AI with ROI: Why businesses should care about intelligent capture
March 22, 2018
The current wave of innovations brought about by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is automating business processes and improving efficiencies. This means that all forward-looking businesses should be analyzing the value they stand to gain from AI adoption. Artificial intelligence (AI) will contribute as much as $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, according to a research by PwC. That enormous value creation comes from productivity gains resulting from automating business processes and augmenting the existing labor force, as well as increased demand for higher quality and more personalized AI-based products.
Despite the - potential benefits from AI adoption, many organizations have been reluctant to make investments in AI because they have difficulty tracking true ROI on such investments. AI requires a fundamental shift in how organization collects, processes and leverages its data for intelligent automation. This calls for update of IT infrastructure and internal processes, changes people’s roles in the organizations, while the positive results of these changes may not be visible in the short term. This makes such changes risky and delays the return on the investments.
However, it is not always the case. Intelligent Capture is a good example of AI technology with proven ROI.
Modern intelligent capture lies at the core of AI transformation since it creates a new way of collecting data. It can read, understand and extract information and insight from any unstructured data source, with a level of accuracy good enough to tackle high-volume, repeatable processes like accounts payable or sales order processing.
Accelerating Business Processes
What is so special about intelligent capture technology is that organizations use different types of unstructured data - documents, images, emails or web content - and can therefore benefit from the intelligent capture. What makes it even more important is that capture technology not only provides data for processing ongoing transactions, it is also a source of training datasets for machine learning algorithms. This smart platform help to automate business processes and leverage AI to practice and “learn” allowing companies to focus more on their strategic goals and ultimately on improving their bottom line.
Effective and Efficient Data Processing
AI requires training while training requires labelled datasets. If, for example, an organization wants to train AI to control and manage expenses, it needs to ensure that expenses are properly recorded and data from all incoming invoices and receipts is processed accurately and timely. This is exactly what intelligent capture does— capture data with accuracy and precision, which could be used for training of AI systems. Modern intelligent capture technology extracts data from billions of forms, financial documents, medical records, IDs and other sources in thousands of organizations. Efficiency of this transactional data extraction is proven by strong ROI coming from early payment discounts, no late fees, and higher customers’ satisfaction.
Increasing the Value of Data
For today’s businesses, structured data is the new currency with a value and a price. Before the digital transformation revolution, the value of capture technology mostly came from streamlining operations and saving processing costs. That explains why the technology was used mostly in business critical transactions. With the widespread adoption of AI, the value of data has grown dramatically as new opportunities emerged for leveraging AI to find new insights or create competitive advantage from the same set of data. For example, in not so distant past, a driver license information was used only for validating a customer’s identity. Today, many customer-facing businesses may leverage additional data from the US driver license about customers’ height, weight and hair color to personalize their services. When such information sits in document archives, intelligent systems can quickly extract the required data for downstream processing. Whether by extracting information from unstructured files or automating an entire business process from start to finish, the modern AI-based capture technology is driving the real ROI.