The focus for companies now is on automating the ingestion and use of content, and leveraging the emergence of AI to analyze content and create business value, said Hyland's vice president of sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Jean Van Vuuren Said.
Understanding the source of an enterprise's data and its quality and security is key for AI and generative AI (genAI) solutions to generate trusted content, he added, speaking at the Highland Summit for customers and partners in Houghton, Johannesburg on May 16.
“We need to build a trusted content repository for sharing secure data with AI solutions and services, behind which are the data governance and security measures required to meet international regulations and standards on information security,” he said.
“This isn’t just about maintaining a repository of content, but about automating content management and developing more intelligent ways of handling content using AI.
“The modern requirement is intelligent content management and automation. This requires technology adoption as many outdated tech decks that are still in place are hindering innovation and adoption of capabilities such as AI,” he said.
Van Vuuren said companies with such systems need to modernize their legacy infrastructure and move to next-generation solutions.
“However, documents contain a vast amount of historical data and business value, and machine learning (ML) solutions can be used to mine and explore the data that resides within these documents.
“AI helps because it provides an intelligent way to generate insights, responds to natural language queries, and has an intelligent data repository that can surface information relevant to users within the context of each process, thereby delivering business value and improving the user experience for employees,” he noted.
AI can provide intelligent ways to mine data from historical documents, query documents, and create intelligent repositories for enterprises.
Hyland is focused on content automation, and a study by market research firm Forrester found that intelligent content automation improved customer experience in 76% of cases. Customer experience matters in the digital environment, and companies can lose or gain customers based on their digital experience, Van Vuuren said.
According to the same study, 69% of companies using intelligent content automation saw their operations become more efficient and effective. Additionally, 63% of companies saw their employees become more productive.
“You don't want employees to be proactive and hunt for paperwork, but rather use new technology to surface information that is relevant to where they are in the process and improve the employee experience. New digital experiences for employees will help make AI valuable to them,” he said.
Intelligent content management can bring insights and innovation, such as allowing users to ask the repository questions using natural language queries and receive relevant content, he said.
“Future repositories will need to be able to manage all future content, including multi-format and rich media digital assets such as medical x-rays and computed tomography scans.
“A content repository needs to be scalable to billions of objects, and we're working to serve as a repository of truth for the AI journey. We're committed to innovating for the next generation of digital content.”
“The time is ripe and we believe modernization is key. Companies that use information management want to effectively extract business value, their know-how and intellectual property. So it's no longer about structured documents, but how to mine the information within them,” Van Vuuren said.
Content Benefits
Hyland Presales Associate VP Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific Arsalan Minhas UK-based insurance company Aviva says it has saved around £3.1 million in annual IT costs by modernising its repositories with Hyland's content solutions.
“Aviva still had 1.3 billion objects running off its mainframe systems. This has now been migrated to a cloud platform and the company now has 1.7 billion documents,” he said.
Furthermore, he noted that in addition to the annual cost savings, the company has also seen an annual improvement in operational profits of £1.6m.
“We were struggling with governance and compliance around the EU General Data Protection Regulation, but we've been able to automate a lot of our highly manual processes and align them with our customer-centric architecture, and we're happy that it's compliant,” he said.
Meanwhile, African insurance company Ayo has announced its intention to provide hospital and life insurance to people across Africa via mobile phones.
“Mobile phones are ubiquitous in Africa, but relatively few people have access to other devices such as laptops. The company used Hyland’s tools to provide an automated claims processing solution.
“Before the change, it took about 11 business days to process a claim. After the change, Ayo has reduced this to two to three days, and in some cases, down to three to four hours,” Minhas said.
Ayo also uses WhatsApp, a messaging app that is familiar and readily available to users. To make a claim, users open WhatsApp and contact Ayo. They are then taken through an automated process where they are asked some simple language questions and are also asked to verify their mobile phone number and hospital claim number.
Clients can then upload the documents required for their claim.Minhas highlighted that the Highland-based system can use ML image recognition solutions to extract text from handwritten notes if the client submits them.
This information will be used to populate invoice forms for you and your Ayo employees.
The company also has complete, real-time visibility into the number of claims processed each day, as well as the nature and status of the claims, he added.
“By combining content and automation with AI, you can deliver content intelligently, just like Ayo does.”
Hyland was leveraging AI to enhance its content. AI was used to identify whether a document was a policy document, insurance document, bank statement, payroll cheque etc. It would then enrich that document and apply appropriate metadata, for example adding value-added tax, he said.
“These are not things people should waste their time on. Using AI in content automation helps with informed decisions and improvements. It uses historical data to derive insights, informs knowledge workers and provides next step recommendations as part of end-to-end automation,” he explained.
“Hyland sits at the intersection of content, automation and AI. We support our clients in their digital transformation journey by supporting their efforts to innovate and improve business outcomes,” Minhas asserted.
The company is working on a genAI pilot program, working with 20 customers on some of the key use cases across various industries, including insurance, public sector, and law.
Hyland plans to offer its AI and ML services in June, he said.
