Watch Out, The Robots Are Reading Your Emails Now (And That’s A Good Thing)

Published on April 28, 2021 - By Gemma Church

• Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) extracts valuable info out of documents. 
• People are not only happy to use such systems but now ‘expect’ them. 
• IDP is the first step towards widespread process automation across the enterprise. 

Feel like you’re drowning in paperwork? Is your inbox a complete mess? Can’t find that document with that really, really important bit of information in it?  

As automation continues to revolutionise the world of work, a new technology can help you get the information you need, fast. It’s called Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). 

IDP solutions automatically transform the unstructured and semi-structured data in your documents into usable information. They can capture, extract and process information across a range of document formats. 

To achieve this, IDP uses AI tools and technologies, including deep learning, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to classify, categorise, extract and validate the relevant data. 

Digital intelligence company ABBYY recently launched its Vantage 2 platform, which uses IDP to help businesses gain insights from their documents and content. The company also launched ABBYY Marketplace, the first open marketplace where organisations can discover, try, and purchase reusable AI skills to accelerate their automation initiatives, while partners can build and publish skills to automate all types of content-centric processes. 

It’s an interesting and innovative take on IDP and automation within the workplace. But how could platforms like this help the future of work? We spoke with Bill Galusha, senior director, Product Marketing, at ABBYY, to find out more. 

Allwork.Space: How do your intelligent document processing features actually work? 

Bill Galusha: ABBYY Vantage is an intelligent document processing (IDP) platform that is a no code/ low code cloud-first platform. Vantage applies AI to understand an organisation’s documents in a fast and simple way and it integrates directly into existing intelligent automation tools and processes. 

It works in three easy drag-and-drop steps: 

It starts with a pre-trained document model (Vantage Skill) from the ABBYY Marketplace that can read a specific type of document like invoices, contracts, sales orders, or insurance forms, or train and publish your own document skills, making them discoverable to any automation tool, such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation), BPM (Business Process Management), ECM (Enterprise Content Management), systems of engagement, and mobile devices. 

It publishes the skills to the Vantage Catalog to make the skills discoverable to any process automation platform or workflow using one of the pre-built connectors or develop your own integration to other systems using the Vantage REST API. 

It monitors the performance of all deployed skills, allowing the system to continuously learn during runtime and create new versions of the skill learning model. 

Allwork.Space: Is there a demand for these types of services? What are the benefits? 

ABBYY has seen a huge demand for IDP and it’s no-code/low-code platforms as we see a new kind of business user within enterprises today. 

The Centre of Excellence automation teams within an enterprise are looking for a faster way to consume and leverage data contained within documents. Their goals can be achieved through AI-enabled, easily consumable, ready-to-use trained document models that ABBYY refers to as skills. A Vantage skill is capable of being trained to digitise text and classify and extract data from all types of documents and variations regardless of document layout, language, and region it originates from. 

The fast learning curve that comes with the platform makes it easy to apply the technology across many business functions and automation systems and not limit the use to just highly trained developers or those skilled in technologies like machine learning. 

Additionally, users will find many pre-trained skills in the ABBYY Marketplace that can be downloaded and used as an integral technology to other popular RPA tools, BPM systems, and conversational AI chatbots, to understand the most complex documents increasing the value and ROI enterprises can achieve. 

Allwork.Space: How comfortable are customers with an AI system effectively reading their documents? 

The consumerisation of AI has changed customer expectations – not only are they comfortable using IDP platforms to read their documents, but they expect them to be able to extract and classify relevant data at high accuracy rates, and be the catalyst for improving the customer experience, lower risk, and increase productivity. 

Allwork.Space: What other automation technologies do you think will help the world’s workers, going forward? 

Most workers experience broken business processes and wish they could have a say in how to improve them. The latest automation technology advancements that will help improve process workflows are process mining and task mining. 

The software analyses how users interact with processes and how each step is executed and where bottlenecks exist – down to each user and every stroke of the keyboard. Having process intelligence will improve productivity and business outcomes and allow businesses to implement the right process, going forward.