David Cushman — HFS Research[00:05]
Hello and welcome to this latest HFS Research Hot Vendors videocast. This week I’m with Ansari Ismail, who is the CTO and co-founder of Botminds. Now, Botminds is an intelligent document processing technology with a difference: it applies search to the data it captures. Botminds can capture data from multi-page, knowledge-intensive documents and dynamic websites. Built-in AI models enrich, extract, classify and validate the data, and built-in analytics surface usage trends, so enterprises can use vertical search for knowledge management to identify outliers and exceptions, or to provide alerts for actionable insights, such as identifying a due date from which to trigger a process. The business currently employs around 40 people, with teams in the US and in India. We named Botminds an HFS OneOffice Hot Vendor for reimagining the interplay of a sweep of key components in the delivery of end-to-end processes and integrating them in line with the internal silo-busting demands of the OneOffice. We applaud the ambition to change the way document-centric process automation is achieved. So, Ansari, what made you think search was the key to better document processing?
Ansari Ismail — CTO and Co-Founder, Botminds[01:37]
Hey, thanks, David, for having me. This is a great question. Search, in my perspective, is truly the right way to unleash knowledge from unstructured data. So we are doing intelligent document processing. What does that mean? The end goal is to get knowledge and insights from those documents, and search is the right way. When you search, ask a question, and get answered instantly with modern AI technologies, that’s how we can help all the enterprise companies. So we want to integrate search as a core part of our platform.
David Cushman — HFS Research[02:12]
And to what extent is this whole revolution in generative AI, the ChatGPT stuff that everyone is talking about, going to have an impact here? Because I can imagine, for example, being able to search with natural language across all of the documents in an organization, which of course have been pre-validated by that organization, and come up with some pretty interesting responses. Are you seeing that as a threat or an opportunity?
Ansari Ismail — CTO and Co-Founder, Botminds[02:45]
Absolutely, this is an opportunity. It’s a very exciting space we live in, and I’m really looking at the AI world and chat — it’s very beautiful what’s going on. Today in Botminds, what we do is that we brought in all the latest technologies, including large language models, the LLM, which is the underlying technology for ChatGPT. We bring in those technologies as part of our search capability. Today in Botminds, for example, you can upload millions of documents, ask a question, and get the answer. The exciting thing about generative AI is that it’s no more just extracting — it generates by reading multiple documents, combining the answer, and giving you the right answer instantly with the references. The days are gone when you read and search and search and then get the stuff. No, you combine every answer together in one line and get the right thing you want. That’s really exciting, and it’s not a threat, it’s a beautiful opportunity for all of us. This is the right way to go, and I’m looking forward, you know, in the coming years, it’s going to be exciting, particularly how enterprise companies are going to start leveraging these technologies. And a company like us, our job is to bring this state-of-the-art, integrated platform to help enterprise companies as soon as possible, so that they can start leveraging these technologies.
David Cushman — HFS Research[04:07]
So, as you say, very exciting times. Let’s go back a little bit to maybe the beginning of the story of the business. What made you decide to set it up in the first place? What was the thing that was bugging you about the way the world was, that you thought you could maybe do better? Maybe just talk us through your journey from there to now.
Ansari Ismail — CTO and Co-Founder, Botminds[04:33]
Yeah. It was almost eight years ago that we started this company. I was part of Microsoft at that time. I was working in Microsoft Research; that’s my background. I was on the AI side. One of the problems I saw is that automation was evolving, AI was kind of independently evolving, but these two things were not coming together. And one problem I specifically saw is how to use AI to process unstructured data, including documents, PDFs, Word files and emails. It’s very challenging. Without bringing that AI capability into the automation world, automation is stuck. So we wanted to bring automation to the next level. What we decided to do is start a journey of bringing automation and AI together, so that we get into truly intelligent automation. Our AI capability is all about how to process unstructured data and bring that AI capability integrated with automation. So that’s how we started this company, eight years ago. While we were growing, our enterprise customers brought a lot of feedback to us. Then we added two more exciting components on top of AI plus automation: search and also analytics. Search is so important when you look at the automation space holistically. People today do automation separately, AI separately, search different, analytics different — it’s not the right way to do it. It has to be brought together now in one single vertical product, and that’s how you can really take automation to the next level. So that was the start of the journey with the two components, AI and automation, but today we added two more, which are search and analytics. Now all of this together is in one single platform in our Botminds.
David Cushman — HFS Research[06:37]
So perhaps give us an example of where the benefit lies in bringing all of those together. Is there a case study or an example that you’ve worked through with a client that’s really brought to life why this is the right approach?
Ansari Ismail — CTO and Co-Founder, Botminds[06:55]
Oh yeah, it’s a very interesting way to look at it. When we were working with enterprise customers, we looked at case process automation. A case could be anything — invoice process automation, or mortgage process automation, and all those kinds of case process automation. What we have seen is that it certainly needs AI to process unstructured data, and not only that: while you’re processing millions of documents, unless you enable the business people to search the right content at the right time, it’s so hard to fine-tune and then make the automation as best as possible. And then also analytics — while you’re processing these millions of cases, you always want to ask, hey, what’s happening in the last quarter? What’s going on in the summation of those varieties of values? Analytics is so important. We want to bring all of them together. Now, the most important unique value is that because you bring all of them into one platform, any complex automation can be done in just one week. People get surprised sometimes — you onboard a complex automation in less than a week. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. One, we did a massive, huge background-check automation, and our overall onboarding time was literally two weeks, but every other proposal my customer got was like one year. So one year and two weeks is a massive difference. Within two weeks, we were able to build 15-plus AI models and 20-plus RPA bots, all combined in one single platform with the right kind of visualization and analytics into an automation — we completely got it done. The same thing goes for our healthcare customers too. We did a case-processing automation for pharmacovigilance, and this whole end-to-end automation was completely done in less than a month because of the power of this platform today. That’s why this vertical integration is really essential, and that’s the insight we had a long time ago, and we want to continue that momentum and build this holistic thing today.
David Cushman — HFS Research[09:15]
That, on the face of it, sounds amazing — to be able to be the difference between two weeks to value versus a year. So I guess the question is, how is the market reading what you’re doing? How are you seeing market challenges developing? It’s become a very disaggregated market, the whole IDP space, automation, RPA. Everything’s heading in different directions; even UiPath has put RPA on the back burner and would rather not talk about it these days. So what are you seeing going on in the market, and how are you dealing with how the market is changing?
Ansari Ismail — CTO and Co-Founder, Botminds[09:54]
Right, you’re right — the RPA world is going on, the IDP world is different, automation is different, and analytics companies are different. And today ChatGPT companies are different. Bringing all of them together is a little hard problem, and putting that value to the customers is very challenging. Those who extract just the email ID from a PDF, they call themselves IDP companies, and, all the way, those who do end-to-end automation by processing a knowledge-intensive document are also IDP companies. So where we position is very straightforward: any large, complex automation, because we solve only complex problems in the world today. One page, 1,000 pages, 100 pages, knowledge-intensive documents, complex unstructured data, and you want to do end-to-end automation completely covering the last mile — that’s where we come in. So when we talk to our customers, if they say, you know, I have just a small problem, then probably we may not be the fit; we solve the large, complex automation you want to do. That’s where we come in, and then customers are really understanding today. They kind of see the noises, but if you remove the noise and you want to solve a complex automation problem, yeah, we are really helping there. And also the speed matters, as I said. You can quickly experiment in a week or two weeks, so that you know what direction you’re going — that matters a lot. So without investing a lot of money and a lot of time, you can quickly get to this hyper-automation world. So that’s our pitch, and so far it’s great momentum now.
David Cushman — HFS Research[11:38]
So tell us a bit about your growth plans. What do you intend to do, where do you see the business, maybe in the next 12 to 18 months? I think we’ve got a clear idea of your vision. How do you see yourself delivering on that idea of leading with search into this market?
Ansari Ismail — CTO and Co-Founder, Botminds[11:55]
Now, with this brand-new AI world, search is now going one level next — it’s like a chat, converse, ask. It’s about ask-me-anything rather than a search. So we are evolving there. We recently brought a chat technology into our platform. We call it ChatMinds, like Botminds. Now, with that, you can upload millions of documents, unstructured data, ask a question, and get the answer. So this is the direction we are going. In the next 12 to 24 months, our plan is to continue the momentum, because a lot can be done in enterprise companies when it comes to process automation. We’re just touching the surface right now. A lot can be done, so we want to continue to help enterprise companies. Every process in enterprise companies should be automated. We need to liberate all the humans so they can do much more exciting work in this world, and that’s why we keep pushing enterprise companies from a technology perspective. So we are literally bridging research and engineering, plus serving our customers. Any brand-new technology, we will take it; we are also doing research on top of it, integrating it and taking it to the customers — that’s our core. So the next 12 to 18 months, my focus is to continue the momentum and help enterprise companies really in terms of faster automation, so that at the end of the day they should see the value through our AI capabilities and also speed up the automation overall.
David Cushman — HFS Research[13:32]
OK, so you guys might be a way in which companies can get a taste of what this new world of AI will actually deliver in terms of speeding processes up and getting work done. There’s lots of chat at the moment, quite literally, and people want to see some action. So if you have one last message for our enterprise viewer or listener today, what would it be? What would you like them to take away from today?
Ansari Ismail — CTO and Co-Founder, Botminds[14:06]
See, the world is changing very fast. Automation is something that’s been happening all through the last decade. AI is also coming, but now AI and automation are going to the next level today. So in my perspective, three things are super important. You automate as many processes as possible — but not just automate; bring the best AI so that you automate in the right way. You’re supposed to re-engineer the process altogether. You can’t just automate the existing process; re-engineer the process and bring the best AI possible. So, automate as much as possible, bring the best AI, but combining these two, there’s a third important element: speed, speed. I’m insisting here — speed. You cannot put money and time to think about a one-year or two-year timeline. No, it’s supposed to be done in a month, two weeks. This is where you bring in technology, both automation and AI, focus on the speed, and automate as quickly as possible, and then transform your business. This is what I would say to every enterprise company today in the modern world. Speed matters a lot, and that’s where Botminds-kind-of companies help. We are focusing on rapid automation — two weeks, how you build a complex automation using automation and AI. So that’s how my thoughts are here.
David Cushman — HFS Research[15:34]
And Ansari Ismail, thank you very much. I’m sure our readers, listeners and viewers will be very glad to hear that, and we’ll be taking a close look at how Botminds develops over the next few months. Thanks for your time.
Ansari Ismail — CTO and Co-Founder, Botminds[15:52]
Thank you so much, David.
