Accelerating Revenues and Deal Flow with Cognitive AI Document Management

‍Cognitive Document Management for Real Estate Increases Revenue and Deal Flow

If you are trying to grow your business, document automation can help you accelerate and scale. Automation enables firms to meet increases in demand without hiring staff or risk decreasing revenues associated with document-related inefficiencies. However, not all automation tools offer the same degree of value to an organization. Cognitive document processing can automate a wide range of document workflows and processes, has a complete understanding of the content within a document and the context in which it’s used, and dynamically organizes content in real-time to make instantaneous document location and retrieval a reality.

The goal of cognitive document processing is to remove the remaining manual work that legacy IDPs (intelligent document processors) still require, and more automation means greater revenue potential and deal flow.

In this article, we’ll explain what content-aware document processing is, how it works, and what to look for when selecting automation platforms.

‍

‍

What is cognitive document processing and why is it important?

Today’s document automation platforms are “dumb” – that classic line – Garbage in-Garbage out summarizes their capabilities nicely. They work well if you make it easy for them by making sure your documents are in a predictable format and are easily understood by the system… and if they are not… well, that’s where the garbage comes out. Existing “intelligent document processors” or IDPs don’t alleviate the challenges associated with managing your business by paperwork.

Cognitive document processing understands what’s in each document (content-aware) and the relationships between documents (context-aware). Because they are content-aware, these platforms can find the data they need even if the document is an unstructured format – such as a memo or a letter. Content-aware document processors are also smart enough to do more than extract data based on keywords – the can interpret relationships between datapoints and perform secondary calculations and analyses to make data more usable by your business systems and automate processes more completely. Because these systems are also context-aware, they have the fundamental capability to understand the relationships between documents. Despite poor naming or disparate storage repositories, context aware document processors uncover relationships among content within documents. making it easier to search and find related content and documents, improving productivity and providing your organization with a deeper understanding of your document collections (in order to uncover insights faster and make data-driven business decisions).

ADEx’s AI-driven document automation platform is content-aware. It understands the content of your documents and knows how to get the datapoints you need to feed to your end systems or other workflows, even if secondary calculations or language interpretation is required to process the data. ADEx also understands how the content of a document relates to all other content in the organization, regardless of content type. Predictable, structured formats aren’t needed because Adex’s AI algorithms can understand the information that is contained within a given document even if it has never seen that document before.

ADEx’s AI-driven document automation platform is also context-aware. It can interpret the relationships between documents, regardless of location, file types and naming conventions. This capability enables ADEx to search across disparate collections of documents easily, and also organize documents into Smart Folders, so that related documents can be easily located no matter where they are actually stored or how they are named.

‍

What is the difference between Cognitive Document Processing and existing Intelligent Document Processors (IDPs)?

Most IDPs address “structured and semi-structured documents'' that are more predictable in format, such as receipts, invoices, and purchase orders. Even office leases have predictable content formats which can  be extracted with keywords. However, “unstructured documents” such as offering memorandums, contracts, letters, employment agreements and memos are nearly impossible for the average IDP to address completely.

During the course of your work day, you deal with many documents. Some are related to each other and some are not. You are responsible for keeping track of those document relationships AND reviewing each document to uncover relationships within the content that are important to the health of a transaction or business process. A cognitive document processing system evaluates, creates and manages these document and content relationships for you. And a truly intelligent, cognitive document processor also organizes those documents. It does not matter if it’s the discrete details of a specific transaction or orchestrating a complex workflow that spans multiple divisions and contains numerous decision trees.

Cognitive document processing platforms cover a broader range of documents and workflows because they can comprehend the text, automatically organize documents and creates a detailed table of contents for each document before formulating a dynamic taxonomy for interpreting the content. A cognitive document processing platform applies this dynamic taxonomy to thousands of unstructured docs that may arrive in unpredictable formats in order to retrieve relevant datapoints to feed end systems, working faster than document automation processors that rely on a pre-set taxonomy and keyword extraction alone.

By interpreting the contents of docs, content-aware document processing platforms can retrieve relevant data points faster from document collections that contain both structured and unstructured document types with less training, and therefore delivering faster, better ROI on automation investments.

‍

ADEx: Purpose Built for the Real Estate Industry

ADEx cognitive document processing delivers greater accuracy and more complete document automation than other intelligent document processors (IDPs). The key to AI effectiveness is training.  AL/Machine Learning (ML) models need to be trained to understand different types of content and what to do with it. This training takes a long time before an ML algorithm actually understands the content it’s working with. And if the training is poorly done, the system won’t work. ADEx’s cognitive document processing is built on AI models pre-trained and tuned for accuracy with over 7 million documents processed. It understands over 2000 documents related to the real estate industry, and is trained to retrieve over 4000 datapoints many of which are calculated and interpreted thereby going beyond your basic IDP. As a result of extensive experience and delivering more comprehensive results, ADEx can automate workflows faster with far less training or manual intervention than existing IDPs.

For example, ADEx’s cognitive document processing capabilities can provide deeper understanding of content and language, correctly interpret the relationship between “right of first refusal” and “right of first offer” and classify datapoints accordingly, eliminating the need for a team member to provide the necessary interpretation and manual data entry.

Since ADEx is an industry specific IDP, it’s trained to provide secondary calculations and libraries of pre-trained data points that take more of the manual work out. For example, ADEx can automatically calculate rent increases based on a CPI percentage and create the rent table. Or calculate the appropriate late fees even if they are a % of rent, and automatically put the calculated amounts into a table for analysis.

ADEx also offers broader content capabilities to extract and classify tables, site maps, signatures and images that occur within the content of a document, as well as better interpretation of handwritten documents.

On top of the pre-training, ADEx also learns about your business’s specific documents making ADEx data models even more effective in understanding, deconstructing, storing and making connections between documents in your organization.

The results speak for themselves. In benchmark studies, ADEx Document Intelligence extracted datapoints from highly complex documents - such as leases, operating statements, offering memorandums and rent rolls – faster, more consistently and more accurately than current staff, saving each team member an average of 8 hours per week and reducing operating costs by 60-90%. ADEx Document Intelligence has also enabled commercial real estate firms to increase revenue by 20-30%, because of its ability to successfully automate a broader range of complex documents in less time than a typical IDP system.

‍

What are the benefits of cognitive document processing?

At the heart of a cognitive document processing platform is the ability to quickly unlock the data that is trapped in documents of different types coming from multiple sources. Current systems actually imprison your content and data, making it difficult to access, utilize and run the workflows that run your business. By freeing your data from these closed systems, ADEx automates your document-related workflows while efficiently processing and using your  structured, unstructured, and unpredictable content formats. Other document automation platforms can’t do this.

‍

Stop your content from walking out the door.

Cognitive document processing platforms know your documents as well or better than you do and institutionalize all that great knowledge. Here is a core benefit of content-aware document automation that many often miss. When an employee leaves your organization, there is a risk that that content expertise and process knowledge walks out the door.

Document automation not only preserves detailed processes and proprietary knowledge related to your business, but surfaces  them for retrieval on demand, to be used by other team members and future employees. By combining automated document understanding with document processing expertise, AI models replicate the accurate and consistent process that rivals human review and this knowledge is retained until you want to change it.  The workflows, orchestration and content connections now live within ADEx and can be easily used as the backbone for business process orchestration.

‍

Can a smaller firm afford a cognitive document processing solution?

According to Indico, “85% of all data in large enterprises is unstructured." That means most companies who have implemented IDP solutions have not completely eliminated manual review and processing unless they’ve trained their machine learning algorithms over a significant period of time. For smaller firms without the resources or the time to train a platform to handle complex documents or provide automatic organization capabilities, a cognitive document processing solution system can deliver better, faster ROI and become a more affordable solution in the long run.

Cognitive AI document processing platforms understand a broader range of documents out-of-the-box, providing smaller organizations a more powerful, effective, turnkey option. In addition, ADEx’s extensive libraries of pre-trained models for real-estate related documents enable secondary calculations that make workflow automation even more effective for specific industries. Libraries of pre-trained models, tools and calculators, along with experience processing thousands of document types and millions of documents, can speed up the time it takes to reliably automate unstructured documents and deliver structured data to existing end systems, reducing your time to value and delivering faster, better ROI on workflow automation investments.

‍

More Intelligent Document Automation. Purpose-Built for the Real Estate Industry.

ADEx is the first purpose-built cognitive document processing platform for the Real Estate Industry that brings speed and agility to document processing and organization, eliminating manual processes in a more efficient way compared with other automation solutions. With pre-trained datapoints and a broad library of document types, as well as real estate specific tools and calculators, ADEx reduces the training time needed to get document automation to work, delivering better and faster ROI on automation investments.