Future of Sourcing - Natural Language Processing (NLP) https://futureofsourcing.com/tags/natural-language-processing-nlp en Semantic Folding Solves the Problem of Too Many Emails https://futureofsourcing.com/semantic-folding-solves-the-problem-of-too-many-emails <div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://futureofsourcing.com/sites/default/files/articles/Semantic%20Folding%20is%20Solving%20the%20Problem%20of%20Too%20Many%20Emails.png"><a href="https://futureofsourcing.com/sites/default/files/articles/Semantic%20Folding%20is%20Solving%20the%20Problem%20of%20Too%20Many%20Emails.png" title="Semantic Folding is Solving the Problem of Too Many Emails" class="colorbox" rel="gallery-node-1988-ul77y9zCpi8"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://futureofsourcing.com/sites/default/files/styles/juicebox_medium/public/articles/Semantic%20Folding%20is%20Solving%20the%20Problem%20of%20Too%20Many%20Emails.png?itok=qGAlDgJX" width="624" height="325" alt="Semantic Folding is Solving the Problem of Too Many Emails" title="" /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-intro field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <h1>Semantic Folding Solves the Problem of Too Many Emails</h1> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-related-news field-type-entityreference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Related news:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/advantages-of-artificial-intelligence-in-enterprise-contract-review-and-analysis">Advantages of Artificial Intelligence in Enterprise Contract Review and Analysis</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Email management is a bigger challenge every year. In 2019, business email accounted for more than 128.8 billion emails sent and received per day, <a href="https://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf" target="_blank">according to the Radicati Group</a>. Adding to the challenge, many emails never make it to the right business account because they are sent to bulk accounts like <a href="mailto:info@company.com">info@company.com</a> or <a href="mailto:sales@company.com">sales@company.com</a>. Regardless of where the emails land, the average full-time worker spends 28% of the workday reading and answering email, <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy" target="_blank">according to a McKinsey analysis</a>. That amounts to a staggering 2.6 hours spent each day.</p> <p>Corporate email continues to rule in the business world, but the deluge is impairing productivity, not to mention becoming unmanageable from a corporate perspective. <a href="https://techjury.net/blog/how-many-emails-are-sent-per-day/#gref" target="_blank">TechJury cites</a> that at least five out of 10 emails were spam in 2019, but spam isn&rsquo;t the only problem. Oftentimes, the right email doesn&rsquo;t reach the right person within the organization quickly, resulting in operational delays and rising costs.</p> <p>The latest worldwide developments regarding confinement and, in some countries, the obligation to work remotely from home, have caused organizations and consumers alike to more heavily rely on email. This has generated a tsunami of emails for organizations used to other means of connecting with prospects and customers.</p> <p>In the financial services, for example, these requests and inquiries used to be handled via physical call centers, many of which are now closed. Customers and prospects are often directed to send their questions per email, which results in a huge increase in the number of written requests to be processed.</p> <p>Organizations without an automated process for handling incoming messages are at a disadvantage. First, there are the hard-dollar costs to pay staff to triage messages, and then soft-dollar costs of losing prospects and customers due to slow response time. Even those who have implemented some form of automation are concerned about the cost of improperly handling the messages due to challenges with natural language processing.</p> <p>As a minimum, a simple classification and routing system would help speed up the response time by forwarding the requests to the correct department.</p> <h2>Too Little Business Value Extracted from Emails</h2> <p>Emails represent an extremely rich and essential source of business information. However, extracting insights and relevant information is difficult and time-consuming. As the number of emails continues to grow, it becomes even more difficult, time intensive and expensive to realize the business value.</p> <p>The main issue is that emails fall into the category of unstructured data that is text heavy. This results in irregularities and ambiguities that make it difficult to automate the process.</p> <p>Most current technologies for email classification fall into two broad categories. Rule-based approaches classify text into organized groups by using a set of handcrafted linguistic rules. These rules instruct the system to use semantically relevant elements of a piece of text to identify relevant categories based on its content. Essentially, the system counts the number of word appearances in the text and subsequently classifies the content into predefined categories.</p> <p>This approach has several disadvantages. For starters, these systems require deep knowledge of the domain. They are also time-consuming, because generating rules for a complex system can be quite challenging and usually requires a lot of analysis and testing. Rule-based systems are also difficult to maintain and don&rsquo;t scale well given that adding new rules can affect the results of the pre-existing rules.</p> <p>Instead of relying on manually crafted rules, text classification systems based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) use statistical modeling. These approaches are usually more accurate than rule-based approaches; however, they involve building large-scale statistical models that are trained through machine learning (ML) using massive amounts of training data.</p> <p>In many instances, sufficient amounts of training data are not readily available. The process is slow, costly and complex, involving several iterations of data preparation, feature engineering, model training, hyperparameter tuning and evaluation. Even if more data is thrown at the model to become more accurate, there is still about 20% of text-based information that the model cannot precisely categorize.</p> <p>Additionally, most standard ML-based systems cannot explain why they made a certain decision. This &ldquo;black box&rdquo; effect is a substantial drawback in light of regulations such as the EU&rsquo;s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipulates that consumers have a right to know why and how corporations made decisions affecting them. Another issue with &quot;black-box&quot; models is they are hard to improve. If their predictions are wrong but there is no way to explain why, it is difficult to know how to fix the model so that it delivers the correct output.</p> <h2> Semantic Folding is Improving the Bottom Line</h2> <p>Now, there is an out-of-the-box solution for mining emails for business content and classifying them, that comes with standard filters and pre-built classifiers. If customized filtering is needed, it can be done with a fraction of the training data, as well as much higher accuracy and efficiency compared to other models. It is based on Semantic Folding, an innovative approach to Natural Language Understanding (NLU).</p> <p>Semantic Folding is a procedure for encoding the semantics of natural language text in a sparse distributed representation called a semantic fingerprint. This unique approach provides a framework for analyzing unstructured data such as emails similar to how the human brain processes language data.</p> <p>Semantic Folding is inspired by and based on the principles of cerebral processing and neuroscience. By applying neuroscience tenets discovered by scientist and author Jeff Hawkins to the realm of NLU, forward thinking technologies have been designed that can identify and analyze language faster and more accurately. Using Semantic Folding, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven algorithm can quickly and accurately categorize emails. The result is an intelligent, efficient way to analyze emails so organizations can tap the value they contain, even across multiple languages.</p> <p>Organizations that can figure out how to efficiently categorize and segment emails can improve their bottom lines, reduce costs, improve productivity, streamline and automate business processes, and serve customers better. The potential results are tremendous, as well as applicable to any business function. For instance, organizations can do the following:</p> <ul> <li>Detect and surface only relevant emails having to do with RFP and bid responses, budgets, forecasts and reporting for the Finance Department.</li> <li>Assist sales and marketing by extracting emails regarding requests for information, requests for quotes, market research, advertising and customer satisfaction.</li> <li>Surface emails about scheduling production, ensuring product quality and minimizing production costs to streamline manufacturing.</li> </ul> <h2>A Case Study in Customer Service</h2> <p>Customer service is among the most compelling use cases for email classification. For example,&nbsp;an <a href="https://www.cortical.io/solutions/message-intelligence/message-intelligence-case-study/" target="_blank">international transportation company</a> saw the benefits of an intelligent, AI-based semantic classification and routing solution to optimize email processing in customer centers. The company was coping with hundreds of thousands of emails sent every day in 35 countries in multiple languages. Teams were wasting huge amounts of time manually sorting out the emails that required action.</p> <p>An AI-based Semantic Folding approach was created to scale a secure web service that that ignores irrelevant emails and automatically routes business-relevant emails to the appropriate regional center, depending on the language used in the message. Only 50% of the emails that made it through the spam filters were relevant to a customer service case. Many of the non-relevant emails were automated confirmation messages providing updates about the status of shipments, such as a container left at a certain port or a container that was not loaded onto the intended ship.</p> <p><span style="font-size: 13.008px;">With the new solution, which was deployed in just eight weeks, customer service representatives were able to ignore irrelevant emails and focus on solving requests more efficiently based on case-relevant communications. The company greatly improved its responsiveness, leading to higher customer satisfaction and retention, not to mention the increased motivation of its customer center agents, who could focus on more rewarding activities. The solution required very little training data, resulting in tremendous cost savings. It has the potential to save the company &euro;4.9 million annually.</span></p> <h2>The Good News</h2> <p>Although email is a faster, better alternative to paper documents and faxing, it can have a direct impact on corporate bottom lines by distracting workers from role-relevant tasks to spend hours daily dealing with unimportant messages. Considering this drag on workplace efficiency, it is time to adopt solutions for categorizing massive volumes of email in near real time using a powerful, low-cost, accurate email classification solution.</p> <p>The good news is that this type of solution can also be applied to a broad range of messages, including instant messages, tweets and blog posts. The results are well worth it, including lower costs, higher productivity, improved customer satisfaction, and increased efficiency and responsiveness for all functional areas of the organization.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/semantic-folding" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Semantic Folding</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/email" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Email</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/machine-learning" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Machine Learning</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/artificial-intelligence-ai" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Artificial Intelligence (AI)</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/natural-language-processing-nlp" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Natural Language Processing (NLP)</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-addthis field-type-addthis field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style " addthis:title="Semantic Folding Solves the Problem of Too Many Emails - Future of Sourcing" addthis:url="https://futureofsourcing.com/semantic-folding-solves-the-problem-of-too-many-emails"><a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_linkedin"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_facebook"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_twitter"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_googleplus"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_pinterest_share"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_reddit"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_email"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_print"></a> </div> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-region field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Region:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/regions/global" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Global</a></div></div></div> Thu, 20 May 2021 16:01:16 +0000 Steve Levine 1988 at https://futureofsourcing.com https://futureofsourcing.com/semantic-folding-solves-the-problem-of-too-many-emails#comments Intelligent Automation: Forget Scale – Think Impact https://futureofsourcing.com/intelligent-automation-forget-scale-think-impact <div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://futureofsourcing.com/sites/default/files/articles/RPA_Scale_Not_Impact.jpg"><a href="https://futureofsourcing.com/sites/default/files/articles/RPA_Scale_Not_Impact.jpg" title="Intelligent Automation: Forget Scale – Think Impact " class="colorbox" rel="gallery-node-1442-ul77y9zCpi8"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://futureofsourcing.com/sites/default/files/styles/juicebox_medium/public/articles/RPA_Scale_Not_Impact.jpg?itok=OzuDjA9z" width="624" height="325" alt="" title="" /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>One of the perennial buzzwords in the Automation Industry is&nbsp;<strong>scale</strong>. Researchers, providers, industry-watchers and the media in general are focussing on the nirvana of delivering Robotic Process Automation (RPA) at scale. This is most likely because there is less success in the industry than was expected&hellip;far less. (<a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/bg/Documents/technology-media-telecommunications/Deloitte-us-cons-global-rpa-survey.pdf" target="_blank">Deloitte reported recently that less than 5% of organisations have effectively &lsquo;scaled&rsquo; their RPA</a>.) As a result, many users are shifting their focus to other technologies with the mistaken belief that that this will unlock their true automation potential. Others are searching for scale but finding the costs can exceed the benefits. The reason for this is simple, most organisations don&rsquo;t have the scale for simple automation approaches to work and the few that do, don&rsquo;t know how to harvest it.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s easy to understand the quest for RPA-led scale when there are reports almost daily of companies achieving it. The truth is a little different. One of the poster child RPA clients has been running a&nbsp;global automation programme&nbsp;for over five years and the roughly <a href="https://www.treasury.sa.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/36918/bp6_budget_measures_statement_2012-13.pdf" target="_blank">1000 full-time equivalent (FTE) reduction</a> is seen as a huge success; that is, until you compare that to the number of total employees and realize that it equates to less than 1 percent of the population addressable through automation. In other words, they have largely concentrated on the low hanging fruit.&nbsp;</p> <p>Also consider that the reports&nbsp;are generally about the same companies (about 5 percent) and the rest are struggling. This is leading to a focus on the cost of automation rather than the benefits and it&rsquo;s a downward spiral. Lowering costs usually involves offshoring implementation and, worse still, discovery and support. The end result is typically low-value tactical automations that don&rsquo;t add up to much and are poorly supported (i.e., they are fragile).</p> <p>The good news is that you don&rsquo;t need to abandon your RPA initiatives and you can deliver truly sustainable, transformational benefits but you will need to go about it in a different way:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Cost.&nbsp;</strong>Instead of focussing on the cost of automation projects, focus on the benefits. If cost is the limiting factor, then it&rsquo;s almost certainly the case that you have identified (&lsquo;discovered&rsquo;) the wrong processes. Even taking a purely tactical approach, to break even in less than one year you only need to find and automate one-to-three FTEs of work. Whether this is worthwhile at all is questionable but a significant number of projects at this level might prove the technology works, provide experience and confidence and give momentum for more complex initiatives. Focussing on benefits means costs become almost irrelevant and return on investment (ROI) is the main consideration.</li> <li><strong>Technologies.</strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;If RPA isn&rsquo;t changing the landscape, then it&rsquo;s highly unlikely that applying an alternative technology will lead to greater benefits. What IS likely is you need to augment your RPA tool with emerging technologies such as machine learning, simple Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and others. RPA is still the core industry automation tool and will continue to be for a few more years. The leading RPA tool providers have started to build in some of this functionality and this will continue.</li> <li><strong>Combined Knowledge</strong>. Automation should always be considered as a tool in a broader initiative, whether as part of process excellence&hellip;or as an enabler for digital enterprise&hellip;or as a strategic weapon to attack business problems (such as optimising supply chain or regulatory compliance)&hellip;or even meeting business objectives (improving customer experience is a prime example). This will&nbsp;<strong>require a combination of internal process, strategic corporate goals and highly experienced automation specialists, all of which are vital to success</strong>. These are known as &lsquo;joint agility teams.&rsquo;</li> <li><strong>Sponsorship</strong>. Successful automations require C-level sponsorship. Even if the programmes become self-funding there is still internal resistance to overcome and cloud cover will be required. Resistance comes in many forms:</li> </ul> <p style="margin-left:1.0in;">o&nbsp;&nbsp;Resistance to change &ndash; freeing up resources even if they are to be redeployed will lead to operational resistance unless change management is carefully orchestrated.</p> <p style="margin-left:1.0in;">o&nbsp;&nbsp;Fear of failure &ndash; the failure levels are high. No one wants to be associated with failure. Developing a cast iron business case and high-level approval will overcome this barrier.</p> <p style="margin-left:1.0in;">o&nbsp;&nbsp;Initiative fatigue &ndash; Automation is now being viewed in some circles as another false technology dawn. There will be pockets within all organisations who are reluctant to dedicate resources to the latest fad. In our experience, one way to overcome this is&nbsp;&nbsp;early success and visibility which creates champions and heroes.</p> <ul> <li><strong>Budget</strong>. A successful automation programme should start with a series of short projects and then initiate increasingly complex projects that are transformational and more rewarding. The short projects may appear trivial in the overall corporate context and the complex projects may be seen as higher risk and requiring investment. For momentum, it is essential that each project has a compelling business case and that the benefits are tracked and widely known, especially at the C-level&nbsp;.</li> </ul> <p>The implementation of RPA can often seem like a daunting and expensive task. Through the alternative measures listed above your organization can move forward in successfully implementing this innovative technology.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/robotic-process-automation-rpa" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robotic Process Automation (RPA)</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/automation" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Automation</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/c-suite" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">C-suite</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/artificial-intelligence-ai" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Artificial Intelligence (AI)</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tags/natural-language-processing-nlp" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Natural Language Processing (NLP)</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-addthis field-type-addthis field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style " addthis:title="Intelligent Automation: Forget Scale &amp;ndash; Think Impact - Future of Sourcing" addthis:url="https://futureofsourcing.com/intelligent-automation-forget-scale-think-impact"><a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_linkedin"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_facebook"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_twitter"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_googleplus"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_pinterest_share"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_reddit"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_email"></a> <a href="https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=300" class="addthis_button_print"></a> </div> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-region field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Region:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/regions/global" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Global</a></div></div></div> Tue, 28 May 2019 20:26:19 +0000 Nick Andrews 1442 at https://futureofsourcing.com https://futureofsourcing.com/intelligent-automation-forget-scale-think-impact#comments