and Contracting Association shows. Organisations leveraging AI in contract management have also achieved 31% cost savings.
Centralising content was crucial for our agility. What once took weeks now takes three clicks.
By linking records and documents directly through a content management platform such as Box, consultancy firm Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) has brought together a single source of truth, says Bertrand Kummel, Chief Technology Officer at the company.
“No one wastes time digging through emails or scattered folders anymore and the whole team is instantly looking at the exact same document," he says.
Centralising content has given PAC greater confidence to move forward with AI. The company can maintain oversight and quickly spot — and avoid — discrepancies in its data
“When your content is fragmented across a dozen different countries, a minor error can easily escalate,” he says. “In the past, recovering a corrupted file or auditing a mistake meant calling local teams, navigating language barriers and halting productivity.
“Centralising content was crucial for our agility. I can’t imagine going back to a world where data isn’t easy to maintain wherever you are. What once took weeks now takes three clicks.
“When your tools talk to each other, information flows naturally and nothing gets lost in translation. When they don’t, you don't notice it until you realise half your team's energy is going into coordination overhead rather than the work itself.”
Those that skip this step will find themselves rebuilding from scratch when the risks become impossible to ignore.
The majority of repetitive and document-heavy workflows, such as employee onboarding, invoicing and other HR tasks, can be streamlined with organised content layers.
Building the foundation for AI: solving inaccurate outputs, context gaps, and broken permissions
Fragmented content doesn’t just create inefficiencies. It creates blind spots when using AI, says Lazhar Sehetal.
“Permissions become inconsistent, retention policies are harder to enforce, audit trails become incomplete and sensitive data can end up in the wrong places,” he says.
Lazhar Sehetal has witnessed chief information officers and IT leaders across France change their mindset around AI, compliance and governance.
“They are approaching it with the rigour it deserves. They want confidence around GDPR and auditability: the ability to explain, after the fact, why an AI system produced a particular output or took a particular action.”
To transition from isolated AI pilots to enterprise-scale deployment, IT leaders must shift their mindset:
- Govern your content: Treat AI, compliance and governance with rigor to ensure security and productivity work hand-in-hand across your documents.
- Ensure auditability: Build systems that guarantee compliance, such as GDPR, and provide the ability to explain exactly why an AI system produced a specific output or took a certain action.
- Prioritise simplicity: Bertrand Kummel advises that fewer systems are almost always the better option. Consolidate your tools unless a specific industry or regulatory environment says otherwise.
- Solidify the foundation: Fix your content architecture before scaling up to prevent team burnout.
The organisations that invest in governance are the ones that will be able to move from isolated pilots to deployment with speed and confidence, Lazhar Sehetal adds. “Those that skip this step will find themselves rebuilding from scratch when the risks become impossible to ignore.”
Click here to learn more about how your business can adopt AI with Box.
