Deloitte has announced an alliance with Kira Systems to bring the power of machine learning to the workplace, an innovation it believes could help free workers from the tedium of reviewing contracts and other documents. 

The alliance combines Deloitte's business insights in cognitive technologies with Kira Systems' advances in machine learning in creating models that quickly "read" thousands of complex documents, extracting and structuring textual information for better analysis.

This capability holds broad applications for the marketplace, said Craig Muraskin, Deloitte LLP, managing director of Deloitte's U.S. Innovation group, as the extensive review of documents underpins many pressing business activities, including investigations, mergers, contract management and leasing arrangements.

"Wading through miles of corporate jargon hunting for key words and patterns can consume considerable time and resources," said Muraskin. "By teaming with Kira Systems, we can help organizations reduce their review time while redeploying talent to higher value activities – let's save our eyes for more strategic matters."

Noah Waisberg, CEO of Kira Systems, said recent innovations by his company, such as Kira Quick Study, are graduating machine learning to new levels of accomplishment. "Artificial intelligence has arrived to a point where machines can scale human expertise by extracting information from complex documents," said Waisberg. "It accurately identifies information by learning from examples versus just reflexively identifying pre-programmed clauses."

Deloitte has been using the Kira platform internally for more than a year, creating custom models that generate quicker insights into client challenges. It's now possible for client teams to analyse hundreds of thousands of documents in weeks, putting them in a stronger position to advise clients in completing major business transactions under tight deadlines.  

Deloitte-customized instances of the Kira platform together with Deloitte-trained models have been rolled out across the organization's audit business under the name Argus and its consulting business under the name D-ICE, with applications being explored for its tax and advisory businesses.

"Our approach to innovation is to use creativity and ingenuity in finding practical applications for the latest technologies," said Ragu Gurumurthy, chief innovation officer, Deloitte LLP.

"That's what Deloitte and Kira Systems are doing with this alliance – it's bringing together two organizations working on the forefront of innovation in a way that can bring pragmatic yet powerful benefits for businesses in a range of industries."