The current focus for businesses is to automate the ingestion and use of content, and to use the advent of AI to analyse it and create business value, Hyland Europe, Middle East and Africa associate VP for sales Jean van Vuuren has said.

To ensure AI and generative AI (genAI) solutions generated content that could be trusted, knowing where the enterprise data was being sourced and its quality and security were important, he added during the Hyland Summit for clients and partners on May 16, in Houghton, Johannesburg.

"We must create a trusted repository of content to share secure data with AI solutions and services, behind which are the necessary data governance and security measures to meet international regulations and standards for information security," he said.

"It is not just about maintaining a repository of content, but about the automation of content management and using AI to develop more intelligent ways of working on content.

"The modern requirement is for intelligent content management and automation. This requires technology adoption, as many of the legacy technical decks still present are holding back innovation and the introduction of functionalities such as AI," he said.

There was a need for companies with such systems to modernise legacy infrastructure and move to next-generation solutions, said Van Vuuren.

"However, there are significant amounts of historical data and business value in documents, and machine learning (ML) solutions can be used to mine the data that resides in these documents and interrogate it.

"Where AI comes in is to provide intelligent ways of generating insights and to have an intelligent data repository that can respond to natural language queries and surface relevant information for users within the context of each process, thereby providing business value and improving the employee user experience," he noted.

AI can provide intelligent ways to mine data from historical documents, interrogate documents and create an intelligent repository for businesses.

Hyland was focused on content automation. Intelligent content automation improved customer experiences in 76% of cases, according to a market research company Forrester study. Customer experience was important in digital environments, as business could lose or gain customers based on their digital experiences, said Van Vuuren.

According to the same study, 69% of businesses using intelligent content automation saw an improvement in their operational efficiencies and effectiveness. Further, 63% of companies saw an increase in employee productivity.

"You want your employees to be proactive, and do not want them searching for documents. Rather, use the new technology to present information that is relevant for where they are in a process and thereby improve the employee experience. A new digital experience for employees will help to make AI valuable to them," he said.

Intelligent content management could provide insight and innovation, such as by having natural language queries to enable users to ask the repository questions and then receive relevant content, he said.

"Future repositories must be able to manage any future content, including multiformat and rich media digital assets, such as healthcare X-ray and computed tomography scans.

"Content repositories must be able to scale up to billions of objects and we are working to ensure they serve as truth repositories for the AI journey. We are working on innovations for the next generation of digital content.

"We believe the time is ripe and modernisation is key. Businesses powered by information management want to be able to extract business value and their own know-how and intellectual property in an effective way. Therefore, it is not about structured documents anymore, but about how the information in them can be mined," Van Vuuren said.

CONTENT BENEFITS
Hyland Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific regions presales associate VP Arsalan Minhas stated that UK-based insurance company Aviva was able to reduce its yearly IT costs by about £3.1-million by using Hyland's content solutions to modernise its repositories.

"Aviva had 1.3-billion objects still running from a mainframe system. This has now been moved to a cloud platform and there are currently 1.7-billion documents that the company holds," he said.

Further, in addition to the yearly cost reduction, the company also saw a £1.6-million-a-year improvement in terms of operational benefits, he noted.

"The company had struggled with control and compliance in terms of EU General Data Protection Regulation. However, we were able to significantly automate its manual, work-intensive processes and aligned that to a customer-centric architecture, and we are satisfied that it complies," he said.

Meanwhile, African insurance company Ayo had the stated intention of offering hospital and life coverage to everyone in Africa through the use of mobile phones.

"Mobile phones are ubiquitous in Africa, but relatively fewer people have access to other devices such as laptops. The company used Hyland's tools to deliver an automated claim processing solution.

"Before the change, claims took about 11 work days to process. Since the change, Ayo has reduced this to two to three days, and to as low as three to four hours in some cases," Minhas said.

Ayo also uses messaging app WhatsApp, which is readily available and known to users. To file a claim, a user opens WhatsApp and contacts Ayo. The user is then asked simple language questions through an automated process, and also confirms their cell phone number and their hospital claim number.

The clients could then upload documents for the claim. The Hyland-based system used ML image recognition solutions to extract text from handwritten notes, if these were submitted by clients, highlighted Minhas.

This information is then used to populate the claims forms for users and for Ayo employees.

Further, the company had full and real-time visibility of the number of claims being processed each day, as well as the nature and status of the claims, he added.

"By combining content and automation with AI, we can start to deliver content intelligently, as Ayo is doing."

Hyland was leveraging AI to enhance content. The AI was used to identify a document as a policy document, an insurance document, bank statement or pay cheque. It then enriched that document and applied the appropriate metadata, including adding value-added tax, for example, he said.

"These are things people should not have to waste their time doing. The use of AI in content automation helps to inform and improve decision-making. It drives insights using historical data and keeps knowledge workers informed and provides them with recommended next steps as part of end-to-end automation," he illustrated.

"Hyland is at the intersection of content, automation and AI. We are helping customers with their digital transformation journey by supporting their drive to innovate and improve business outcomes," averred Minhas.

The company is busy with a genAI pilot programme. It is working with 20 customers on some of the key use cases in different industries, including insurance, public sector and legal, among others.

Hyland aims to deliver an AI and ML service in June, he said.