We’re thrilled to announce our strategic partnership with NICE, which combines Hyperscience’s industry-leading Intelligent Document Processing solution with NICE Employee Virtual Attendant (NEVA) to enable more enterprises to harness the power of automation to transform how they work and serve their customers.
Hyperscience automatically classifies complex, diverse document types, including handwritten customer forms, machine-generated PDFs, and distorted or low-resolution images, and extracts machine-readable data. The solution continues to learn on an organization’s data to deliver lower error rates and greater automation over time. Customers who choose Hyperscience experience a 67% increase in accuracy of data processing, up to 10x faster processing time, and over 90% cost reduction with more efficient and streamlined processes.
NEVA is the first virtual attendant bot geared specifically for the employee and is triggered by specific desktop actions to provide employees with contextually relevant real-time guidance. Pairing NEVA with any organization’s employees enables intelligent process optimization while unleashing employees’ potential to ensure exceptional customer experiences.
In anticipation of this exciting announcement, we chatted with Gareth Hole, Director of Robotics & AI at NICE, about our strategic partnership and what it means for enterprises and their end customers.
Hyperscience’s ability to take information from scanned documents and turn it into accurate and actionable data is a valuable AI and Machine Learning capability. By taking capabilities such as Hyperscience and combining them with the augmentation of employees in real-time, NEVA can help them to achieve things that they simply couldn’t do on their own. We’re now looking at the future of intelligent, real-time process optimization being able to unleash the true potential of employees to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Gareth Hole, Director of Robotics & AI, NICE
Tell us more about NICE’s strategic partnership with Hyperscience. Why Hyperscience?
Ultimately, it’s about business outcomes. Hyperscience is able to deliver outstanding results in real-world situations, particularly when it comes to accurately reading messy handwritten information. When that capability is combined with NICE’s Advanced Process Automation, it unlocks significant opportunities to automate and augment more business processes, which results in better business outcomes.
There’s a lot of marketing hype around AI, Machine Learning and Cognitive Automation. I like the fact we can cut through the noise and deliver real-world applications of AI with the resulting benefits.
What does this mean for enterprises and their end customers?
It’s incredibly exciting. Through this partnership, we’re helping to transform business operations and elevate customer service to the next level. It’s already possible to add AI capabilities to unattended automation to help with back office processes, but now that Hyperscience has been combined with NEVA, the NICE Employee Virtual Attendant, the options are almost limitless.
This is no longer constrained to the back office. Imagine a world where documents are no longer a barrier to automation in real-time, whether that be at border crossings, customs checkpoints, vaccination centres or customer service channels. Enterprises benefit from scale, efficiency, and error reduction. End customers benefit because of the ease of transacting with the enterprise. Everyone wins.
Gareth Hole, Director of Robotics & AI, NICE
What trends are you following in enterprise automation right now?
A lot of focus has been put on unattended automation in the back office. While that can deliver efficiency benefits, the more interesting trend is towards augmentation of people as they work. What we’re seeing around attended automation (i.e., popping up a form and handing off work to unattended robots in a virtual back office) isn’t thinking big enough. Organizations and their employees need real-time guidance and compliance being enforced, in addition to automation on the desktop. That’s where the greatest progress will come from, and it’s why we’re seeing so much interest in partnerships like this right now.
The other trend I’m following is desktop analytics and task mining. When you’ve got a robot on every desktop, you can gather information about how people are interacting with the different systems they use, and Machine Learning and AI can be layered on top of this to uncover some interesting insights. Tasks that you didn’t even know employees were spending time on can be surfaced and identified as ripe for automation.
How should enterprises be thinking about hyperautomation?
I think of hyperautomation as the application of innovative technologies like Robotic Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Process & Task Mining to augment workers and automate processes in a way that has much more impact than traditional automation capabilities. I see it as the ability to bring together the best possible decision-making, data analysis, understanding of the customer interaction, and real-time augmentation to deliver transformational business results and customer experiences.
NICE’s partnership and technical integration with Hyperscience is an example of this. Documents can be extracted from systems or e-mails by NICE robots and sent to Hyperscience for automatic intelligent document classification and data extraction. The structured data is then sent back to robots for processing into the relevant systems of record.
Given the cutting-edge AI and ML capabilities of the Hyperscience platform, there is a diverse range of documents and unstructured formats that can be handled and aren’t a problem anymore. Messy handwriting and blurred images would have been a huge challenge until recent times, but with Hyperscience, it’s business as usual dealing with them.
We want to enable people to do what they simply can’t achieve on their own and to deliver intelligent process optimization in real-time, while unleashing employees’ potential to ensure exceptional customer experiences.
So when thinking about hyperautomation, it’s important to not stop at the back office but to think all the way to the frontline of your business and how it can positively impact customer service.
What impact are you seeing from COVID-19 on digital transformation?
While these are unbelievably challenging times, one of the positives we can take from the current situation is the ability to adapt and innovate. We’ve seen it with the ability to produce vaccines at an unprecedented rate and to continually monitor and adapt to changing conditions with the virus. Similarly, businesses that have chosen to embrace digital transformation and used the pandemic as an opportunity to embrace innovation have been able to adapt and grow
At the beginning of lockdown, it was all about helping people work from home – buying laptops and routing calls and work. After that, it was about ensuring that key KPIs didn’t drop, and there was more focus on employee engagement. Now that many businesses are operating with a “work from anywhere” approach, the digital transformation agenda has only accelerated. I’ve been told by C-level executives that decisions that previously would have taken years to make (or in some cases, would not have been made at all) are now taking just days or weeks. It’s not too late to innovate for any organization out there and embrace digital transformation.
Even with a background of COVID-19 and the challenges we’ve all faced, I think there are many reasons to be cheerful about the future of digital transformation, particularly as the building blocks to achieve it are already here.
