In the one minute of time it takes to read the opening of this story, there will be 3.5 billion Google searches, 38,000 status updates on Facebook, and over 300 hours of new videos uploaded to YouTube. And that’s just a small fraction of the data coursing through the digital world every minute of every day.

It’s a major reason why digital intelligence tools are becoming more essential for enterprise companies and interest in automation continues to grow. One of the hottest fields in the space has been robotic process automation, which involves the use of software robots to automate repetitive, mundane tasks.

Gartner Inc. has called RPA the fastest-growing market in enterprise software, and recent spending data reported by Enterprise Technology Research has validated that conclusion. Yet, beneath the shiny exterior of a fast-moving industry, not all is running smoothly.

Two of the leading RPA players in the field have announced staff cuts over the past nine months, and there have been questions in some sectors around how to scale it effectively. This has created an opportunity for companies such as ABBYY USA Software House Inc. to address RPA’s value proposition in very precise ways.

“ABBYY is really specializing in some pieces of the RPA puzzle that I don’t think have been fully cracked yet,” said Robert Youngjohns (pictured), chairman of the board at ABBYY. “What are the processes to automate? It sounds obvious, but some companies are still struggling over that.”

Youngjohns spoke with Dave Vellante, chief analyst at market research firm Wikibon and co-host of SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE. They discussed how ABBYY’s platform identifies process flows, the importance of deriving insight from unstructured data, how the digital enterprise should look in the future and advice for companies during the pandemic crisis.

Deep-rooted analysis

ABBYY is not a new player in the business world. The company was founded in 1989 by a fourth-year student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Today, more than 50 million users in 200 countries rely on its solutions.

Youngjohns, who previously led cloud strategy for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and spearheaded the merger of its software business with MicroFocus, became ABBYY’s chairman in April.

ABBYY’s digital intelligence platform uses deep-rooted analysis and predictive classification to identify process flows in an organization. The goal is to find processes that provide the most value and then open the data floodgates to fuel them.

“As automation gets more sophisticated, the one thing enterprises are going to need to do is get very clear on their high-value processes, how they actually operate in practice as opposed to how they were designed, and then how to go about automating that,” Youngjohns explained. “To do that you need tooling at the front end, you need process identification. Then you have to crack the biggest single problem of RPA, which is making sure all the data that processes need to flow is available.”

Handling unstructured data

The critical problem confronting many businesses is that much of the data needed to power the enterprise effectively is unstructured. It might be printed reports, photos or audio, but it can also include social media posts and real-time streaming from internet of things devices.

Projections from International Data Corp. indicate that 80% of worldwide data will be unstructured within the next five years. That’s a compelling argument for firms such as ABBYY.

“The provision of the data that actually feeds these robotic processes often comes from unstructured data sources, documents, scans, PDFs, screen scrapes, and so on,” Youngjohns said. “It’s got to be captured in an intelligent way that recognizes the context in which the document existed and can therefore extract and feed it into the right parts of the automation sequence. ABBYY fits extremely well into that part of the RPA value proposition.”

Gathering relevant data can help. Yet, leveraging that to make real organizational change can be a challenge. A member of France’s second-largest banking group came to ABBYY for help with managing the flow of inheritance and credit cases, which was getting bogged down in cumbersome processes and complexity. ABBYY’s digital solution now intelligently classifies and routes content more quickly throughout the organization.

“If your traditional flow goes from A to B to C, but analytics show that in practice A always goes to C, well that should be your new business process,” Youngjohns said. “That’s trivial, but it encapsulates what we can do. That’s what we think the digital enterprise looks like.”

In the midst of a global pandemic, what many enterprises look like today is nervous. The significant disruption of daily life has created a business climate that is uncertain at best.

Youngjohns continues to advise a number of companies, large and small, and he has the same advice for all of them.

“Every company I’m working with is in cash preservation mode,” Youngjohns said. “More importantly, I’m getting people to focus on where they are when they come out of this. Have they built competitive advantage between now and the end of the year? Are they reaching out to customers right now that are struggling? That’s critically important.”

Here’s the complete video interview , one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE