foreign [Music] modern Finance is broken forcing Finance and Accounting teams to work like its 1985. the year Excel was invented here we talk about the struggles Finance teams face in fast-growing companies and discuss how they can spend less time catching up and more time in the clouds I'm your host Jake Jones multimedia producer and brand influencer here at Zone and Co and I'm joined this week by Maxim Vermeer senior director for technology marketing at Abbey one of our partners thanks for joining us today Max absolutely [Music] as we continue talking about OCR invoice scanning we brought our partners from Abby to discuss how artificial intelligence machine learning intelligent document processing and OCR invoice scanning all work together to automate your invoice processing Max it's great to have you on the show we're really excited to talk about Abby and talk about OCR invoice scanning and a little bit about intelligent document processing but before we get into that topic I want you to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself then also tell us about Abby and what you guys do yeah absolutely I'd love to again I'm Max I'm really glad to be here and I'm the senior director for technology marketing so again thanks for inviting me over Jake and Zoning Co I've been with Abby for a couple of years now about seven having gone through an entire range of different roles and functions at the company you know trying to get everybody out there to understand and evangelate really about what Abby does and how IDP intelligent document processing can really change people's lives that's what I've been doing at Abby so right now I'm responsible for technology marketing which is really great because I'm pushing together with the rest of the company for us to continue to be a leader in the intelligent document processing space so that's one thing definitely to know about Abby we are leaders simply because we combine our Innovation and experience to transform any kind of document any kind of format any language anytime into actionable intelligent outcomes for our customers so that they can actually focus on what's important to them and I'll have to deal with documents all the time and it's for that reason that amongst others Gartner and 10 other actual analyst firms have named as leaders in this particular industry so you know having been around for more than 30 years we have offices all over the world and large customers and in the Fortune 500 and actually if you count all of our customers there's more than 10 000 of them so we only have 20 minutes to digit so I'm not going to count every single one of them but there's a lot we have a large partner Network as well which is why I'm very glad to be here again working together with you on this podcast with Zone and Co absolutely we're so fortunate to have you guys as a partner started with fast forward to give just a little history of course fast forward is now part of Zone we're talking about this Arc about OCR invoice scanning and how that whole process works as I was talking with you Max Abby is not necessarily an OCR company your products play a huge role in how that process works so let's start with intelligent document processing tell me what that is and then how does that fit into OCR invoice scanning and that whole process that's that's really interesting so actually it's it's the other way around how those OCR fit into the intelligent document processing world the original technology was OCR optical character recognition building an engine that was able to guess from an image that was entirely unreadable by a computer on how to make that into actual data going from that image over into actual data so that's where it all started of course you know the usage for that is quite limited and if you think back couple of years when the whole conversation around AI began everybody was like oh computer vision computer vision it's new no it's not computer vision was invented in the 80s even before I was born it's been around for a while and that's why if you look at IDP so intelligent document processing OCR is one of the things that you need to be able to do that the intelligent document processing is about using amongst other things OCR intelligence models that actually are based on machine learning AI is people today call it and being able to make sense of the data inside of that document and turning that into actual information that can be used by the business that drives the business forward so everything around IDP is having straight through processing being able to take any kind of document you got for example in invoices where you have the actual AP process where you have lots of information in those documents coming in and going out that's where intelligent document processing takes you one level higher because it's great if you just do OCR that gives you instead of an image gives you text and that's it right and you still have to do something with it that's where intelligent Network processing takes it up a notch by adding several other Technologies to make sure that you actually get the content from that piece of text that's important to you in this particular process which makes all the difference happy being again in the space for more than 30 years we've seen it all complex line items complex documents different languages you know over 200 the languages that we support all over the world we actually able to process these documents which makes a huge impact on our customers being able to have more than just the OCR but actually being able to get the data that they need to forward that process and get high accuracy rates and get high throughput that's what's important for example one of our customers that we have they have yields as high as 90 completely automatic throughput nobody's touching any invoices anymore except for the exceptions of course because you still want to have that human interaction too we're not letting you know the Terminator loose on your documents not at all you're in control but it's actually helping you and that you actually see it in the market too that there's more and more about the assisted automation right so that's a term that's now being phrased quite a lot because people actually start seeing how Ai and machine learning can help them instead of thinking that it's going to take away from what they do you know it's going to assist you in what you do and allow you to focus on what's important and not so much on I would say competitive work that's such a message we've heard and a couple podcast episodes talking specifically about AI it's not that you want everything to be automated it's not that you want like you said the Terminator loose on your documents and in your system but if you can use AI smartly to assist you in the mundane it gives you a lot more freedom and time to focus on other things I'm sure we'll talk more about that as we go on but how does AI fit into OCR invoice scanning and then again intelligent document processing how it fits into that picture the eye part it's that's a technical jargon right so you know AI covers the umbrella term for everything in terms of machine learning computer vision all of it serves a purpose in the sense that it's what we deliver is applied AI so AI that you can actually use because if you look at periods that's theory about it that's the the scientists that are inventing it that's the mathematics but what business are looking for is the apply the audit that actually helps them move forward using OCR was one of the components which is the computer vision if you look at the AI umbrella term and then having data models being able to understand what is in that document and then actually extracting the information classifying the information and giving you the only the pieces that you need allows you to have a solution that gets you up to 90 process in a few minutes right so especially in invoices because it's such a use case that's out there everybody has invoices sometimes I really think it's what makes our world work is just sending other people invoices it's been done it's been tested it's been tried and it's something that we love helping our customers with because it's very successful and it gives you really great Roi one of our customers actually achieved a 91 reduction in invoice processing transaction costs so I'm not talking about how fast can we go from this image that we originally started from to the data no no the entire transaction cost went down by 91 simply because we added this Automation in we added the AI in it's taking you up that level so AI can really assist you in taking up your organization to a higher level and making sure that you can save both money and time together with our partners like zonenko before we get too far away from this question because it's such a Hot Topic right now a lot of companies are showing interest and how can we use this how can we take advantage of this the kind of question that I always have in the back of my mind is how reliable is this Ai and I've heard you say 90 91 that sort of thing a couple times now how reliable is something like this for as far as invoice scanning and helping businesses reduce some of that mundane work it's a great question right so the reliability does depend a lot on the experience of the provider I would say of these kinds of Technologies what you see in the market is you see a lot of Niche players focusing on a very tiny bit you know one single language or one single kind of format and then you get great results just like with everything if you focus really hard then you get ready results because that's the only thing you're working on but that's not how businesses work they get invoices from all across the world in all different kind of formats and all different kind of languages and that is what Abby specializes in specifically making sure that we can cover that breadth and that comes you know like I said both through our Innovation and our experience you know we've seen all of these different variations in a lot of different customers in terms of reliability as always bad data in there's bad data out so a lot of these things in terms of quality what you can expect at the end of it does stem from the quality that you get in at the start of it if we're talking about paper processes where you still get manual invoices no paper invoices the scanning part is important to get that quality of the image so that you can actually get good data out but in terms of the way that the machine learning the AI has evolved over time the techniques that are now being used it's become much more redundant in the sense that it does not require strict parameters on how we can think about things I used to compare it with when you're teaching a kid back in early days of school you're teaching them to memorize things but as you go higher and higher in education you actually are not taught to memorize things you're taught to reason and that's how you can actually see the evolution of IDP technology all AI Technologies in general as well they're starting to reason more and more in the back let's be honest it's still a lot of rules but if you have enough rules enough parameters built in it's starting to look a little bit more not not memory but actually reasoning that's happening that's all we're doing in our own brains as well so it's an interesting question but I think you know definitely we've been able to prove out that specifically certainly for an AP process invoice processing you can get very high numbers is very reliable but not to forget again we talked about the Terminator there's no Terminator here we're actually doing assisted AI so that also means that even if it does get it wrong you can give it feedback you can provide feedback to our platform to your platform and actually say you got this wrong this is how you were supposed to do it and it will incorporate that it will continue to learn because nothing's perfect and we're not seeing that anybody that promise you 100 out of the box don't believe them because nothing is perfect because it's still built by humans right it's important that you have that human Loop Factor too for two reasons one is what I just talked about so we can continue to train and evolve it but on the other hand it's also for people that are working with it to see this is helping me this is actually making my life easier and for that they actually sometimes just have to see how it works and what kind of benefits they can get from it and to see that they still have control it's a great explanation Max and I really appreciate a lot of that perspective of as you're taught as a child to memorize these numbers memorize these letters but then as you get older you have to think about it it's in the name machine learning right the AI is going to learn with you it's going to learn as you go that human element is just always going to be a part of it but it's how efficiently and how effectively can humans be working with this AI to really maximize what you're doing from your perspective and from Abby's perspective how can this OCR invoice scanning and intelligent document processing how can that affect a business's outcomes and results look at where we are in history right now because I think it's important what's currently happening in the markets what's currently happening in the economy in the world we've seen this before but I think it's important that businesses realize what that means you know the best way to learn from others mistakes is to look at the past see what happens it may look a little bit different but still there's a lot of repetition going on here this is always the perfect time to actually go into elevating your business looking at okay what can we do differently what can we do to ensure that we can endure within this new world order make sure that we actually come out better at the other end and for that you need to have good insights into what your businesses are doing and especially Finance leaders need to elevate their conversation and thinking about what is really driving my team what value is my team delivering is that entering data or is that thinking about our processes is that actually delivering the accounting is that giving insights to the business I definitely think it's a ladder and actually we saw that in some surveys for example the international organization of Financial Manager survey in 2022 revealed that about 75 of accounts payable teams report processing more invoices than most recent quarters you know up to 66 percent and actually that's interesting because what's happening right now you know after covet everything opened up again so that increased now we're going to see that this is going to fluctuate a little bit but still our economy will always pull through it always does and and everything's a cycle so you might as well start getting prepared for that Gartner suggests that by 2025 only 50 of B2B invoices will be processed without manual intervention so that is where the world is going in any case it's definitely something for again Finance leaders to be thinking about okay what should a focus be is that doing the process or is it about enhancing the process and I think that's really important you know continuous Improvement better operating margins investing in technology to gain new insights right because we haven't talked about that per yet if you only have your documents it's really hard to get that information at a glance and actually make sense of it if you have the data from it that's an entirely different story you can give much better insights you have much better decision making possibilities simply because you have access to the right information I think there's a lot to think about why these types of Technologies can really make a difference for a business how they can use it to shift the company from looking at costs you know how much does it cost to actual profit that's a huge difference when things are down you got to prepare for that Resurgence lots to think about there I I'd love to hear more of your thoughts Max on we've been talking about how these programs can help you be efficient and take away some of the manual work so that you know your team can focus on some other things obviously that's a huge impact when your Finance team can think about other ways to make your company money you mentioned the data this gives you a lot of data in a really easily digestible way talk about that a little bit like you said we haven't really touched on so I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on that if you think about how things have started to evolve it was only X many years ago that we put a man on the moon if you had a curve of how technology evolved it was like this and then suddenly it's it's doing that right it's going up and up and up and it's exponential and it's Moore's Law it's as simple as that actually we've already exceeded that long but that also means that we as humans have to deal with so much more data because there's more and more information being added to the organizations all of it is structured right so I wish that we were still in the time and age where everything in a computer was structured and it was easy to find the rooms might have been filled with mainframes but still it was pretty clear as to how it worked and what it did and what data was there today everything is almost unstructured if you think about it it's one less thing to worry about if you are able to very quickly get the right insights from your data inside of documents and again we're talking about you know the AP flow right now invoices really important very quick for the ROI very great for businesses to start looking at that but then you can start to evolve right and just having that data even if we are just talking about Finance having those insights is going to be a lot better than not having them that's pretty obvious just being able to gain those insights from your data that you have anyway you're just making it accessible that's a huge step up from any of your competitors I would say that are not looking at it that way yes there is your process that you have to do yes there's regulatory implementation that you have to follow but then you can get to work on looking at okay what are my vendors doing how are they working when am I receiving their invoices is there some cost saving I can do is there actually maybe some Revenue that I can start generating because I can go back to the business and say well if you can do this kind of deal differently well then we're actually going to get better discounts these are all things that you can only do and only see if you have access to the data so that's why it's ever important to make sense of all this information that's coming towards using AI again to help us get those insights make those decisions and put it to good work to that point as well you have to have all this information but then you have to have the time to actually really pour over it and think about it you know everybody's just trying to get by everybody's just trying to get to a successful sale what you may notice when you have access to all this data and again time to really pour over it you might be seeing problems that you didn't see before that you can find solutions for make the process easier more efficient it's just kind of a big cycle you know putting human eyes on the big problems and then letting the assisted AI take all the stuff that you've already figured out the process it's just a matter of getting it done a lot of great conversation we've had here today Max and before we go is there anything else you'd like to talk about or share or bring up about either intelligent document processing or OCR invoice scanning it's an amazing and exciting world out there around OCR and especially in diligent document processing maybe just from my end I would say use that as a great first use case for intelligent document processing AP invoices no-brainer the ROI is incredibly high as you guys know as well but then you can really get to work because you've already made back that investment then you can really get to work on everything else within the organization because there's so much more out there there's documents coming at us from every single angle and there's incredible amounts of useful data locked away in them that right now businesses simply don't have access to so let's get to work well Max you've had a great conversation all about OCR invoice scanning and intelligent document processing what it can do for your business how it fits into your work process how it can not only simplify your process and automate a lot of your process but it can give you a lot of data to really let you look over it pour over that data and make improvements for your business a lot of really good conversation again thank you so much for joining us Max and Abby we're really happy to have you guys as a partner and lucky and fortunate to have you guys as a partner it was really great to be here Jake so thanks again for inviting us I think it was great conversation I hope your readers and listeners and viewers are all going to find it interesting too feel free to reach out and find me on LinkedIn or just come over to The Abbey website designate the website there's lots more to explore I definitely hope to come back to your podcast Jake because it was a lot of fun we want to hear from you how has your business been positively impacted by intelligent document processes let us know by emailing hello sonancode.com Finance in the clouds post bi-weekly on Fridays if you enjoyed today's conversation be sure to subscribe to financing the clouds wherever you get your podcasts or watch us on YouTube on the zoneco YouTube channel also be on the lookout for articles and guides all about today's Topic at zoningco.com we will see you next time [Music] [Music] [Music]
2023-05-13