AI-Powered Automation: Bringing Order to Unstructured Data Workflows

Although the flow of data has accelerated, data is still largely processed manually, holding companies back on unleashing its full value. However, new AI-powered automation solutions, like Alkymi, offer a clear path towards turning this source of inefficiency into a competitive advantage.

Digitalization has ushered in a new era of business optimization, accelerating access to data. But it has also inadvertently introduced a new set of operational challenges associated with spikes in data volumes, changes in delivery methods, and the lack of standardized formats of incoming customer data.

Companies, looking to derive value from incoming data, initially turned to manual data collection, extraction, and transformation. However, most have quickly realized that this approach was quite costly and not as efficient.

Enter Automation

New data workflow automation companies want businesses to rethink how they interact with data by optimizing every stage of the data journey through cutting-edge AI technologies and efficient utilization of human talent. Alkymi, a leading unstructured data workflow automation company backed by Danish software company SimCorp, says that the first step towards an efficient process is through data centralization.

“We wanted to establish a centralized hub which offers our clients a single source of truth for their decision-making,” says Harald Collet, CEO and co-founder of Alkymi. “Data Inbox collects data from a variety of sources, including e-mail, documents, and business forms, helping the business users process more information with fewer windows and clicks.”

The benefit of this is accelerated decision-making, data governance, and auditability, as well as better risk and compliance management. The user is always in control of the data, and can at any time link the data back to its source.

Reducing the Noise

Financial services and insurance companies often deal with large data quantities and different sources, yet only a fraction of the information contained in source documents and emails is required for a given process. In other words, locating and extracting the correct data becomes the main challenge.

The overall processing becomes 98 percent faster than the manual status quo while also minimizing human errors because the final approved data can directly integrate to your existing business
systems-of-record.
Harald Collet, CEO and co-founder of Alkymi

To tackle this issue, Alkymi introduced Alkymi Patterns — a smart filter for critical data. The solution utilizes multiple AI elements, including computer vision and machine learning, to locate, extract, and surface user-specified data in a clean and structured format.

“All a process owner has to do now is look at the relevant data points and click a button to push the data forward. The overall processing becomes 98 percent faster than the manual status quo while also minimizing human errors because the final approved data can directly integrate to your existing business systems-of-record,” Collet says.

Removing the hurdles

AI technology is undeniably making an entry into the financial and insurance sectors. Nonetheless, some companies are still holding back from integrating the technology into their workflows because they believe it is complicated to deploy and requires specially skilled people to set up and maintain. But it does not have to be.

“Alkymi is removing the complexity associated with intelligent document processing. Our clients do not have to be machine learning or AI experts, because we have built the solution for business users,” Collet says.

This is beneficial in a world where every company is competing to hire the best data scientist. “By removing the hurdles for adopting new technologies we help our users become innovative. This fits well with the focus that all of our customers have, which is better data, better decisions, and more control,” Collet says.

Alkymi’s customers include startups and large companies alike, which proves that utilizing AI is not just for those businesses that can afford to hire specialists in the field. Alkymi is making AI-powered automation solutions available to all.