How to integrate AI in Alfresco and ADF?

[leelaprasad_guvvala]

Hi,

Can we integrate AI in Alfresco and ADF?
If yes, Is there any trial version available to test?

Thanks,

Leela Prasad Guvvala

[angelborroy]

Yes, you can integrate AI with Alfresco and ADF/ACA/ADW, but there are two different paths.

For Enterprise, the supported product route is Alfresco Intelligence Services / Content Intelligence. Alfresco Intelligence Services adds AI capabilities to ACS and Digital Workspace using AWS AI services such as Textract, Comprehend, Rekognition and Transcribe. Hyland also has the Alfresco Connector for Content Intelligence, including Knowledge Discovery in Digital Workspace.

For Community or custom implementations, the usual architecture is:

1. Use Alfresco as the source of truth.
2. Extract content and metadata through the Alfresco REST API.
3. Generate embeddings with an AI service or local model.
4. Store vectors in Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or another vector store.
5. Expose a backend REST API for semantic search / RAG.
6. Add an ADF/ACA/ADW extension for the user interface.

ADF/ADW supports extensions, so you can add custom actions, panels or routes without rebuilding everything from scratch.

I have a few public PoCs that may help:

• aborroy/alfresco-ai-framework: sample Spring AI integration with Alfresco, including RAG, sync service and UI
• aborroy/alfresco-genai: private/local GenAI examples for Alfresco, including summarization, tagging and document Q&A
• aborroy/alfresco-content-lake: newer PoC for semantic search and RAG over Alfresco content, with permission-aware retrieval
• aborroy/alfresco-content-lake-ui: ACA/ADW extension adding semantic search and RAG UI panels

For a trial, if you want the supported Hyland route, I would suggest contacting Hyland Sales or Support about Alfresco Intelligence Services / Content Intelligence availability. If you want to test the technical approach locally, the GitHub PoCs above can be used as starting points, but they are community examples, not supported product distributions.

https://docs.alfresco.com/intelligence-services/latest/
https://docs.alfresco.com/digital-workspace/latest/develop/extensions/
https://github.com/aborroy/alfresco-ai-framework

[Salmen11]

Hi Leela,

Yes, AI can be integrated with both Alfresco and ADF (Alfresco Development Framework), but the exact approach depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

In most real-world setups, AI isn’t “plugged into Alfresco directly” as a single feature—instead it’s integrated through APIs, middleware, or event-driven services. For example, you can connect document workflows to AI services for:

document classification and tagging
metadata extraction
content summarization
search enhancement (semantic / vector search)
workflow automation (approvals, routing, etc.)

With ADF, you typically build a custom frontend layer that calls backend services, so it’s quite flexible for embedding AI-powered endpoints.

For testing, there usually isn’t a dedicated “AI for Alfresco” trial, but you can prototype the integration using:

Alfresco Community Edition (for document management)
a sandbox AI API (like OpenAI or similar)
a middleware layer (Node.js / Python service)

If you want a faster way to experiment with AI-driven automation workflows without building everything from scratch, there are also platforms like AtomicBot that let you prototype agent-based workflows and integrations more quickly before moving into full custom development.