by Anthony Macciola

IRVINE, CA - Enterprise organizations continue to push the boundaries in search of technologies that can understand and liberate meaning from unstructured content – documents, email communications, images, and text – given content is central to all business processes and activities.

Moreover, the data trapped within content contain information that is critical to improving customer service, increasing engagement, enhancing operations and identify revenue opportunities. It makes understanding the role of content equally critical to improving processes and boosting user productivity.

Since information is received through a variety of channels such as mobile devices, email, scanners, and fax, it is necessary to turn content into usable information that can be fed into processes and systems – regardless of its point of origin.

To achieve this, organizations have used capture technology to digitize paper documents, classify, and extract the data. Typically, this was deployed centrally and managed by a highly trained capture expert. However, the way enterprises are looking to consume and use technology like OCR, machine learning, and other AI technologies is evolving rapidly.

Striving for

Excellence

Within enterprise organizations, new Centers of Excellence
(COE) have formed as a result of the fast-growing use of robotic process
automation (RPA). Within the COE you will find stakeholders in business and IT
working together to identify and automate all sorts of repetitive processes. Centers
of excellence that start with RPA are increasingly finding themselves also
responsible for planning and executing AI innovations for other teams and
departments. In their efforts to identify internal automation opportunities,
they are also finding that many of the processes involve unstructured content
which could be part of onboarding a customer, a lending approval process, or attached
to a finance related process like invoicing.

This evolution and how the technology is consumed within automation tools like RPA has led to what ABBYY calls Content IQ.

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Defining Content IQ

Content IQ
is a class of technologies that help digital workforces understand and create
meaning from enterprise content. It brings together OCR, machine learning and
other AI technology to create structured information from unstructured content.
Content IQ enables organizations to apply intelligence to their content and
connect it to a wide-range of business processes. In addition to easily connecting
to a process, it adapts to the many variations of a document making it a
powerful for the digital workforce.

With the new
digital workforce, the ability to quickly consume and use Content IQ technologies
empowers a broader set of users in the enterprise to automate more. To do so, the
class of technologies are delivered as Content IQ skills that are the driving force to fast, intelligent, and
extensible technology. A skill
represents best-of-breed AI technologies from ABBYY that can be quickly
consumed as a service and carry out a task like reading a document, routing a
document, extracting data, or any other task related to understanding and
processing content.

The use of cognitive skills can then be leveraged directly within an RPA platform like UiPath or Blue Prism, targeting activities and skills required by the digital worker to solve specific business problems. A skill can represent a core cognitive skill like classifying a document or extracting data, and advanced cognitive skills designed and trained for specific document use cases give the digital worker the necessary skills to perform the work that would otherwise be handled by an employee.

Related: There's a crisis in content engagement - one which AI looks to solve

Where to get started

Regardless of your industry or business process, Content IQ skills can
automate any business process you have – handling both structured and unstructured
content. You are a candidate for these technologies if you find that you are:

If you’re interested in learning more about integrating Content IQ technologies to transform your business processes with a smarter, more powerful digital workforce, visit ABBYY Content IQ. Information about enabling RPA processes with Content IQ can be found at Content IQ for Robotic Process Automation.

Anthony Macciola is the Chief Innovation Officer at ABBYY, a global provider of intelligent capture solutions that enable enterprises, government agencies, and developers to automatically unlock the value of their business documents.