CONTRIBUTOR
In the Media and Telecom (M&T) industries, an underutilized resource lies in wait: Unstructured data. Trapped within a labyrinth of legacy contracts, customer service records, and operational documents are invaluable insights that could redefine cost-efficiency, revenue assurance, compliance and business responsiveness.
Yet, extracting this valuable information presents significant challenges for business leaders, beyond the traditional use cases of invoice processing, customer service inquiries, etc. Recently, a conversation with a telecom company revealed the difficulty they faced in understanding the threat of eviction based on their tower lease agreements. These agreements involved three million documents of 32 document types, and the company was finding it impossible to extract usable insight.
The question is: How can M&T companies mine this data wealth effectively and use these insights to scale automation across the enterprise? This is where Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) steps into the spotlight.
Unleashing the Power of IDP: The Multiplier Effect in Action
An intelligent approach to data extraction and processing IDP is rapidly becoming a high priority for organizations striving to digitize their workflows. According to an SSON Research & Analytics report, 68% of shared services practitioners now see IDP as a high priority for their process optimization efforts.
This AI-driven technology enables the swift, accurate extraction of relevant data, optimizing for volume, variety, veracity and velocity. But the beauty of IDP is that it goes beyond mere extraction and establishes a streamlined document pipeline from data intake to actionable insights. With a powerful combination of technologies such as NLP, deep learning models, OCR, AI analytics and neural networks, IDP increases the accuracy and speed of extraction while reducing errors and manual intervention.
Companies are increasingly deploying IDP to improve business outcomes. For instance, a large telecom company employed IDP to revolutionize its contract review process, boosting workforce productivity by 70%, processing over 700,000 mobile tower lease contracts, and saving over $20 million. Similarly, another company processed a historical load of 30K+ customer contracts in just one week. Identifying key contractual terms and clauses, quick comparisons with standard templates, and risk scoring, accelerated M&A programs and led to a 70% increase in workforce productivity.
The versatility of IDP allows businesses to apply the same solution to multiple applications. This reduces the need for separate solutions for each document type, improving efficiency and accuracy across different workflows. This multiplier effect is one of the key advantages of IDP, enabling businesses to maximize their return on investment. For instance, M&T companies can use IDP to:
- Optimize power tariffs or tower lease rentals by swiftly extracting relevant data from various documents, potentially saving millions in overhead costs.
- Unearth revenue assurances in complex, decades-old contracts, offering a clear view of financial commitments and highlighting areas of potential revenue leakage.
- Respond quickly to subpoenas with efficient information retrieval from a sea of documents, ensuring prompt, accurate responses.
- Ensure contract compliance and reduce non-compliance risk by rapidly and accurately extracting relevant data and flagging potential issues.
Next-Level Synergy: The IDP and Generative AI Fusion
Today, when most enterprises strive to create a connected business, merely extracting data from documents is not enough. The downstream systems – whether another system, bot, or human – should be able to consume this information. Unfortunately, most extracted information does not lend itself well to consumption. It needs to be processed and transformed to answer questions like “How do I reduce costs on legacy network operations?” or “Why didn’t the client pay the billing invoice?” The ROI lies in being able to answer these questions to create business impact. And this is where generative AI can make a massive difference. With large language models, businesses can extend IDP capabilities to front-office functions, such as marketing and customer service teams.
Generative AI turbocharges the capabilities of IDP, enhancing its impact in several profound ways. Firstly, it democratizes IDP by making it accessible to a wider range of use cases and sectors. With generative AI, businesses can go beyond merely extracting data to generating new, value-driven content based on that extracted information. For instance, a company can use IDP to extract data from thousands of customer feedback documents and then employ generative AI to create personalized responses or promotions. Secondly, generative AI boosts IDP’s accuracy. Generative AI can adapt and refine its algorithms to better interpret complex or ambiguous documents by continually learning from the data it processes, increasing overall accuracy.
A New Era of Unseen Opportunities
In a world rapidly moving to end-to-end automation, the right solution for document processing will be crucial for holistic digital transformation. IDP proves a potent solution, processing millions of business documents quickly, efficiently, and economically.
The symbiosis of IDP and generative AI signals the dawn of a new era for the M&T industry where the sum is greater than its parts, prompting businesses to look beyond traditional use cases and uncover the transformative opportunities hidden within operational complexities.
