Botminds.ai: Harnessing The Power Of AI And RPA For Advanced Document Understanding
Over the span of close to eight years, Robotic Process Automation has been experiencing an exponential growth. This technology came into being with the objective to emulate the actions of an employee interacting with various digital systems to solve repetitive, rule-based processes and handle structured documents. The Indian market has a two pronged priority when it comes to their expectations from an RPA player; cost effectiveness and high ROI. In essence, they want a solution, not just a software. To achieve this and ensure seamless automation, customers are in dire need of an end-to-end solution that essentially needs to cover the surrounding areas and not just the core process. With various advancing technologies such as AI and ML, RPA players have begun adding a variety of technologies, such as OCR, Computer Vision, document understanding, human-in-loop and so on, surrounding the core RPA features. However, most of these solutions available in the market are not proficient in dealing with large content or unstructured documents. The strategy proving to be a game changer in this market is solution providers building an RPA layer around their core AI offering to achieve higher levels of accuracy.
Spearheading the latter approach is Botminds, incepted in 2015, with Document Understanding AI at the heart of their offering that specializes in reading and understanding large content and unstructured documents just like humans do. This technology enables end-to-end intelligent automation that is highly customizable and needs no code. It takes 90 percent less (than standard) sample data to train the engine. “We use our patent-pending AI & ML technology to extract insights from documents & websites and get our customers up and running within a week. Customers are using our enterprise SaaS technology for tracking competitive intelligence, making investment decisions, analysing massive legal & tender documents to assess risk clauses,” informs Gokul Ganapathi, Co-founder and COO, Botminds.
Delivering Innovative Technologies
He goes on to walk us through the novel technologies the company is involved with. Being an AI-first company, the team of experts at Botminds have engineered the AI models to solve the underlying problem of Document Understanding. The team then proceeded to seamlessly integrate RPA to handle the upstream and downstream actions required to be carried out by a process.
By taking this approach, customers are offered the ability to create Cognitive components. This enables the user to effectively read and understand the document. An interesting feature about the platform is that it has semantic AI built-in as its core model. This permits the platform to attain complete understanding of a document, almost mirroring a human’s comprehension ability through headings, fonts, tables, positioning, and so on. “As part of vertical integration, we have multiple AI models that are pre-trained to handle individual specific problems and we orchestrate them to provide the desired solution. All this is done through point and click activities. There is no code to be written on our platform,” adds Gokul.
While it is not clear how AI makes a particular decision as it only generates an output to an input provided, Botminds provides Transparent AI. This permits viewing the confidence level or each of the trained models and see which model is performing at the peak and which one is not. The subsequent training can be done for the models that are not giving out the desired accuracy.
In essence, Botminds offers IDPA (Intelligent Document Processing Automation) which is a combination of RPA and Cognitive capabilities. This allows businesses to leverage the latest breakthroughs without dealing directly with the underlying technology/algorithms.
Bringing A Paradigm Shift To Document Processing
Based on this novel technology is DocuMind, one of the core offerings of Botminds. The aforementioned technology is leveraged by DocuMind to convert normal unstructured documents into Smart documents, extracting data in a human & machine-readable format, for further processing. The task can be to wade through hundreds to tens of thousands of pages with complex unstructured data, tables, running text, multiple document versions, multiple supporting documents, information/data scattered/referenced across multiple documents and DocuMind would still succeed effortlessly. This extracted information can be viewed anywhere anytime and is completely customizable. Additionally, it is embedded with a Deep Linking feature that mentions the link reference in the exported document, for the original document, so as to not lose context. Also, there is always a loopback that is available, in any format of the document that is exported.
The second key offering is WebBee engineered with the ability to navigate webpages similar to humans and extract information, at scale. This solution has been designed and developed post conducting an extensive research and gaining a complete understanding of the challenges that organizations face, in doing large scale navigation across the web, to extract the information. Keeping this in mind, the team built a powerful ingestion component, while addressing the challenges of scale, variety and website blocking. WebBee can crawl through any kind of website, navigate as a human, read and extract information, not just from the home page, but from all the pages right from the top-level website. This is achieved through human-like navigation and harnessing the power of multiple technologies, allowing WebBee to navigate without getting blocked. “We use our proprietary browser engine that embeds visual signals from the web pages for downstream ML processing, achieving a human-like understanding of web-pages. These pages render in our browser engine, making a web-page as a Smart webpage, allowing us to extract data and provide it in a structured format for consumption,” adds Gokul.
A Leap Into The Future
Taking huge strides in this domain, the team at Botminds is currently working on developing vertical solutions for the market.
A key market segment that is emerging for Botminds in India is KPOs. They typically have strong domain expertise, and some are niche service providers. KPOs have the knowledge workers who are handling large documents, complicated tasks, non-standard business processes and activities that do not fall under the traditional BPO 'processes', thus, untouched or say, out of reach for most RPA providers. As this means, handling unstructured data that spans hundreds of pages, the knowledge that is spread across multiple documents or web pages and needs to be condensed or gathered. Something so unique to what humans do, can now be done using Botminds Document Understanding AI platform. Botminds AI platform augments knowledge workers to achieve 10X efficiency. Botminds AI accelerates KPOs towards rapid non-linear growth by empowering them to automate many different processes using single horizontal platform. As a client reference, an extensive knowledge activity that took four days to complete is now done by Botminds AI platform in a matter of minutes.
Gokul concludes, “We are looking to expand our footprint in the Indian market while simultaneously focusing on the Northern American market, which has given us excellent feedback on the use cases and the need for a platform like Botminds.”
The Client Testimonial that Speaks Volumes for Botminds
“At Recognos Financial we perform daily data extraction on hundreds of PDFs including annual reports, municipal bond offering statements, material events and various other document types that total in the thousands of pages. These PDFs are constantly evolving with many sets of large tables. Rule based extraction methodologies are PDF specific and brittle. Minor changes require hours of developer time to correct. The no-code automation platform Botminds offers works across all PDF files (and other formats) with a single configuration. It rapidly understands and summarizes documents through a seamlessly integrated architecture that delivers results at high speed. Of equal, if not greater significance, is the high level of accuracy we are able to achieve using the Botminds tool. Over the fourteen years of our operation, Botminds has delivered one of the most disruptive technologies to our practice allowing us to rapidly scale the breadth and depth of data we can deliver to our customers. Anyone considering large scale data extraction should include the Botminds’ extraction tool in their tool kit.”
In a Nutshell
Incepted in 2015, Botminds was established with the aim of significantly improving the efficiency of document related processes. Over of a span of close to half a decade, the company has catered to a broad spectrum of well-renowned clientele. The company has a set process in place that is executed once the client is on-board. The team at Botminds can get its clients started with a Document Extraction problem, whether it is a financial document, balance sheet, company public announcement, tender documents, lease documents, legal papers and the likes. They can build up a POC within seven days and provide 80 percent accuracy, with only 100-200 examples.
Listed below are some of the differentiating factors that set Botminds apart from its competitors and place them in one of the leading positions in the market:
1. Ideally, customers spend up to four to eight hours per document per person for manual review. But Botminds offers 30 – 50 percent time saved on an average.
2. Most organizations have documents on multiple storage systems which pass several hands thus making it hard to achieve a holistic view. Botminds however produces a centralized repository of all documents and data.
3. The designated workforce dedicate hours per document looking for relevant information by re-reading text that has already been read before. This time could be better utilized elsewhere. Botminds extends Hyperlinks between extracted data and original text within documents along with efficient data search capabilities that find relevant information within seconds.
“Botminds is currently working on developing vertical solutions in the market, with a strong focus on KPO’s”
4. There can be instances of inaccurate in-house data being furnished based on multiple data sources and/or inconsistent reporting. Botminds ensures the delivery of accurate and consistent data with a complete link to the source of information extracted.
5. Manual data transfer to DMS/ERP/BI systems can often lead to inconsistent data transfer. Effectively combating this problem, Botminds provides its clients with tight upstream & downstream AI integration to efficiently transfer the data to the underlying systems.
All in all, Botminds offers:
• 90 percent reduced cycle time
• 60 percent committed savings of resources
• 45 percent productivity improvement
• 30 percent enhanced capacity
Gokul concludes, “We are looking to expand our footprint in the Indian market while simultaneously focusing on the Northern American market, which has given us excellent feedback on the use cases and the need for a platform like Botminds.”
The Client Testimonial that Speaks Volumes for Botminds
“At Recognos Financial we perform daily data extraction on hundreds of PDFs including annual reports, municipal bond offering statements, material events and various other document types that total in the thousands of pages. These PDFs are constantly evolving with many sets of large tables. Rule based extraction methodologies are PDF specific and brittle. Minor changes require hours of developer time to correct. The no-code automation platform Botminds offers works across all PDF files (and other formats) with a single configuration. It rapidly understands and summarizes documents through a seamlessly integrated architecture that delivers results at high speed. Of equal, if not greater significance, is the high level of accuracy we are able to achieve using the Botminds tool. Over the fourteen years of our operation, Botminds has delivered one of the most disruptive technologies to our practice allowing us to rapidly scale the breadth and depth of data we can deliver to our customers. Anyone considering large scale data extraction should include the Botminds’ extraction tool in their tool kit.”
In a Nutshell
Incepted in 2015, Botminds was established with the aim of significantly improving the efficiency of document related processes. Over of a span of close to half a decade, the company has catered to a broad spectrum of well-renowned clientele. The company has a set process in place that is executed once the client is on-board. The team at Botminds can get its clients started with a Document Extraction problem, whether it is a financial document, balance sheet, company public announcement, tender documents, lease documents, legal papers and the likes. They can build up a POC within seven days and provide 80 percent accuracy, with only 100-200 examples.
Botminds offers idpa (intelligent document processing automation) which is a combination of RPA and cognitive capabilities
Listed below are some of the differentiating factors that set Botminds apart from its competitors and place them in one of the leading positions in the market:
1. Ideally, customers spend up to four to eight hours per document per person for manual review. But Botminds offers 30 – 50 percent time saved on an average.
2. Most organizations have documents on multiple storage systems which pass several hands thus making it hard to achieve a holistic view. Botminds however produces a centralized repository of all documents and data.
3. The designated workforce dedicate hours per document looking for relevant information by re-reading text that has already been read before. This time could be better utilized elsewhere. Botminds extends Hyperlinks between extracted data and original text within documents along with efficient data search capabilities that find relevant information within seconds.
“Botminds is currently working on developing vertical solutions in the market, with a strong focus on KPO’s”
4. There can be instances of inaccurate in-house data being furnished based on multiple data sources and/or inconsistent reporting. Botminds ensures the delivery of accurate and consistent data with a complete link to the source of information extracted.
5. Manual data transfer to DMS/ERP/BI systems can often lead to inconsistent data transfer. Effectively combating this problem, Botminds provides its clients with tight upstream & downstream AI integration to efficiently transfer the data to the underlying systems.
All in all, Botminds offers:
• 90 percent reduced cycle time
• 60 percent committed savings of resources
• 45 percent productivity improvement
• 30 percent enhanced capacity
