Alkymi Patterns tool uses AI to extract data from documents

Alkymi, a provider of business intelligence software for enterprises, today announced the launch of Alkymi Patterns, a tool designed to identify and extract data for automating backend processes that run on email and documents. The release comes as Alkymi’s revenue growth reaches 400% over the past 12 months, chiefly through financial services customer and partner acquisition.

The potential value in underused enterprise email and file data is immense, with a Veritas report pegging it at $3.3 trillion by 2020. But the process for unlocking can be challenging. Capturing business data — for example, when onboarding a new customer — requires operational resources and time with the possibility of data loss and mistakes. That’s why between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends, a Forrester survey found.

Patterns

Alkymi Patterns is aimed at enabling customers to extract data from tables and text, eliminating repetitive processing. Once a data pattern is created, Patterns can automate extraction jobs — like those required in banking, asset management, and insurance operations — to save time, capital, and resources while improving customer service and turnaround times.

Employing machine learning, computer vision, and an understanding of tabular data structures, Patterns — akin to Google’s TAPAS — can determine the context and location of data in rows, columns, charts, and text. Extracted data appears in the Alkymi user interface, email inbox, or app of choice, ready for human-in-the-loop review and export.

Users can tap Patterns to define the data they want to extract with search terms. These fields are assigned to a schema that can be used to automate the extraction of data points on an ongoing basis. Patterns’ mapping and formatting commands help organize information according to their own business logic and objectives. Moreover, they preserve data lineage, ensuring that data remains traceable back to the source.

Alkymi cofounder and CEO Harald Collet claims that Patterns can extract any type of data in virtually any format, layout, or naming convention.

“Alkymi brings computer vision and machine learning-powered automation into daily workflows, eliminating manual data entry by analysts and supercharging processes so that users can make more intelligent decisions, faster, and at lower cost,” Collet said in a press release. “Adopting Alkymi Patterns allows organizations to introduce automation and human augmentation even more broadly across their workforces.”

Value add

When McKinsey surveyed 1,500 executives across industries and regions in 2018, 66% said addressing skills gaps related to automation and digitization was a “top 10” priority. Salesforce’s recent Trends in Workflow Automation report found that 95% of IT leaders are prioritizing automation, and 70% of execs are seeing the equivalent of over 4 hours saved each week per employee. Moreover, according to market research firm Fact.MR, the adoption of business workflow automation at scale could create a market opportunity of over $1.6 billion between 2017 and 2026.

One Alkymi customer, SimCorp, says that it’s integrated Patterns with its platform to address inefficiencies and the growing allocations of limited partners. “Alkymi Patterns opens up a new universe of workflow automation for institutional investors who struggle to extract insights from unstructured data quickly,” VP of innovation Hugues Chabanis said in a statement. “Patterns can address … a lack of automation in alternatives.”

Alkymi Patterns is now available for all Alkymi customers using Data Inbox, the company’s automation product for email- and document-processing workloads. There’s no extra charge associated with it.