Businesses have access to huge amounts of data, but much of it is going unused. The Journal of Business Strategy identifies as much as 55% of data stored by organisations may be ‘dark data’ – information that businesses collect but never use.
A study from NetApp finds UK organisations’ poor data storage practices are costing the private sector up to £3.7 billion each year. Three-quarters (75%) of IT leaders consider excess data storage a constant source of workplace stress, and over a third feel concern about having an “overwhelming” amount of data to go through.
Not only is wasted data bad for business, but it’s also bad for the planet. In 2020, digitisation was purported to generate 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Document AI is the game changer businesses need – but there’s a right way to do it
There is a way to categorise and analyse this data without breaking the bank or employees’ patience. Document AI is the solution for managing businesses’ vast amounts of data, and at ABBYY we’re seeing the results first-hand.
At our recent Ascend event series, I shared that in 2024 ABBYY processed more than 5.9 billion pages for our connected customers. That’s billions of moments where data was turned into clarity, documents into action, and complexity into outcomes powered by ABBYY through AI-powered intelligent automation.
Companies are increasingly turning to AI for data and document management. In the same period, we saw about 32% growth in active subscriptions with more customers consuming at scale.
This year our Ascend series was themed around “Clarity compiled,” highlighting how ABBYY transforms operational complexity into tangible business value. It was dedicated to breaking down the barriers between advanced AI technologies and practical, actionable applications. Catch up with the highlights here.
ABBYY’s Document AI makes it easier for businesses to process data and decisions, especially in a world that’s only getting more complex.
Make data work harder for businesses
Invoice processing is a key example of an area in which ABBYY helps its customers. Dealing with invoices once meant hours spent manually sorting, verifying, and keying in numbers, then chasing down approvals across departments.
Today, automating document processing can take on the heavy lifting: capturing, extracting, and validating key data, then sending that information directly to business systems for processing.
When combined with AI technologies such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), automated invoice processing efficiently processes even unstructured PDFs and handwritten receipts, whether they arrive via paper, email, API, mobile, or scanning.
ML enables the system to identify patterns and continuously improve accuracy by learning from past corrections, while NLP helps understand context and adapt to new formats without manual intervention.
Companies can see as much as a 90% improvement in invoice processing times when using AI-powered automated invoice processing. It can reduce the time of processing tasks that once took a day or two to under an hour, increase employee productivity by as much as 400%, and saves 30% of accounts staff’s time on queries, freeing them to focus on higher-value tasks.
Purpose-built AI drills down into exactly what businesses need…
It’s important to remember that different types of AI are useful for different purposes.
Businesses investing in general-purpose AI tools may find that these advanced models are sometimes applied to tasks too simple for their level of sophistication, resulting in unnecessary energy intensity and potentially hallucinations creeping in.
In business-critical scenarios where accuracy and compliance matter, that’s a dealbreaker. LLMs are a bit like people pleasers: they’ll always give you an answer, even if it’s completely made up. That’s why, if you want to use AI in your core business processes, you have to ground it in structured, validated data.
In fact, research shows that 80% of AI projects fail to deliver their intended value. That’s often because they lack the reliable data foundation and task-specific design needed for business-critical processes to succeed at scale.
More efficient, task-specific AI models can significantly reduce energy consumption while maintaining effectiveness. Purpose-built for business documents, ABBYY’s Document AI extracts clean, structured facts, applies validation and business rules, and delivers reliable outputs you can trust.
Beyond document processing, ABBYY combines Process AI and Document AI to help businesses discover inefficiencies, predict outcomes, and continuously optimise operations – driving greater productivity, compliance, and customer satisfaction.
All of ABBYY’s solutions are designed to help automate faster, smarter, and with clarity. This transformation doesn’t just drive business value – it reduces the environmental footprint of data, making enterprises operations more sustainable for the future.
