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 contains information that is critical to improving customer service, increasing engagement, enhancing operations and identifying 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.

Within enterprise organizations, new Centres 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.

Centres 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.

Defining Content IQ

Content IQ is a class of technologies that helps the digital workforce 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 tool 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 behind 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 to give the digital worker the necessary skills to perform the work that would otherwise be handled by an employee.

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:

• Dealing with outdated or complicated processes
• Manually entering data from documents
• Receiving documents from diverse channels such as mobile devices, the Internet, or other digital channels
• Manually classifying and routing documents as they enter your organization
• Having to manually sort and enter data from a document into a system
• Receiving documents in different languages
• Facing competitive pressures and need to improve your customer service
• Worried about fraud and the security of your content
• Having to work with different processes, systems, and interfaces where content plays a central role
• Trying to enforce regulatory compliance around documents entering the organization

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.