As the artificial intelligence (AI) hype cycle continues to run its course, a collective consciousness of practicality and strategy in AI use has begun to play a larger role in how these solutions are utilized by enterprises globally.

Perceptions of AI-powered solutions have progressed from an initial “one-size-fits-all” mindset to a more goal-oriented and intentional approach, veering in the direction of solving specific business challenges and generating value in high-priority areas with a more acute understanding of AI’s strengths and weaknesses.

So, what’s the next step for maturity in businesses’ use of AI?

According to Forrester, it’s weaving an automation fabric that is capable of supporting complex end-to-end processes across the organization; an automation fabric that is comprised of key players, each excelling in their roles to tackle objectives that might have otherwise been impossible.

We see our customers currently navigating this approach, inspired to implement more AI-based solutions into their processes while ensuring that these solutions are both purpose-built for their business needs and positioned to augment their existing tech stack.

One customer, a leading global sportswear manufacturer, is putting the “AI” in team particularly well. They recently made game-changing strides toward expanding and strengthening their automation fabric, implementing AI-powered intelligent document processing (IDP) to integrate with their existing robotic process automation (RPA) solution and defining a strategy to incorporate a variety of AI-enabled technologies into a winning team.

 

Using IDP to make RPA more effective

After selling one of its large subsidiary brands, the sportswear company was faced with a massive document challenge: segregating and sorting 27 million documents associated with the two entities. Two and a half million of these documents lacked any standardized format, structure, or obvious indication of which document belonged to what company.

Wanting to take an AI-driven approach to solving this challenge, they decided to integrate ABBYY’s AI-powered OCR with their existing RPA system. The combined solution scanned the documents for specified trigger words, company codes, and other differentiating factors to sort them into the appropriate folder for each brand. As a result, the global company was able to successfully sell the subsidiary brand without any penalty or complications resulting from missing or errantly processed documents.

Without this strategic synergy of solutions, the manual processing and sorting of millions of documents would have consumed an unsustainable amount of time and resources, while increasing susceptibility to errors.

This use case isn’t just a proof point for the value of ABBYY OCR in processing large volumes of unstructured documents, but also a testament to the strength and efficacy of the global company’s automation fabric.

Identifying a game-changing tech stack

The athleticwear giant is no stranger to assembling a winning team of solutions. They’ve carefully designed a “digital playbook” to AI-enable digital platforms for the full end-to-end process lifecycle, dividing their approach into five stages: discovery, analysis, improvement, standardization, and finally automation.

Each stage incorporates a combination of AI-enabled technologies and platforms:

• Business process management and mining (BPMM)
• Intelligent document processing and archiving (IDPA – ABBYY is here)
• Low-code / no-code
• Workflow automation (WFA)
• Robotic process automation (RPA)
• Backend automation (BEA)

This digital playbook has supported multiple digitization initiatives for the organization and will continue to do so in the future as they look towards additional application integrations with automation tools. For example, they’ve also automated invoice processing in their accounts payable workflow using ABBYY IDP, yielding a 53% straight-through processing rate.

Innovation leaders striving for the same value and adaptability, take note: with the right approach, your organization can also build a game-changing tech stack.

 

Building an AI-ready organization

An effective automation fabric is built upon high-quality data, guided by a strategically designed roadmap, and supported by a strong integration team. We’ve seen our customers experience the most success when they practice the following three principles:

• Process understanding. Having a thorough and data-driven understanding of your organization’s processes is crucial for identifying the best opportunities for automation. Auditing your data landscape for potential discrepancies in quality and structure will ensure that your automation initiatives are effective, and your AI platforms are working with reliably accurate data.
• Technology assessment. By assessing your current technology stack and outlining milestones, objectives, and desired outcomes, you can then develop a phased implementation plan that includes deployment, integration with existing systems, and scalability considerations. Defining KPIs and metrics to measure the impacts on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction will enable you to ensure you’ve incorporated the right solutions in the right areas of your business.
• Strategic implementation. The last step is strategically selecting the right AI tools for your business and the right partners to implement them. ABBYY’s 35 years of experience in AI and IDP technologies enable strong support from planning to full-scale implementation, with dedicated collaboration that provides access to both innovative technologies and expansive knowledge of best practices.

Even with AI, some business challenges are too complex to be solved by any single technology, tool, platform, or solution. But with in-depth knowledge of your business data and the support of a dependable partner like ABBYY, your business can establish a suite of automation solutions effective enough to wholly transform your operations.

Ready to harness the power of AI in your organization? Download our free checklist, Action Steps for Building an AI-Ready Organization with ABBYY.