Are labels still useful in an AI world?

[Grace Harman]

My organization has implemented the use of labels to follow best practices in categorizing information and making types of content more findable. However, with Rovo Chat now available and other AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude that can be connected to Confluence, we no longer need to rely on keywords and manual searches. We have started using AI to search for us and found it to be significantly more successful in finding what we need.

Due to the increased use of AI, I'm wondering if it's worth the time and effort required to continue adding and maintaining labels across all Confluence pages. This is starting to seem like an unnecessary step, as it no longer serves the purpose for which it was originally implemented.

Have any of you found other uses for it or ways where it's still providing value? Would you recommend sticking with it or allowing to to be used optionally rather than required?

[Kris Klima _K15t_ · Accepted solution]

Hello @Grace Harman and welcome to the Community.

It depends on your use case and workflows.

• automation
• search
• content management and life cycle management
• API integrations
• Marketplace apps
• content manager's very own sanity

For example, in my previous company, we used labels to tell the AI agent which pages, and which content from specific pages, to use or ignore in its answers within the actual product. 

Marketplace apps use labels for all sorts of creative uses - our Scroll Documents use labels for conditional content - designates which pages, paragraphs, words appear in which variant of the documentation so you can use one space to create two doc sets, one for, say, Windows variant of your product, the other for the Mac variant.

Space Sync for Confluence uses labels to distinguis which pages should be synchronized to another space.

[Nikola Perisic]

Hello @Grace Harman 

For which purposes are you using labels in Confluence? Rovo also has the Search feature that would find the pages or spaces that you specifically need. Then again, your use case of using labels is more important here. My thought on this is, personally I don't use labels, rather the search funcionality.

[Grace Harman]

We've used labels to help categorize and connect pages across Confluence so information is easier to find, filter, and manage. But we're finding we don't need labels anymore for that as AI finds it all easily without labels. So I'm wondering if there's another use case that makes it worth continuing with the labels or if we should remove their use from our Confluence guidelines.