Around 88% of UK insurance staff waste eight hours per week trying to understand data in documents, according to research by global digital intelligence firm Abbyy. In addition, 74% of UK insurance staff find data in documents increasingly difficult to access. In turn, this causes delays in completing the process (48%), more manual handling of the document and overall process (44%) and creates bad customer experiences (33%). Abbyy's research suggested that artificial intelligence (AI) skills could help here, according to 53% of respondents. The digital intelligence company also revealed that 44% of staff lose one full day of productivity per week searching for documents to help serve customers effectively.

Of course, there is no shortage of data in financial services -- structured, unstructured, transactional, account-level – but while this data brings benefits, when in the hands of nefarious actors, also make fraud more pervasive. Neil Murphy is the Global VP at ABBYY, and believes AI is the way forward to tackle the ever rising cases of fraud. Along with other benefits, Murphy explains by using AI, financial organisations can reduce manual steps required in the onboarding stage, and process both structured and unstructured documents. In doing so, financial organisations gain a birds-eye view and can filter out suspicious and fraudulent actors. Technological advancements, an increase in investment into security systems and fraud prevention initiatives have been widely adopted by the finance industry in an effort to curb scams and crises from occurring.

The stark contrast in customer experiences has become increasingly evident for millions of us over the past year, as organisations across all industries struggled to maintain business operations while volumes increased. Automation has helped to drive business operations, but consumer-facing processes rarely meet our expectations. In fact, Gartner suggests 91% of organisations plan to deploy AI within the next three years to enhance customer experiences. In this way, conversational AI might be the solution, but with chatbots limited to question-and-answer engagements, it's clear a more intelligent platform is required. Most organisations have an automated phone system and offer multichannel options, including mobile apps to improve operational efficiency.

ABBYY, a Digital Intelligence company, announced it acquired Pericom Singapore, part of the Pericom Group, a leading solution provider based in Singapore. The acquisition strengthens ABBYY's presence in Asia Pacific following the opening of its Hong Kong office in 2019, long-established office in Japan, and a strong partner network throughout the region. Singapore ranks first in the Asian Digital Transformation Index and is considered the trading crossroads for innovations in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, data analytics and other technologies that span healthcare, security, energy, aviation, defense, smart cities and education. As more Asia Pacific executives look to accelerate their digital business initiatives post-COVID, including 84% of Singapore businesses who have increased their budgets, ABBYY's growing presence signifies its readiness to meet their digital transformation needs. "We have had many successful large-scale implementations in the Asia Pacific market working closely with our valuable partners and large system integrators," commented Ulf Persson, CEO of ABBYY.

Andrew Pery, is the Ethics Evangelist at ABBYY, a digital intelligence company. They empower organizations to access the valuable, yet often hard to attain, insight into their operations that enables true business transformation. ABBYY recently released a Global Initiative Promoting the Development of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. We decided to ask Andrew questions regarding ethics in AI, abuses of AI, and what the AI industry can do about these concerns moving forward. What is it that initially instigated your interest in AI ethics? What initially sparked my interest in AI ethics was a deep interest in the intersection of law and AI technology.

Anthony is recognized as a thought leader and primary innovator of products, solutions, and technologies for the intelligent capture, RPA, BPM, BI and mobile markets. ABBYY is an innovator and leader in artificial intelligence (Al) technology including machine learning and natural language processing that helps organizations better understand and drive context and outcomes from their data. The company sets a goal to grow and strengthen its leadership positions by satisfying the ever-increasing demand for AI-enabled products and solutions. ABBYY has been developing semantic and AI technologies for many years. Thousands of organizations from over 200 countries and regions have chosen ABBYY solutions that transform documents into business value by capturing information in any format.

Despite the benefits these technologies brought to businesses – and to workers themselves – the fear of job losses and lack of education around automation has marred the impact of these new innovations in the working world. In 2020, that will all change. A new model of partnership between humans and machines is emerging, focused on the value automation and humans working together can bring: augmented intelligence. In fact, Gartner believes that this will create up to $2.9 trillion of business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally by 2021. Businesses who don't take advantage of AI while keeping employee satisfaction front-of-mind are likely to fall far behind in the global race for productivity and business value in uncertain economic times.

This transformation often leads to businesses investing in digital solutions in order to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive and saturated market. The number of digital workers entering the workforce will increase by 50 percent by 2021, according to new IDC research. With the explosion of the robotic process automation market (RPA), there are now millions of digital workers employed at businesses around the world. So, don't be surprised to see a new robotic colleague at your next company meeting as organisations give at least one robot to every employee to augment their day-to-day activities. But despite the promise that trillions of dollars are expected to be saved by deploying digital workers, most RPA projects fail to fully deliver on that promise.

Medline Industries, a manufacturer and distributor of medical supplies, based in Northfield, Ill., is growing quickly, said Sarah Stokes, director of accounts payable at the company. That means double-digit sales growth year over year, she said, but it also means more paperwork. "Our biggest challenge is trying to keep up with the volume," Stokes said. To help tackle the 2,000 invoices the company receives each day, Medline has turned to optical character recognition (OCR) technology from vendor Abbyy, paired with platforms from several RPA vendors. The combination has gone a long way in automating accounts payable, Stokes said.

As many people are aware, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a wonderful tool for automating rules-based processes. By that we mean that they will do exactly what you tell them to do, again and again and again. Which is perfect when you want 100% compliance and all your processes are rules-based and repeatable. But quite often this is not the case, and those processes will require complex decisions to be made or have data inputs that are unstructured or particularly variable. At this point intelligent robots are necessary.