Agnostic ABBYY marks its territory as the intelligent capture specialist in end-to-end process automation.

Waaay back in the robotic process automation (RPA) olden days of 2017, HFS released our Triple-A Trifecta model. It is a simple Venn diagram that shows the intersection of automation with artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics. These elements are all valuable in their own right, but they are exponentially valuable together because they enable broader and potentially end-to-end process automation. Today, many enterprises are making progress with RPA and realizing that it does a great job of automating structured tasks and rules-based processes, but its core functionality does not address unstructured data. For any processes that require data or document capture, such as invoicing, claims processing, loan processing, or customer onboarding, the immediate practical complement to RPA is machine learning-enabled intelligent capture. With the Triple-A Trifecta on the brain, HFS attended ABBYY’s recent customer- and partner-focused Content IQ Summit in Nashville to see how the company is faring as a viable solution to help enterprises get more from automation.

ABBYY doubles down on enabling end-to-end process automation

ABBYY is an evolving intelligent content capture company that’s been around as a solid if not differentiated solution partner since 1989. Its core business has historically been very specialized, selling capture software to IT organizations to support distinct capture or document processing functions within enterprises. In these specialized document processing functions, success and advancements were often couched in terms of improved technical functionality like enhanced readability percentages rather than the broader business outcomes that the documents being processing supported.

ABBYY realized a few years back that the demand for its capabilities was expanding as businesses began to view capture as a key capability in broader process chains rather than as a siloed process unto itself. RPA was a major catalyst, which opened up an entirely new ecosystem of partners and buying centers. In the words of ABBYY’s CEO, Ulf Persson, the company “chose not to fade into history” and instead left its familiar comfort zone to embrace emerging automation solutions and the evolving world of business-led transformation. This pivot heralded its move to its “Content IQ” strategy, which supports enhanced growth and profitability at the intersection of cognitive capabilities and capture.

RPA is great at automating deterministic tasks governed by structured data; unlocking unstructured data remains the holy grail

One of the unsung benefits of RPA is its ability to enable business leaders to take an active role in technology-enabled transformation. Business operations leaders continue to adopt RPA to automate business processes, typically at the task level. However, as they become more fluent with RPA’s capabilities and begin to better evaluate their existing “as-is” processes with an eye to improvement or reinvention before automation, they realize they need greater functionality to achieve more than modest improvements.

To put a fine point on it, HFS’ 2019 voice of the customer research with 255 super users of RPA across 30+ customer experience dimensions highlights that customers are most satisfied with core RPA capabilities—automating rule-based processes based on structured data. And RPA is quite scalable in this capacity (Exhibit 1). However, for the second year running, RPA customers cite the need for enhanced cognitive functionality to process unstructured data as RPA’s biggest limitation. Related to this, even better OCR capabilities make the list of necessary improvements.

Exhibit 1: RPA is great at automating deterministic tasks governed by structured data. Getting beyond this remains the holy grail.

Source: HFS Research 2019, Robotic Transformation Software Customer Experience (CX) Survey
Interviews with 255 super users of RPA (enterprise clients and product partners) and 311 product ratings across 30+ CX dimensions

The evolving RPA plus intelligent capture ecosystem

The need for the RPA-plus-intelligent capture combo pack is not new. WorkFusion pioneered the space in 2014 with Smart Process Automation. Automation Anywhere launched IQBot in 2015 to complement its core RPA product. AntWorks entered the fold in 2015, leading with intelligent capture enabled by RPA. And Kofax, despite having RPA and capture under its product umbrella together since 2013, began promoting the integration in 2018. Despite the early combo impetus, it’s taken multiple years of RPA fits and starts to create a context for the value of combining these capabilities. It’s go time as enterprises start to move up the curve to intelligent automation in their quest for transformation (Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2: The path to integrated automation

Source: HFS Research 2019

The benefits of being agnostic

As an evolving capture company with no in-house RPA toolset, ABBYY has done a great job of leveraging this agnosticism to forge partnerships with RPA software companies to enable tool integration. UiPath is its biggest relationship, followed by Blue Prism. Even Automation Anywhere is a partner despite IQBot. It has additionally built numerous partnerships with specialized RPA services firms (e.g., Symphony, Accelirate, WonderBotz) and global consultancies and system integrators (e.g., the big four, Accenture, Capgemini). ABBYY is truly surfing the RPA wave; closing several hundred deals in 2019 alone related to RPA while retaining its identity as an intelligent capture specialist.

An opportunistic follower versus a proactive leader?

While ABBYY is doing a great job of surfing the RPA wave, it also needs to advance its product line to be more business-user friendly. To this extent, it launched its ABBYY Vantage product in April 2019, designed to bring easy-to-use capture and cognitive capabilities, which it calls “content IQ skills,” to enterprise automation teams. As reported at its Content IQ Summit, it has its first Vantage customer and a growing pipeline. Vantage is designed to be integrated and consumed by a host application like RPA.

RPA has been a godsend for ABBYY. However, the reliance on RPA puts it in the slightly uncomfortable position of being a contingent supporting player. It’s not the lead solution like it was in its pure capture past. In its boldest move yet, ABBYY decided to acquire TimelinePI, a process intelligence company, to help mitigate this. The Timeline proposition, now being touted as Process IQ, is to help enterprises address process change with baseline process understanding obtained through process mining. It’s an interesting new tip of the spear potential for ABBYY. Process IQ could put it in a position to lead engagements as enterprises realize that they need to understand their “as is” processes to unlock the full potential of automation through process improvement and process reinvention as well as the thus far largely ignored post-automation process monitoring. But being a proactive market leader will be its biggest challenge yet as it strives to move from its current approach of providing “Content IQ” to its 2020 vision of delivering “Digital IQ,” the value-based intersection of content and process.

The Bottom Line: A Triple-A Trifecta approach to automation yields greater dividends than piecemeal tools alone.

It’s common sense, right? In the history of technology-enabled change, no single tool has ever driven transformation by itself. It takes a toolbox approach plus a gigantic helping of people and process change, as depicted in Exhibit 2. RPA plus intelligent capture is the most tangible example of emerging Triple-A Trifecta combos. Despite not being new, it is finally being recognized and adopted. ABBYY’s role as an RPA-agnostic intelligent capture specialist is helping push this combo pack forward. While HFS sees loads of potential for the broader process mining market as a valuable complement to process automation, the jury’s still out on ABBYY’s evolving play here.