Laserfiche AI Agents

Laserifche AI agents allow users to easily to automate time consuming tasks such as organizing and categorizing documents and folders. A user simply needs to tell the agent what they want it to do using natural language, and it will determine the necessary steps to accomplish it and present them to the user for approval.When the user approves the steps, the agent will automatically do it for them. The user saves time they otherwise would have needed to spend performing the task manually, without needing to take up a process designer's time designing a process. For example, the user could use a directed agent to quickly perform bulk actions that are not predicable enough or frequent enough to merit a process at all, without having to do those bulk actions by hand.

Since the agent is acting on behalf of the user, it is constrained by the same security settings as the user; see Security and Auditing Considerations, below, for more information.

ClosedSee a video on Laserfiche AI Agents

Learn how to use Laserfiche AI Agents to automate bulk document actions like organizing files, renaming documents, and moving content using natural language prompts while maintaining user approval and permissions. By reducing manual administrative work and simplifying complex document tasks, AI Agents help teams improve efficiency, consistency, and operational speed without building workflows.

Using Directed Agents

Users provide prompts to directed agents using Smart Chat in the Laserfiche Repository Web Client. Select the Laserfiche AI icon (The Laserfiche AI button.) to open Smart Chat if it is not already open. Smart Chat will display its current mode (ask or agent) in the lower left corner of the chat window; if it is not already in agent mode, click to toggle it to Agent. Select the entries you want to perform actions on.

There are two ways that you can select documents. First, you can select them in the contents pane of the folder browser, search results, or a collection. Second, you can use Smart Chat in ask mode to locate documents that meet specific criteria, and then switch to agent mode in the same chat window to perform actions on those documents. This allows you to either directly specify the documents you want, or to use Laserfiche AI to dynamically locate them. You can also specify that you want only certain documents to be affected in the prompt itself. For example, you might select all the documents in a folder, and then prompt the agent to move only the documents that have been assigned a particular template. Note that the agent can only refer back to prior information in the chat history if the chat history has not been cleared, either manually or automatically. Once the chat history is cleared, the information can no longer be referenced by Laserfiche AI.

Once you have collected your documents, you can type your prompt in Smart Chat, specifying what you would like to do with the selected entries. Agents can perform a number of tasks; see Available Actions, below, for more information. The agent will display the actions it will perform to accomplish your goal, giving you the option to confirm or cancel. If you confirm, it will then take the specified actions. You can specify the prompt using natural language in a conversational style. If the agent doesn't have enough information to process your response, it will prompt you to clarify.

The specific actions that you can instruct an agent to take are limited by your own security settings. See Security and Auditing Considerations, below, for more information.

Example: Joe wants to sort all documents with the word "Expedite" in the name into the folder "Expedited Cases." He selects the folder he wants to organize and uses the prompt "Move all documents in this folder that have "Expedite" in the name to the subfolder "Expedited Cases"." The agent analyzes the documents and provides a list of which documents to move for him to confirm. Upon confirmation, it moves the documents, creating the new subfolder if necessary. This saves Joe time locating and then manually moving the documents to the folder.

Example: Maria has imported a large quantity of PDFs that have nonstandard names. She wants to clean them up by changing dashes and underscores to spaces, and by changing them to title case. She selects the documents she wants to rename, opens Smart Chat in agent mode, and uses the prompt: "Rename the selected documents to meet the following criteria: all underscore (_) and dash (-) characters replaced with spaces, and the names in title case." The agent analyzes the selected documents and gives her a list of new names to review. When she confirms, the agent renames the documents.

Available Actions

AI agents can perform a variety of tasks in your repository. See the links below for instructions and examples for each action directed agents can perform:

These actions can be combined into a single prompt. For example, you could tell the agent to move a set of documents to one folder and create shortcuts to those documents in another folder, in a single prompt. In some cases, Laserfiche AI will process this as two steps: first, you will be prompted to confirm the move action, and then the shortcut creation.

Information Available to Directed Agents

Directed agents have access to the following information about your documents to analyze documents and perform actions:

  • Entry name
  • Template
  • Field values
  • Tags
  • Document relationships
  • Entry type (document, folder, or shortcut)
  • Entry path
  • Page count
  • Creation date
  • Created by
  • Last modified date
  • Last modified by
  • Whether the document is under version control

Security and Auditing Considerations

For security and auditing purposes, direct agents act as extensions of the user that is using them. The agent can only take actions that the user themselves could. For instance, if a user has sufficient rights to move a specific document to a folder, then the agent can do so on their behalf. If the user lacks any of the necessary rights to move the document, however, the agent will not be able to perform the action either. In effect, the agent is performing the act on behalf of the user, and therefore has only the access the user has.

Similarly, when an action is performed by a directed agent, the operation will be audited as performed by the user who prompted the directed agent. Again, as the agent is acting as an extension of the user, the audit logs will reflect that fact.

For more information on Laserfiche AI security and governance, see the Laserfiche Security, Trust, and Compliance page.