The system has the ability to learn the patterns and processes like any new employee would
Andrew adds: “It’s important to visualise what AI can do and so we do a simple demonstration to show how inSTREAM has learned to understand the meaning of content. Using a smartphone, we photograph some articles from a newspaper and email them to inSTREAM and it can tell us what they mean. It can do this because it’s already read thousands of articles like them before on the BBC News website. News articles fit into categories like politics, health, sport, entertainment or crime and by reading thousands of these, inSTREAM has learned to recognise the pattern of each article and categorise them. And it can do hundreds of these every minute.
The inSTREAM system is already in use by customers including Carphone Warehouse, Kuoni and Davies Group. For travel firm Kuoni, inSTREAM receives over 15,000 tour documents per day from 185 countries and in 40 different languages. Processing all of this information used to require 60 people. It now requires six, despite the fact that volumes have increased by 50% in the last few years.
Mark Tabone, Director, Products and Services for Equiniti, says: “Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is becoming more industry specific. What now differentiates service providers is the ability to articulate big ideas. To take financial services as an example, the majority of the large UK clearing banks are wrestling with their costing ratios. Aligned with that you’ve got the new entrants to the market, which are concentrating on products and marketing but don’t necessarily want to carry the fixed cost assets or middle and back office. Clearing banks want to cut their cost base and that’s where we see innovation like inSTREAM playing a massive part. The service providers that can make big dents in banks’ improvement programmes will be the ones that get round the table and work with them.