AntWorks: Delivering Cognitive Process Automation Solutions for Intelligent Enterprises

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming every walk of life today. From chatbots and robotics, to self-driving cars and sophisticated enterprise applications, the technology is taking over significant pieces of the global economy. AI-powered applications enable organizations to integrate information, analyse data, and use the resulting insights to improve decision-making. A company which is creating new possibilities with data through automation, digitization and enterprise intelligence is AntWorks™. In an exclusive interaction with Analytics Insight, AntWorks Co-founders, Asheesh Mehra and Govind Sandhu, share how the company is helping organizations globally to amplify people, products and businesses.   Analytics Insight: Kindly brief us about AntWorks, its specialization, and the services it offers. AntWorks: We —AntWorks™ — are a global, artificial intelligence (AI) company; creating new possibilities with data through automation, digitization and enterprise intelligence. We are the only providers of an integrated, intelligent, enterprise-level automation product that is powered by Fractal Science. With the world’s only platform that understands every data type, we digitize every bit of information for a diverse range of industries. Our competitive edge lies in creating human-like bots in a code-free environment. This allows us to innovate new ways to automate complex processes. Our solutions power up enterprises with accurate insights through an integrated, intelligent, technology stack that automates and learns independently. In short, we accelerate the new, constantly.   Analytics Insight: With what mission, AntWorks was set up? Tell us about your journey since inception of the company? AntWorks: Antworks’ vision is to create a nimble AI and Robotics-driven company that would future -proof businesses through Machine Learning, Natural Language Modeling and Pattern Recognition Technologies. The founders, Asheesh Mehra and Govind Sandhu with 40 years of corporate experience behind them, identified the glaring gaps in the current Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market. RPA customers today are paralyzed by the unstructured, inferred or image data that is passing through their systems since they cannot process them. These results in stalled automation programs that directly impact the bottom line. To bridge the gaps in the Automation market, AntWorks developed and deployed ANTstein, a unique platform built on Fractal Science. ANTstein helps solve a myriad range of customers’ problems through an integrated, single-stack, intelligent automation suite. This combines advanced data ingestion with industry-agnostic automation capabilities. Today, we work with more than 200 clients in 9 industry verticals across 8 countries and as the industry matures, the opportunities ahead are immense Our mission across the company remains the same as the day we started – to be fresh, fearless and fast – in who we are and in whatever we do.   Analytics Insight: Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now. AntWorks: For us, the only challenges that are interesting enough to talk about are the challenges we help our clients overcome. Everything else is just details. For the largest insurer in the United States of America, AntWorks extracted and processed the right information from over 50 million documents annually by utilizing cognitive technology, natural language processing, and machine learning. That said, as an industry, customers need to look beyond OCR. OCR depends on character recognition, which renders it incapable of handling different types of unstructured data that typical RPA systems meet everyday. Pattern recognition technologies such as what we work with and build, are far superior in dealing with the challenges of unstructured data. Another industry-wide issue that has worked to our advantage is that currently the total cost of bots ownership is prohibitive. Typically, customers pay for expensive developers to develop and then maintain bots. The AntWorks platform enables code-free bots. Business users can pull in drag and drop pre-fabricated components to run their RPA process. These tectonic shifts in the industry are a huge opportunity for companies like ours. It is gratifying and a source of great motivation for our team to see the leap of faith that several forward-thinking clients have taken with us. The future belongs to them and we are delighted to be a part of their success stories as we forge our own.   Analytics Insight: The industry is seeing a rising importance of business and technology enablers like virtualization, convergence and cloud. How do you see these emerging technologies impact your business sector? AntWorks: At ANTworks, we see no negative impact of these emergent technologies – if at all it has been positive since ANTstein is both On-Premise and Cloud-enabled. We have recently signed a partnership with Red Hat. Many of our customers want to deploy on the cloud and there is increasing awareness about the efficiency, affordability and flexibility of functioning with virtual machines.   Analytics Insight: How does your company’s rich expertise help uncover patterns with powerful analytics and machine learning? AntWorks: Most platforms leverage neural networks which require huge datasets. Other than Facebook, Google, and Amazon, no company has access to such huge datasets. The AntsWorks platform uses a hybrid of Fractal and neural networks. This allows its bots to train on much smaller data sets. That reduces the training cycle times for bots and positively impacts support infrastructure expenditures.   Analytics Insight: How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead? AntWorks: We see ANTworks as problem-solvers in a fast-paced industry of the future. We are small, focused and resourceful and we see ourselves at the forefront of ushering in the age of Cognitive Automation. While most automation companies are adding their intelligence post RPA, our platform applies cognitive technologies like Machine Learning and Natural Language Modeling prior to RPA. This results in smooth, seamless automation with high levels of accuracy. The future will belong to point solutions. We are predictably seeing customers from the Banking and Insurance industries, but more than ever there is growing interest from the heavily regulated industries in this technology. RPA is non-invasive, sits outside core systems and helps customers maintain audit trails- a necessity of these industries. As a company, we are also working very hard to create a different kind of work environment and culture for our employees – fun, irreverent, flat and talent-led. We want to attract and retain men and women who share our ethos of working smart at the highest levels of integrity and who foster a culture of continual learning and innovation, to serve the best interests of our clients. For AI and Robotics right now, the world is its playground. As these exciting technologies make deeper inroads into newer frontiers such as healthcare, exploration, transportation and waste management, ANTworks will be right there dreaming, creating and delivering not just solutions, but also the jobs, roles and opportunities for the future.