ABBYY, a specialist in Content IQ technologies and solutions, has launched ABBYY Vantage, an enterprise platform aimed at providing human-like cognitive skills to intelligent automation platforms such as robotic process automation (RPA) and business process automation (BPA).
The new platform can be leveraged by enterprise companies in financial services and insurance, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, and other industries. Several high-profile enterprise customers and consulting partners are participating in the early adopter program, including MSD, UK-based Symphony Ventures, RoboRana, and RPAbox.
ABBYY says Vantage offers a transformative shift in the way structured and unstructured content is processed, using cognitive skills to make digital robots in automation platforms smarter and faster. It delivers text recognition, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of consumable skills to power the new digital workforce (software robots) needed to make intelligent business decisions. According to the Forrester report “Predictions 2019: Artificial Intelligence,” more than 40 per cent of enterprises will create digital workers by combining AI with RPA. The research firm estimates the RPA market will reach USD1.7 billion in 2019 and USD2.9 billion in 2021. Vantage addresses common content-centric process pain points such as lengthy set-up and configuration, shortage of training data, requiring skilled experts in areas like machine learning for automating unstructured content, and inability to scale across an enterprise organisation, resulting in missed efficiency and cost gains.
“For the first time, enterprises can automate content-based processes without requiring users to be tech experts. ABBYY has revolutionised the way organisations accelerate their digital transformation initiatives by simplifying technologies like AI and data capture. This makes content-centric processes easier to set up and configure with out-of-the-box core skills and advanced cognitive skills that make robots smarter,” says Anthony Macciola, Chief Innovation Officer at ABBYY. “Vantage delivers the technology as consumable skills that are combined with automation platforms like RPA to accelerate enterprise self-service automation. Organisations can quickly leverage these skills directly in their process automation platform, cutting down the time it takes to deploy and realise the benefits. Vantage sets a new bar by simplifying how cognitive skills are designed, deployed, and consumed.”
The new platform aims to minimise the complexity of processing content such as documents, forms, images, and email communications with a set of cognitive skills that allow digital workers to identify a document, find specific information, understand the content, and route the document or process the information on its content. Core cognitive skills include text recognition, classification, and data extraction coupled with learning and can be plugged into any type of document workflow. Advanced cognitive skills can be developed by partners and customers to perform specific tasks unique to a business operation, such as processing a loan application, insurance claim or bill of lading.
“Enterprise operations executives are searching for the best approach to get started on the AI automation journey,” says Sarah Burnett, Executive Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Everest Group. “The advent of RPA opened the eyes of executives that they need AI in addition to RPA technologies to handle both structured and unstructured content. With solutions such as Vantage, ABBYY is addressing this demand for intelligent automation. Vantage will add intelligent skills to RPA to enable organisations to scale automation – more processes and more of each process as well.”
Vantage tightly integrates into leading RPA platforms like Blue Prism, UiPath, and others. It also can be leveraged by ISVs, System Integrators, BPOs, and IT technology strategists who have a business need to incorporate content IQ skills into their automation platforms. It is the first product on the market designed to increase the Content IQ of the digital workforce by allowing them to quickly and easily understand and process content as part of an overall automation task. These capabilities can for the first time be adopted and scaled across an organisation en masse.
