Kodak Alaris has revealed the creation of AI Foundry, a business dedicated to helping organizations process and learn from structured and unstructured data through the use of proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. The launch marks the next phase in Kodak Alaris’ evolution as a provider of information management solutions, building on the success of its award-winning document scanners and capture software “which power business processes in many of the world’s largest companies.”
The International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. It recently reported that unstructured communications and related content – such as email, pictures, instant messages, documents and other formats – account for 90% of all digital information. This unstructured content must be read and understood before a response can be created and a business process initiated. As a result, organizations require new automation solutions to address the volume and variety of unstructured data – or face increasingly labour-intensive B2B or B2C processes.
“Unstructured communications are a disruptive force to an enterprise, breaking automation and adding costs to business processes while driving down customer satisfaction,” said Steve Butler, General Manager of AI Foundry. “AI Foundry was established to harness the power of artificial intelligence to understand amorphous data and provide smarter ‘context aware’ information management. With our end-to-end solutions for automating business processes, enterprises can work with AI Foundry to solve customer-experience or content-management problems holistically and drive the greatest ROI,” he added.
Artificial-Intelligence-based solutions, said Kodak Alaris, are especially powerful when used to understand customer communications and take action (whether responding to an inquiry, building a knowledge base or initiating a workflow process.) By adopting this new wave in technology, organizations can deliver more accurate responses on the first interaction, reduce handling times, minimize transaction costs and increase staff productivity. More important than just saving money, businesses can now drive up customer satisfaction and loyalty by creating much better customer experiences, said Kodak Alaris.
AI Foundry’s flagship offering, Info Insight, is ideal for businesses across a variety of industries and vertical markets – such as insurance, healthcare, retail, logistics, utilities and anywhere customers interact electronically with their vendors. The algorithms underpinning the solution rely on linguistics (i.e. semantic understanding) to make sense out of unstructured communications, while learning in real time and “getting smarter” over time. Info Insight also incorporates smart routing to send inquiries and suggested responses to the “best person” while considering that person’s skill level, availability, time zone and even language.
“The name AI Foundry aligns with our iron-clad solutions for understanding and managing unstructured communications,” said Alan Swahn, Vice President of Marketing at AI Foundry. “The core advantage is that Info Insight uses natural language processing to read and understand unstructured information from all media that we use to communicate in our daily lives – including email, web chats, text messages, email attachments and social media content. Traditional rule and keyword-based systems just aren’t up to the task of solving today’s problems. Our new breed of ‘context aware’ information management positions AI Foundry to capitalize on the explosive growth of unstructured data.”
According to a report by Forrester Research, AI is evolving quickly in this decade, and will become part of the daily engagement of customers with computers, devices, wearables, and systems we interact with to get tasks done, get answers, get support in making decisions and automate repetitive tasks and actions.
Kodak Alaris announces its AI Foundry Artificial Intelligence Business
