A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Appian World conference in Denver. What a beautiful location to spend a few days. As someone from flat coastal Virginia, I am always amazed at how those Rockies just rise up from the earth! It was a week of learning and catching up with clients, coworkers and friends. If I had to summarize the conference, I would do it in two letters – AI. Of course this is no surprise. AI (artificial intelligence) is the focus of any business automation conversation. The difference now, is that it’s becoming real – we finally have the tools to make it a reality for business.
Put AI to Work in Your Business Processes
Every company wants to “do” AI, but it’s been difficult to know what this really means for your business. How do you implement AI in a work setting so it’s secure and trustworthy? Where do you start? The answer is, very methodically.
AI is not magic. It needs to be directed, guided and contained. Sound familiar? AI participates in your orchestrated business processes, just like your human workforce. And since Appian is The Process Company it only makes sense they are leading the charge.
One of the speakers walked through the Levels of AI as it relates to business processes. It’s the maturity model of AI automation, or what Pyramid Solutions refers to as “Crawl, Walk, Run.” These are the levels Appian described:
Level 0 – Using business rules to guide the process. This is your standard workflow where a business process is controlled by a system set of rules and defined paths. This is the first step of preparing for AI – it helps ensure your business operations are consistent and efficient.
Level 1 – AI-assisted. In this scenario, the business user is still in charge of making decisions, but with assistance from the AI copilot. This allows your defined business process to ‘be smarter,’ for those known situations and questions. AI makes recommendations allowing the business user to spend less time on manual work.
Level 2 – AI Agents actively participating in the business process. In this scenario, specific tasks in the business process are assigned directly to Agents. This is the natural next step from level 1. Once the AI-assisted steps are proven to be running well, these tasks get assigned directly to the AI Agent. These AI tasks will require governance and periodic evaluation as AI engines can change over time, but this level of AI automation can greatly reduce manual efforts in a business process.
Level 3 – AI Agent determines the process. In the previous three scenarios, there is a structured business process that defines the ordered steps and decisions that the process will follow. Once you make it to this level of automation, the AI Agent actually determines the process. Appian announced the beta of Agent Studio. This tool allows the user to define the following:
- The task assigned to the Agent
- Available data
- Available tools (e.g., standard Appian objects like processes)
From this information, and based on intelligence that is determined through its previous lifecycle, the Agent determines the appropriate discrete decisions steps, defining a process that has not previously been modeled. When I said AI is not magic, I might have lied! By using system objects like processes and business rules plus internal information that has been gathered from past processes, AI has what it needs to make autonomous decisions.
Put AI to Work in Your Document Processes
As someone who’s been focused on IDP (intelligent document processing) for many years, long before that was the buzz word, I was of course intrigued by where Appian would go with this. When I first started doing document capture 20 years ago, clients wanted to throw all their papers on a scanner and magically they’d be organized, classified and the data extracted. Back then, that wasn’t remotely possible (although as a tech seller, of course I didn’t say it quite so bluntly!). Fast forward to today and that is not a far-fetched concept anymore.
Appian provides a set of ready-to-use AI Skills that are pre-trained capabilities to help automate document processes, including document classification, data extraction, PII extraction and document summary, to name a few. These Skills are built by Appian and based on machine learning neural networks and apply to both structured and unstructured documents. Additionally, we can augment these pre-trained models with client-specific data. Furthermore, these document processing capabilities are built into the Appian business process, so there’s no need to have a separate IDP tool. And of course, there is still the concept of reconciliation (or human in the loop) for those documents that are a bit tougher to understand.
Appian Understands Business Requirements?
There’s one more capability that I can’t wait to get my hands on because it will directly and personally automate MY job: Appian Composer. The goal of Composer is to build an Appian solution directly from the business requirements. Wow, you mean I can just drop my current RFP in and voila, my job is done. Sign me up! Well, maybe not exactly, but I can’t wait to try it out. Stay tuned to hear more about that!
I am excited to see how Pyramid Solutions can utilize these new features to help our clients incorporate AI into their business processes, whether it’s a state government case management solution, insurance claims processing, or a financial institution onboarding use cases. If you want to learn more about the powerful capabilities of the Appian automation platform give us a call to see how we can help you!
