A Summer to Remember

This summer signaled for me the start of a new career at ABBYY. We have also seen a heatwave hit the UK and witnessed the England football team playing with a freedom and intelligence never seen before.

Thinking about these early few months in the new role, you could link those 2 traits with some of the organizations I’ve encountered at the various events I’ve attended. One observation is that it's clear that digital transformation is changing the way businesses interact internally, with their customers and with potential suppliers. For example, it was interesting to hear how one of the big UK banks was interacting with the main technology organizations and challenging them to work on new ideas and co-fund such initiatives.  The knock on effect of this is telling and they readily admitted it was seeing changes in how they look to source suppliers in the future with the traditional request for proposal (RFP) process becoming a thing of the past for certain sectors maybe.  Partnership and true Customer Success clearly need to be at the forefront of any business relationship and that will only continue to increase as technological adoption drives more efficiencies around customer interaction and measured success on both sides of any enterprise relationship.

ABBYY have also seen evidence of this shift in supplier and customer interaction with the benchmarking of potential AI suppliers with some of the customers we are talking to.   One major insurer had benchmarked ABBYY together with 42 other providers in this sector based on initial product offering, interaction between the companies and how reactive we were to their business strategy. It was pleasing to hear we came out in the top 2.   This gives me great confidence in our team and the solutions we are providing to help companies obtain structured data for their robotic process automation (RPA)/digital transformation. The ongoing move towards automation is driving the need for Content Intelligence and ABBYY is at the forefront of this technological requirement.

Naturally, any change or new technology can cause concern and worry within a workforce as people believe their jobs might not be required. The reality though is that A.I and automation can revolutionize and improve the efficiency of the more mundane and repetitive tasks such as manual data entry, leaving the workforce to be more creative and focus on the core elements of their work.   Human interaction is crucial in the workplace and AI taking over the entire processes of current roles still remains very unrealistic at the moment.

It’s been fascinating to hear how organizations are transforming their businesses using RPA, Machine learning, AI and robotics and Company Innovation/IT functions are clearly being given the freedom to work with partners on intelligent solutions that can deliver real change and efficiency throughout their organizations.

Going back to the World Cup 2018, The freedom and intelligence that England seemed to play with was very refreshing to see and even though they didn’t go on to win the tournament, I think it’s fair to say it’s already been a great summer to remember…

By Paul Goodenough, Head of Enterprise Sales ABBYY UK