Wolters Kluwer headquarters in the Netherlands
Walters Kluwer
It’s widely known that to be successful with AI, companies must have their own information. His Wolters Kluwer, a specialist information, software solutions and services company based in the Netherlands and currently operating in over 180 countries, has never been short of resources. The company he founded in 1836 as a textbook publisher, merged with other publishers over the years, and eventually began developing and acquiring digital information capabilities.
Wolters Kluwer’s CEO and Chairman, Nancy McKinstry, took over as company leader in 2003. She transformed Wolters Kluwer into a professional solutions company and began hiring and developing professionals with deep expertise in areas such as healthcare, tax, risk and compliance, and legal. The company also established a global Digital Experience Group (DXG) to help speed time-to-market and innovation for digital products, and a Global Business Services (GBS) group to provide strategic execution services. The company’s publishing revenue now accounts for less than 5% of its total, down from more than 80% when McKinstry took over as CEO.
By the time AI became more pervasive in the late 2010s, Wolters Kluwer was well into the business of providing “expert solutions” to its customers. At this point, hundreds of experts in various fields were providing their expertise to their clients, but fortunately Wolters Kluwer had collected data on the advice they provided and the results for their clients. . One might find this to be the perfect situation to start modeling and predicting outcomes with machine learning. By 2016, the company created its first AI-enabled product. CCH IQ uses machine learning to help tax service providers identify which customers are affected by tax law changes, assess the impact of changes on their tax returns, and understand tax service opportunities. It was helpful. Additional tax services to our customers.
Building AI-based Product Capabilities
In addition to data, Wolters Kluwer started building the capabilities needed to create AI-based products. The company’s Finance and Corporate Compliance (FCC) department established an organization called Customer Information Management/Operational Excellence (CIOx) to better understand customer needs and build new products and solutions. Group members are expected to spend time with customers and identify their needs. The goal is to create solutions that fit the customer’s workflow and develop solutions that address their problems.
The group has developed a product development process with steps of “idea, test, incubate, scale”. Our team of product developers employs this process. The company has also started hiring a number of data scientists, including them as domain experts. The formula for product development success has become “Data + Domain Knowledge + AI = Solution”.
Working closely with business lines within the FCC division, the CIOx team has also developed a set of principles for successful product development projects. For example, the team recognized that they should sit at the same table with other team members and be seen as data-driven trusted advisors. They wanted to be seen as having a solution mindset rather than as a research group. Their metrics of success, and the resulting reward mechanisms, should be the same as the business they were working with. In other words, they saw themselves as “blue-collar AI workers” focused on achieving results, rather than just developing great models.
In addition to quality personnel and operational principles, CIOx has also established a set of technology capabilities to accelerate AI-based product development. They created a set of platforms that shield developers from legacy technologies and enable faster data access and modeling. A set of data stores and feature engineering repositories are part of this feature. Wolters Kluwer also adopted a machine learning operations (MLOps) workbench for developing, deploying, and continuously monitoring advanced neural network models.
Analyze statutory invoices with AI
One of Wolters Kluwer’s most prominent AI products is called LegalVIEW® BillAnalyzer, offered by Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, part of the Legal and Regulatory Department. It supports the chief legal officer of a large company in reviewing law firm bills for compliance with outside attorney billing guidelines. Comparing the legal services contracts of these companies with the amounts actually billed by law firms, we frequently spot billing errors. Since 2017, LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer is based on human review by legal experts. It was a successful but labor intensive product.
But now, AI systems extract key clauses from legal service contracts and automatically analyze invoices. LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer has over $160 billion in legal bills for training machine learning models. For each invoice item, the model calculates a risk score, the likelihood of billing anomalies, based on a reconciliation of legal service contract terms and historical data. For example, if an outside law firm charges him 16 hours for a deposition that normally requires only 4 hours for that particular type of case, the item would be assigned a higher risk score. . If a customer confirms that an item needs adjustment, that data is used to refine the model, potentially increasing the risk score.
With LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer, businesses can save up to 10% on outside legal services costs and improve compliance with billing guidelines by up to 20%. The system also saves in-house counsel a significant amount of time investigating overclaims.
Generative AI products in development
Wolters Kluwer, like many companies, is experimenting with generative AI. But consistent with CIOx’s focus, we have specific products in mind. For example, one of the upcoming generative AI-enabled products involves an existing product called OneSumX® ProViso. Employs AI technology validated by regulatory experts to monitor, acquire, review and summarize the vast amount of changing laws and regulations for banks, insurance companies and other financial services companies. This is a product that has been professionally based and successful for several years. But now the CIOx group is working to determine how GPT-4 can add value to their products. Having the language model read the regulations and summarize them has yielded promising results so far. The technology seems to do an excellent job of producing first drafts, producing similar deliverables to human financial services legal experts. Ultimately, the company works with product owners to identify potential use cases and understand how ChatGPT and other generative AI solutions can help their customers.
Wolters Kluwer also maintains legacy computer systems throughout the company that have been in place for many years and are specialized for specific content domains. The company explored the idea of training employees in the old and new programming languages to convert old code to new code, but this would be very time consuming and difficult to attract the right people for the job. Hard to maintain. However, Wolters Kluwer often works in compliance-oriented fields, so maintaining program code quality has always been important.
The company is currently exploring the idea of translating old program code into new languages using GPT-4 and documenting the new code in English. In particular, product operations specialists in several areas of the business work with data scientists to analyze and in some cases rejuvenate over 1 million lines of code. Wolters Kluwer adds artificial intelligence capabilities to their products, allowing them to complement their deep domain expertise with the latest technology.
the ongoing role of humans
But Wolters Kluwer has no intention of using AI to replace human employees. The company has invested heavily in employee training and “up-skilling” programs, assuming that future jobs will rely heavily on AI and other new technologies, working in partnership with experts. . The internal grassroots community has established a community of 800 members called “Addicted to Learning” to encourage further learning about new technologies such as AI and generative AI. It is envisioned that such focused education will foster innovation and drive future demand for Wolters Kluwer products. So far, at least for Walters Kluwer, this maxim has proven to be an accurate indicator of innovation over his 187 years.
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