Automation Hero’s new comprehensive document processing features change the game for companies

Why is everyone talking about document processing? There’s been an uptick in enterprise-level automation combined with an influx of new documents. At the same time, customer expectations around documents are higher than ever. There’s now serious urgency around turning the world’s unstructured data into usable, structured data, and — as remote work becomes the new normal — fewer people are sitting in offices making this happen.

What was once cutting-edge for documents just a few years back is now table stakes.

“The dream is for a computer to be able to view and process the document the way a human does,” says Pyramid Solutions’ automation consultant Stephanie Kiefer, an expert in document processing who follows the field. “There’s no reason why technology can’t achieve that perfection these days.”

Automation Hero is working to make that dream a reality with three new capabilities in its end-to-end automation platform. 

Leveling the playing field

In the past, enterprise companies needed a handful of expensive, hard-to-use tools to process a document end to end. Only mega-companies with an army of developers and data scientists could afford such tactics. With our latest release, we’re helping to level the playing field.

Our three new AI capabilities can handle structured, semi-structured and unstructured documents with fluidity — meaning they allow limitless possibilities for intelligently automating complex workflows — and still generate extremely high accuracy rates.

In combination with the point-and-click functionality in our new Flow Studio, the features are easy for a non-technical crowd to grasp. When all this gets rolled into one platform, it makes automation more accessible to all. 

Our platform can handle a wide range of use cases in the most document-heavy industries — like insurance, healthcare, law, and banking. 

Keeping humans in the loop

Automation Hero’s existing innovative user interface effortlessly keeps a human in the loop, so he or she can steer self-learning, stepping in where needed to review exceptions. 

Our new capabilities 

Classification 

Lets you instantly determine the category of a document. What type of email is this? For example, a busy insurance contact center team can spend less time analyzing emails and more time talking to customers.  

Extraction

Makes it incredibly simple for non-technical users to retrieve any type of data from a document. Who is the plaintiff in this court document? 

OCR

Quickly turns images into text and processable data. This includes words, handwritten phrases or signatures, images, QR codes, checkboxes, and complex tables — with impeccable accuracy. What’s the date on this insurance claim? 

How it works in the real world 

Let’s say an insurance customer’s fish tank breaks, causing significant water damage to the floor and wall of her home. 

The client emails a claim to her homeowners’ insurance company. The email includes a photo of the damage, a receipt, an account of what happened, and an attached policy. 

Using Automation Hero, the insurance company could instantly:

→ Use Classification to detect the email’s basic content and intent (water damage claim)

→ Route the claim automatically to the appropriate department and flag it as urgent, since water damage quickly leads to other types of damage 

→ Automatically reply to the customer requesting other types of supporting documents

→ Use Extraction to pull data from the attached contract, including a policy number, which could be automatically cross-checked using database lookup

→ Use OCR to extract the amount of the fish tank and record this information as part of the claim  

In the end, the fish can be saved. And with intelligent automation, both the insurance company and the client save hours of valuable time. 

(See how we saved Markerstudy and Kin Insurance hundreds of hours of work in their claims processing and underwriting operations.)  

Where documents are headed 

Just five years ago, document processing, also called capture technology or input management, was still evolving, with low accuracy rates and limited industry use cases. 

Now, digital transformation has picked up speed and AI is changing faster than ever. Every year, AI models leapfrog each other, doubling or tripling in accuracy and efficiency. 

But high-accuracy AI models are just the beginning of the workflow around documents. Companies must harness an end-to-end platform with a range of technologies under the hood to process complex documents efficiently and at scale. As the world gets more complex, dealing with unstructured documents should be as easy as using Excel spreadsheets. 

Intelligent automation is the connective tissue between systems, no matter what the size or age of the company. In fact, says Kiefer, at Pyramid Solutions, the end-to-end aspect of document processing can be most difficult for more established companies. “There’s a lot of room for improvement,” she says. “The longer the company’s been around — the more room there is.”