Using AI to find patterns in documents

This post will help you use AI to find patterns in documents. You will learn how to prepare your documents, ask the AI to analyse them, and check the results. This approach helps you get useful information from large collections of text.

Why finding patterns in documents matters

When you have many documents, it can be hard to see what they all say. Reading every document carefully takes a lot of time. AI can help by quickly going through many documents to find patterns in documents. This means you can understand the main ideas, common issues, or important details without reading every single word yourself. For example, if you have hundreds of customer feedback forms, an AI can help you find out what customers like most or what problems they often mention. This can help you make better decisions more quickly.

What to prepare before you start

Before you ask an AI to find patterns in documents, you need to get your documents ready. First, gather all the documents you want to analyse. These could be reports, emails, customer feedback, or policy documents. Make sure they are in a format the AI can read, like text files, Word documents, or PDFs. If your documents are scanned images, you might need to convert them into text using an optical character recognition (OCR) tool first. It is important to have all the relevant documents together, so the AI has a complete record to work with.

Setting up your AI tool

Most AI tools that can analyse documents allow you to upload your files directly. Some tools let you paste text into a chat window. If you have many documents, uploading them is usually the best option. Before you start, it's a good idea to set up your AI with clear instructions. This helps the AI understand what you want it to do and how you want it to present the information. For example, you can tell it to always provide a quote from the original document for every finding. You can learn more about setting clear rules for your AI in our post: Set your AI's rules once: custom instructions to make AI accessible.

Asking the AI to find patterns

Once your documents are ready and your AI is set up, you can start asking it questions. Be clear and specific about what you want to find. For example, you could ask the AI to identify the most common themes in customer feedback forms, and to provide a quote from a document for each theme. Or you might ask it to summarise the main points from a collection of meeting minutes. The more precise your question, the more helpful the AI's answer will be. Remember to ask the AI to always show you where it found the information in the original documents.

Checking the AI's findings

It is very important to check everything the AI tells you. AI tools can sometimes make mistakes or misunderstand your request. Always look at the quotes the AI provides and compare them to the original documents. This helps you confirm that the AI has accurately identified the patterns and that its summaries are correct. If something does not look right, you can ask the AI to explain its reasoning or to re-examine certain documents. Never rely on an AI's output without checking it yourself.

Common problems and how to fix them

Sometimes, the AI might give you answers that are not quite what you expected. This could be because your question was not clear enough, or because the documents contain conflicting information. If the AI's answer is too general, try asking a more specific question. If it misses something important, point it out and ask it to look again. For example, if you asked for common themes and it only gave you some, you could ask it to find more. You can also refine your custom instructions if you find the AI consistently misses certain types of information. Our post Ask for a brief, not a chat has more tips on asking clear questions.

Keeping control of the process

Using AI to find patterns in documents is a tool to help you, not to replace your own judgment. You are always in control of what the AI does and how you use its findings. Think of the AI as a very fast assistant that can read and highlight information. You still need to decide what questions to ask, what information is important, and what conclusions to draw. By staying in control, you ensure that the AI serves your needs and helps you achieve your goals effectively.

Next steps for your document analysis

After you have used AI to find patterns in your documents and checked the results, you can use this information to make decisions, write reports, or plan your next actions. The insights you gain can help you understand complex information more clearly and efficiently. You might want to explore how these patterns connect with other data you have, or use them to inform further research. The goal is to use the AI's help to get a deeper understanding of your documents.

If your organisation needs a tool like this shaped around the people who use it, read about custom accessibility work: accessible AI tools and software, built for the people who use them.

aXai is a disability-led AI, software and accessibility company, delivering through AI-supported work: skilled people with disability in real, properly paid roles, with AI removing the barriers. Read how AI-supported work works.