We sat down with Bill Johnson, VP of Sales at Parascript, to discuss his philosophy about the industry, Parascript’s unique approach to partnering with its clients, and how the latest machine learning technology is helping to change the way companies operate. Before joining Parascript, Bill was responsible for regional sales, channel management and partner development at Ephesoft. He was also Founder and CEO of Result Oriented Solutions, Inc. and Image Information, Inc. that integrated data extraction solutions as part of their award-winning business solutions.
Parascript in the Industry
R2: My first question is for those out there who are not in the know: What is Parascript?
You may not know who we are, but you use us every day.
Bill Johnson: You may not know who we are, but you use us every day. If you’ve ever addressed a letter and sent it, our software made your letter more likely to reach its destination. If you’ve ever deposited a check via ATM, chances are our software helped your check get processed faster. There are over 3.5 million ATM’s in use today, and Parascript is the driving technology in 9 out of 10 devices.
Parascript’s signature recognition and verification software reduces risk and the occurrence of fraud, protecting your money and identity. If you’ve ever used a PDA, our technology contributed to the core technology that advanced PDAs.
R2: You mention of PDAs: How did Parascript play a role in that?
BJ: Want to talk about innovation and pivotal contributions? No one is better than Apple and Microsoft to exemplify innovation and progress. Parascript was a core technology in the Apple Newton that led to the PDA movement with Palm Pilot and others following. The natural evolution of personal enablement led us to the Tablet device, and once again, Parascript was in the middle of it with Microsoft.
Think about all those CGI movies we watch and Virtual Reality games we play every day. Ground breaking technology was developed by Parascript and sold to Silicon Graphics that arguably made them the de facto innovator of their time.
R2: So that gives us some context. Where do you see the industry at today, and how does Parascript fit in?
BJ: In the ever-present quest to do more with less, reduce cost and increase efficiency and throughput, Parascript—with its vast experience in artificial intelligence and machine facilitated self-learning—further automates business processes, reduces errors and as importantly, requires less human intervention, both at the configuration and system maintenance level, as well as being able to adapt on-the-fly to new forms, documents and formats. Document and transaction acquisition is the very first contact for a business transaction; and the more accurate and efficient you are there, exponentially improves process performance downstream.
Our software analyzes over 100 billion documents a year.
To give you a sense of just how big Parascript’s impact is behind the scenes, our software analyzes over 100 billion documents a year for financial institutions, government agencies and the healthcare industry. We’re unique in that we help our clients help their customers re-imagine data enterprise-wide. Our automation gives you faster access to better data.
Like Batman’s butler, we just get it done—invisible without the glory, but essential. Can you imagine Batman without Alfred Pennyworth as his sidekick?
R2: Batman wouldn’t be nearly as fun. What’s next for Parascript?
Machine Learning and Further Advances
BJ: That’s the exciting part. Parascript is all about automation through advanced machine learning, which solves the ever-present challenge of cost and complexity of advanced document capture solutions.
Parascript software automatically adapts to changing streams of documents.
Here’s a system that automatically configures itself and adapts to changing streams of documents. Simultaneously, it measures and improves performance—all without the typical time and expense of professional services. While leading systems have “learning” capabilities, these systems are based upon the combination of user-supplied instruction and automated template creation. So these systems require a user to sit with the application and tell it where the required data is through an explicit action. And then, the system builds rules that define where the data is for each document type. This process requires a lot of work to do the initial configuration and often creates a large, unmanageable system.
The Parascript approach is to analyze documents in a way much like Watson analyzes data through self-learning. You can provide it a structured form or you can provide tagged samples, and it will analyze and automatically create a “document map” with only a push of a button. Once in production, it collects background data from operations and uses it to measure and improve performance with no change to existing workflows. By working in the background, it eliminates manual efforts to configure or optimize the system.
All of this intelligence is portable. The results of self-learning are stored in a file that can be transferred or shared from one system to another system.
If you found this interview interesting, you may find this ebook and webinar useful, too:
>>Free Download: Document Processing Automation | Robotic Process Automation
On-demand Webinar
Check out the SIG Webinar in which Harvey Spencer Associates VP of Research Mike Spang and Greg Council take an in-depth look at document processing automation at the core of cognitive RPA and its impact on operations. We focus on how to close the gap between document automation project launch and goal realization based on actual use cases. We examine the current state of document automation in cognitive RPA application deployment, recommended steps for a successful RPA document automation project, provide examples of business processes that have been improved by leveraging cognitive RPA with document automation at its core and identify the best task candidates for automation.
>>Webinar On-demand – watch at your leisure: Document Processing Automation at the Core of Cognitive RPA