Anyone with any doubts about the interest in AI and its use across enterprise technologies only needs to look at the example of the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) market and the kind of verticals that are investing in it to quash those doubts. According to the Everest Group's recently published report, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) State of the Market Report 2021 (purchase required) the market for this segment alone is estimated at $700-750 million in 2020 and expected to grow at a rate of 55-65% over the next year. Cost impact is now the key driver for intelligent document processing adoption, closely followed by improving operational efficiency and productivity. These solutions blend AI technologies to efficiently process all types of documents and feed the output into downstream applications. Optical character recognition (OCR), computer vision, machine learning (ML) and deep learning models, and natural language processing (NLP) are the key core technologies powering IDP capabilities.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Over the next two years, 75% of finance professionals believe their day jobs will significantly change, and 83% said they will have to learn new skills for AI and related technologies, according to a survey of finance processionals around the world from Unit4, a cloud leader in enterprise software. Above: More technical knowledge may be helpful, but the survey shows a surprising lack of emphasis on strategic leadership skills; only a quarter say interpersonal and influencing will be essential for future finance professionals. And only 21% think story telling will be important. In the next 12 months, more than four fifths of respondents are expecting to focus this upskilling on AI, machine learning, coding, analytics and data science capabilities, but a third of respondents accept that their organizations will need to grow their teams to fully implement the new technology, Unit4 said.

In this special guest feature, Claus Jepsen, Deputy CTO at Unit4, AI has risen as a main focus point for its ability to accelerate processes and help organizations remain competitive in today's unpredictable landscape. However, the benefits of AI go far beyond improved business operations and its potential to improve the internal workplace experience is often overlooked. Claus is a technology expert who has been fascinated by the micro-computer revolution ever since he received a Tandy TRS model 1 at the age of 14. Since then, Claus has spent the last few decades developing and architecting software solutions, most recently at Unit4, where he is leading the ERP vendor's focus on enabling the post-modern enterprise. At Unit4, Claus is building cloud-based, super-scalable solutions and bringing innovative technologies such as AI, chatbots, and predictive analytics to ERP.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is steadily growing more sophisticated, particularly in regards to advanced decision making capabilities, making it increasingly appealing to corporations. A survey from Narrative Science shows that 62 per cent of organisations will be using AI technologies by 2018, while Gartner is predicting that three million employees worldwide will be supervised by AI in 2018. The question that remains is what will this transformation look like? While computers are capable of making intelligent decisions about financial trading, medical diagnoses and even flying planes or driving cars, several factors have kept businesses from adopting AI broadly. One of these is accessibility.

The bot ecosystem is changing, and so are the use-cases. Fueled by the development work of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others, bots are becoming more intelligent and therefore capable of performing tasks previously done by humans. Not to be confused with robots, a bot is a software program designed to imitate the behavior of humans. Most bots are designed to do a specific task, whether that's crawling the web to index sites, making robocalls, serving up a weather report, or responding to a simple customer query. However, orchestration layers are required to enable seamless, transparent, rich services.