Each year ABBYY holds numerous International Technology Summits, where we share our latest product innovations and future technology roadmaps with our partners and developers.

The latest event (see report HERE)was hosted by the ABBYY North American team at the remarkable Hotel del Coronado in Southern California. When it was built more than 125 years ago, the five storey resort was the largest wooden structure in the United States. In 2015 it’s still the second-largest according to Wikipedia.

Unlike many of the buildings of that era it has been reinvented and revitalised for the modern era, mixing the finest of contemporary technology with the highest standards of quality and architecture. This made it a fitting setting for the 2015 ABBYY North America Technology Summit.

We at ABBYY have millions of users around the world processing billions of pages every year and increasingly they need the ability to go mobile. The number of mobile users exceeded desktop users two years ago and is still growing at the same speed. The number of enterprise mobile applications is expected to quadruple by 2016 and ABBYY’s mobile business has been growing annually by 30% over the last few years. Even greater rates of growth are forecast in the future.

The bad news is that while the volume of documents and data is growing exponentially, the demand for speedy processing and massive storage are increasing as well. In days gone by we could leave the customer to take weeks to make a decision whether to open a new bank account or purchase a new insurance policy. Market research now tells us that when a potential customer completes a request via your web site, you need to respond within 10 minutes to ensure “conversion.”

Dealing with customers who have already arrived at our Web site is a known challenge, however an even bigger data challenge comes from dealing with the “unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know,” as a famous American once referred to the problem. We don’t know what exactly our current and potential customers are writing in social networks, even though they are addressing us with their opinion about our products and services. Sometimes we don’t even know what knowledge we have in our internal resources as the person who created it left the company or moved to another position.

Semantic technologies such as ABBYY Compreno can now help us to understand text and extract valuable information from unstructured documents.

ABBYY Smart Classifier combines text- and semantic-based classification to power governance policies for content, records, and email management, data migration and document review. ABBYY InfoExtractor addresses critical needs in Case Management.

Today, across many industries we are seeing significant digital transformations in our lives and in business.

In a world of Uber, Amazon and AirBnB, we are now booking flights and accommodation and buying our books and CDs online. Our banks are not banks anymore they have virtually become IT companies with bank licenses.

Organisations are dealing with escalating volumes of unstructured data, trying to classify documents, extract information and populate tables in databases to render it usable.  In addition to this they need to comply with government regulations while protecting commercial data and protecting customer privacy.

Semantic technologies such as Compreno are showing the way forward for innovative ways to deal with masses of unstructured data, letting them automatically process claims, find relations between different entities and automate classification.

Given the huge volumes that organisations must now deal with, it is essential that we develop ways to automatically monitor and process customer feedback, complaints and requests. We need to enhance the efficiency of text-heavy business processes, and more effectively manage risk in complex transactions.

To ensure your organisation is still standing proudly in 100 years, it’s important to be open to innovations and adopt them fast enough to be ahead of your competitors.

Yury Koryukin is Managing Director of ABBYY Australia