A guest blog post by Anthony Macciola
Enterprise Content Management, Production Capture, and Document Transformation have been around for 35+ years. Their origins center around scanning, manually indexing and publishing documents to content management systems for archival and shared retention.
Over time, the industry has focused on reducing human touch points, associated labor cost, and increasing visibility into the content contained within documents. Production optical character recognition (OCR) became mainstream, as did forms recognition (classification), field level data extraction, text analytics, and natural language processing (NLP). The capture market has leveraged various forms of AI for 25+ years, long before AI was popular.
The emergence of Digital Transformation has caused the capture market to shift from an autonomous, batch oriented, back-office focus to an integrated, transactional, in-process service focus. This shift was the catalyst for the emergence of what we now know as the $5B+ Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) market.
Up until recently, the service to license ratio associated with deploying IDP solutions has been high… The cost associated with setting up, training, fine-tuning, and scripting document transformation-related support tasks has been daunting. Fast forward to today and recent advancements in AI are revolutionizing the IDP industry. The service dependencies associated with IDP deployments are being shattered by advancements in multi-modal transformation, key-value-pairing, machine learning, and generative AI.
IDP’s back-office, document-centric focus has influenced the legacy architectures for many of the dominant IDP providers. As a result, the shift from back-office automation to front-office, customer experience automation use cases requires a significant change in approach. New entrants to the market (post the back-office to front-office shift) do not suffer from these legacy IDP architecture constraints.
Enter Customer Experience Automation (CXA): The next generation of AI driven platforms solely focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences by automating customer engagements in all shapes and forms and through any and every channel of engagement. An interesting dynamic occurs as the shift from back-office process automation to front-office experience automation unfolds. The historic IDP focus on documents must expand to include a much broader variety of content. It’s not just about capturing business documents. It’s about capturing and understanding all engagement related content such as email, texts, spreadsheets, videos, and audio. It’s about having an interactive dialog with the customer and asking them questions to gather the information needed to complete the engagement.
IDP vendors have been so document focused (and to a large extent back-office centric) the transition to front-office, content centric, experience automation is likely going to require material retooling and a significant investment in time and money.
The next generation of Customer Experience Automation (CXA) vendors have built their platforms with this knowledge and foresight in mind. Leveraging AI to generate optimal and satisfying customer experiences along with the ability to capture and process any sort of experience related content.
Here’s just a few examples of how Intelligent Experience Automation differs from Intelligent Document Processing:
The emerging customer experience automation market segment requires a broader definition of IDP to satisfy its automation objectives. As a result, Intelligent Experience Automation is poised to surpass IDP and become the new bar for processing customer experience related content, enabling CXA platforms to automate customer engagements. Designing your customer experience automation strategy is essential to success in digital transformation. Making sure your engagement automation strategy is capable of supporting your CXA initiatives will be key to any future success.