AI-enabled automation is making good headway. This discussion looks at some use cases. Sramana Mitra: Let's start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Hyperscience. Peter Brodsky: I'm the founder and CEO of Hyperscience. We are an automation company. We automate mostly things like data entry. Moving forward, we are going to be automating more and more companies with their business processes. That's Hyperscience in a nutshell. Sramana Mitra: Let's double-click down. Speak to me in use cases so that we get a visceral view of what kind of customer problems you are solving. Peter Brodsky: A lot of companies and governments have a lot of business processes that are document-based. Imagine, you have to get a mortgage. What do you have to do? You need to assemble a whole host of documents - your bank statement, tax returns, W2's, letters of employment, and documentation of anything that you might own. You submit this pile of documents that then gets

It's what draws so many of us to this work -- and what keeps us coming back for more every day. But as technology evolves, the building blocks that comprise that technology -- web frameworks, programming languages, libraries, servers -- evolve right along with it, offering an ever-growing array of tools and approaches for developers to tinker with. So, how do engineers decide what tech to use to tackle their next project? And how do they stay on the cutting edge, evolving their tech stacks as new tools and trends emerge? We asked three NYC companies to give us a peek under the hood to find out.

In our recent article on Indonesia's Big "Big Data" Problem, we looked at how technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are being used to uncover new sets of data that corporations can use to better understand the world's fourth biggest country by population. A consistent theme throughout the time we spent talking to local tech firms was that great potential was simply waiting to be unlocked, and that probably holds true at a smaller scale for many developed market corporations. For example, think about something like "data entry." The mere fact that you require a human to take data from FORM A and then manually input that data into FORM B means that your archaic business processes need changing. This is the equivalent of those backwards companies that ask you to fax them a form in order to request a change of address for your account.

QBE North America recently announced its investment and multi-year commercial use agreement with HyperScience (New York), a machine learning, enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) solution, which the insurer intends to use drive operational efficiency and unlock new data and insights for underwriting, pricing and claims. The acquisition was the third in a series flowing from a $50 million commitment QBE announced in 2017 to invest in early-stage businesses working on technically-challenging and industry-changing ideas. The company earlier announced its investments in RiskGenius (Overland Park, Kan.), a machine learning platform for analyzing policy wordings, in Oct. 2017, and Cytora, a London-based company that uses open source data to help commercial insurers lower loss ratios, grow premiums and improve expense ratios, in Dec. 2017. David McMillan, QBE's Group COO has characterized the acquisitions as contributing to the company's objective of delivering "Brilliant Basics" in underwriting, pricing and claims. Insurance Innovation Reporter talked with Ted Stuckey, SVP, Managing Director of QBE Ventures, and Head of QBE's Global Innovation Lab, to talk about the acquisitions and how they fit into QBE's broader strategy.

QBE Insurance Group's streak of investing in technology start-ups continues. Through its investment arm QBE Ventures, the company recently partnered with HyperScience, a machine-learning company putting artificial intelligence to work. The start-up automates office work and will allow QBE to glean useful data from thousands of documents that often just get filed away in a box or the cloud, never to see the light of day again. "HyperScience, to us, was a really obvious choice and an obvious partner because of the problem they were solving and the way that they were doing it," said Ted Stuckey, head of QBE's Global Innovation Lab. "If you look across the normal operations of your standard property and casualty insurer, so much of what we do is back-office processing of information. Just the volume of the documents that we deal with, the volume of human-readable content that is touched by so many different people across the organization, automating that [by] using artificial intelligence to influence and add efficiency to that process was not only a huge operational efficiency game, but an obvious partnership."

QBE Insurance Group Limited (QBE) is taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance its operations globally. The firm has partnered with machine learning company HyperScience, entering into a multi-year commercial use agreement to roll out the latter's solutions across QBE. In addition, its venture capital arm QBE Ventures has closed an investment into the AI start-up. Financial details of the investment – the third made by QBE Ventures since its launch last year – were not disclosed. HyperScience's technology allows firms to facilitate straight-through processing and achieve faster customer response times, as well as "unlock" data within static and unsearchable documents.

There seems to be no end to what artificial intelligence can do. After thrashing humans at sophisticated games like chess and go, AI's next conquest appears to be the workplace. Many already hold jobs at forward-looking companies across industries. Others serve as lawyers, surgeons, and chefs. Given that astonishing range of capabilities, no one would be astonished if robots eventually run your enterprise back office, where the tasks are more often tedious than prestigious.

Today our portfolio company HyperScience is coming out of stealth and talking a bit more about what they've been working on for the last couple of years. We have been involved for a little while already as lead Series A investors, and we are excited to now be joined today by our friends at Felicis, a great addition to a strong syndicate from both coasts that also includes Shana Fisher (Third Kind) who led the seed, AME Cloud Venture, Slow Ventures, Acequia and Box Group. The company is announcing today a total of $18M in Series A investment. HyperScience offers AI solutions targeting Global 2000 corporations and government institutions. Their products enable those customers to automate or accelerate a lot of dusty back office processes, particularly those that involve the manipulation and triage of large amounts of documents and images.

HyperScience delivers machine learning solutions for the enterprise, working with Fortune 500 companies. The HyperScience team is guided by the belief that AI is destined to be the biggest event in the history of human labor since the industrial revolution. HyperScience offers leading global businesses the tools to take advantage of this new technology and create innovative solutions ranging from predictions, automated classifications and anomaly detection in any domain. There are many examples of AI currently applied to everyday life, ranging from self-driving cars to medical software that diagnoses patients. The company already counts a number of businesses in the Fortune 500 as customers and their engagements start at the C-suite, solving these large businesses-- most challenging problems.