Kasun Illankoon spoke with Sinuhe Arroyo, the CEO of TAIGER, on how AI is playing a crucial role in increasing sustainability for businesses
1. Tell us how Taiger has been performing over the past 12 months?
TAIGER is the market leader and pioneer of Knowledge Process Optimization. We have been growing at a phenomenal rate. In the last 12 months, we more than doubled both our revenue and headcount year-on-year. This has earned us the distinction of being among the top five most-valued AI companies in Singapore.
Earlier this year, we secured US$25 million in Series B funding and we are now valued at US$110 million. This has made us one of the fastest growing startups in Asia. Moreover, our cutting-edge AI solutions have garnered awards and recognition from organizations such as Gartner, Citibank and Red Herring.
2. How can organizations in the UAE go paperless by leveraging solutions from TAIGER, in line with the Paperless Strategy?
Document processing exists in every industry. It is both labor intensive and costly, making it difficult for organizations to scale their operations. AI can be harnessed to implement a paperless strategy, but it takes a special set of AI technologies to emulate human-like intelligence and propel organizations towards a true paperless work environment.
TAIGER’s patented approach of melding various AI disciplines to process unstructured data (such as power of attorney, board of resolution etc.) and structured documents yield an industry leading accuracy rate of more than 85%. This is also backed up by the contractual KPI we work with clients to determine and achieve, helping banks and government agencies reduce paper-driven processes, saving costs and processing time.
As an example, TAIGER worked with Santander Bank in Spain to transform the way they onboard non-customer SMEs. By automating and digitalizing the main steps of onboarding, Santander successfully reduced the time taken for new customers to open an account from an average of seven days to just 15 minutes compared to the traditional in-branch process.
3. How do you enable digitization and business sustainability through AI and cognitive technologies?
AI and cognitive technologies exploit the meaning of structured and unstructured information with accuracy to streamline key business processes. The result of this is increased efficiency and an overall reduction of costs and human risks. To make this happen, TAIGER has a specialized portfolio of products which include intelligent information extraction, semantic search engine and humanistic virtual assistant.
• Intelligent information extraction (TAIGER EXTRACT) – Automatically identify, extract, cleanse, validate and store key pieces of information from any kind of documents with a record 85% and above accuracy, with proven 90% and above reduction of processing time.
• Semantic search engine (TAIGER SEARCH) – Going beyond mere keywords to understand users’ complex queries, related content, expand searches and recover corresponding documents more efficiently and precisely.
• Humanistic virtual assistant (TAIGER CONVERSE) – Understands complex user queries, and informs, recommends and transacts, with a record 80% and above deflection rate.Together, these solutions help automate manual yet complex tasks intelligently, driving business sustainability by taking on tedious but mission critical processes.
Tell us what role AI and Knowledge Process Automation plays in helping UAE meet its goals for a sustainable infrastructure?
Knowledge Process Automation/Optimization (KPO) refers to a style of automation where back-end installed software integrates with an organization’s core systems through APIs as part of an overarching organizational transformation initiative. KPO automates complex cognitive tasks involving comprehension, intelligence, skill, and judgement complementing Business Process Automation (BPA).
With this, organizations in the UAE will be able to automate, simplify, and improve on tasks that require specialized intelligence. An example of this would be the automation of medical claims processing and reimbursement or the digital automation of processing trade settlements.
To build a sustainable business and technology infrastructure in UAE, organizations must be able to harness technology that is scalable and applicable to tasks of all levels of complexity. This is where KWA/KPO comes in, to process large amounts of unstructured data or to significantly cut down on the manual human effort that is needed. This helps organizations improve efficiency, save cost, and reduce risk – critical factors that ensure sustainability of businesses in UAE.
4. Are there any obstacles or barriers you foresee with the use of AI?
While AI has become more tangible, measurable, and repeatable across industries, its value remains elusive to a wide range of business leaders. For example, a global report by McKinsey states that 80% of businesses in the accounting industry are still holding back on AI adoption as they are still uncertain about the return on investment due to a lack of concrete business use cases.
The value of AI is clear, but to encourage widespread adoption, we need to demystify AI and provide a clear roadmap for organizations as they look to start implementing AI to their business processes. We are already seeing organizations establish AI Centers of Excellence and other sandboxes to pilot AI capabilities. This is reminiscent of cloud adoption when it first started – slow initially, followed by quick and widespread adoption once businesses started to see the clear benefits of cloud computing.
Business leaders need to understand that those who can identify applications for AI and implement it in a highly scalable way can get the most value from their structured data, unstructured data, and their employees.
5. What are the future innovative technologies that TAIGER plans to introduce?
At TAIGER, we are focusing our research and development efforts in technologies that relate to deep learning and self-learning. We hope to integrate these cutting-edge technologies into our portfolio of solutions to help organizations further streamline key business processes that are time and labor intensive.