Stéphan Donzé is the founder and CEO of AODocs, a cloud-native doc administration platform that transforms enterprise content material into actionable intelligence. In contrast to legacy programs restricted to primary storage, AODocs combines strong doc management with workflow automation, enabling companies to streamline advanced processes throughout industries.
From gross sales proposals and claims administration to engineering and manufacturing, AODocs makes use of generative AI to extract structured knowledge from unstructured paperwork—at scale.
What impressed you to start out AODocs in 2012? Was there a selected drawback you noticed in doc administration that wasn’t being addressed on the time?
It got here from the idea of bringing Enterprise-to-Shopper (B2C) applied sciences, pioneered by Google, to the enterprise. This included cloud-based, serverless, and routinely scaling applied sciences that have been absent in enterprise software program on the time.
On the time, Google was advocating for functions to adapt to the cloud by transferring away from thick purchasers and embracing browser-based and serverless architectures. In contrast to Microsoft and Amazon on the time, Google’s stance was that cloud functions ought to undertake a really totally different structure than on premise software program. I noticed a possibility to create one thing new by combining outdated and new approaches.
Early adopters of cloud applied sciences in enterprises, who had adopted Gmail and Google Drive, wished to increase these advantages past electronic mail and collaboration to business-critical paperwork. There was a scarcity of options available in the market to satisfy this want, as conventional doc administration programs have been on-premise with outdated software program and architectures. This hole introduced a possibility to construct one thing new from scratch on the correct cloud structure, working with these early adopters.
Many enterprise SaaS firms battle with buyer adoption. How did you persuade main enterprises like Google or Veolia to belief AODocs early on?
Permitting clients to maintain paperwork of their personal cloud storage was a major consider convincing enterprises. AODocs manages paperwork, together with sharing permissions and enterprise processes, however the paperwork stay inside the buyer’s setting (initially Google Drive, later Azure, Google Cloud Storage, and Amazon S3). This basic attribute decreased the perceived danger for purchasers, and made them extra snug working with a small and younger firm.
One other key purpose was shut buyer relationships. We co-built and co-developed with clients, particularly within the early phases. This proximity and reactivity in fixing issues and making enhancements constructed belief and additional decreased the notion of danger.
This was finally what satisfied firms like Google, Veolia, Ascension, Pinnacol Assurance and others to undertake us.
Wanting again at your 13+ years main AODocs, what have been a number of the most important choices that led to the corporate’s success?
The choice to maintain buyer paperwork in their very own cloud storage is a giant consider our success and stays a key differentiating issue.
Growing the product by staying very near clients was additionally crucial. All the pieces we construct is impressed by or validated by means of buyer wants. We keep away from constructing options with out a clear buyer use case.
Our skill to type by means of buyer requests to determine widespread and replicable wants that profit your entire buyer base, versus very particular particular person requests higher addressed by skilled providers, is one thing we have been good at.
AODocs was born within the cloud and has now advanced into an AI-powered resolution. What have been a number of the greatest challenges in making that transition?
It is not a lot a transition however a continuity. Being born within the cloud inherently made AODocs simple to combine with new, cloud-based applied sciences, together with AI.
AI fashions like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are cloud-based, making it pure for AODocs to interface with them and add AI capabilities to our doc processing platform.
We view AODocs as a “backbone” or an “meeting line” for doc processes, the place AI is just a brand new “limb” or “module” that may be plugged in to reinforce the platform. We didn’t foresee the particular emergence of AI in 2022, however our cloud-native structure was designed for extensibility and integration, making the adoption of AI a pure step.
How does AODocs stability automation with human oversight, guaranteeing compliance and accuracy with out eradicating human validation?
We offer the instruments to clients to make use of AI at numerous steps of their doc processes. The choice of how a lot autonomy to provide AI is finally made by the shoppers on a case-by-case foundation.
Clients can configure their processes for full automation, full human assessment, or a mixture of each at any AI step. We suggest figuring out simple instances appropriate for full AI automation (e.g., detecting lacking paperwork in a request), whereas for advanced instances, AI can be utilized to hurry up the human assessment, sometimes by producing summaries of advanced paperwork.
Primarily, we give clients 100% management over the extent of human oversight of their processes by offering the configuration instruments.
AODocs is shifting its platform to concentrate on AI brokers for doc processing. What drove this choice, and the way do AI brokers enhance upon conventional doc administration programs?
AI brokers are a brand new functionality that may be built-in into our current “meeting line” for paperwork.
The first driver for our pleasure about AI brokers is their potential to carry important velocity to particular duties. For easy duties like rejecting incomplete paperwork or routinely accepting low worth, simple claims, AI can allow full automation.
For advanced duties, AI brokers can dramatically speed up processing by summarizing lengthy paperwork, permitting people to assessment key data a lot quicker. AI excels at ingesting giant quantities of data and offering concise summaries, saving human reviewers important time. This elevated velocity and effectivity improve the worth of the AODocs platform.
Enterprise search stays a serious problem, with firms struggling to retrieve related paperwork. How does AODocs’ AI-powered resolution deal with discoverability points higher than current enterprise search instruments?
AI chatbots symbolize a serious enchancment over conventional enterprise search by permitting customers to ask questions in pure language and obtain simple solutions. Nevertheless, they’ve a major flaw: they can not distinguish between legitimate, up-to-date paperwork and drafts, incomplete, or out of date information.
We tackle this problem by guaranteeing AI brokers use solely the correct data to supply solutions. Conventional search presents customers with a listing of potential matches, permitting them to determine probably the most related doc (corresponding to distinguishing between a signed contract and a draft).
In distinction, AI chatbots supply assured solutions however cover the underlying search course of. This creates an elevated danger of utilizing outdated or incorrect data, as customers haven’t any visibility into which paperwork the chatbot used to formulate its response.
Our position is to curate and assure that every one paperwork within the information base have been correctly validated and are up-to-date. This makes them protected for AI brokers to make use of as data sources. By guaranteeing AI-powered search depends solely on trusted and managed data, we considerably scale back the chance of inaccurate responses.
With generative AI changing into a key a part of doc processing, what particular AI applied sciences or fashions does AODocs leverage to enhance accuracy and scale back handbook work?
LLM fashions excel at remodeling current content material, corresponding to summarizing advanced paperwork, translating textual content, and categorizing information. These duties have a really low danger of hallucinations, which is why our AI utilization strategically focuses on these actions.
AODocs primarily leverages AI for rephrasing, repurposing, and remodeling current textual content reasonably than creating new content material. When working with the correct materials, producing summaries, translating paperwork, and categorizing content material all preserve a low chance of error. Equally, our knowledge extraction capabilities—figuring out due dates or key data from paperwork—stay grounded in current content material to reduce inaccuracies or “hallucinations.”
By accelerating data ingestion and supporting human reviewers, these AI capabilities usually enhance effectivity by a major issue. This creates tangible worth whereas fastidiously avoiding the dangers related to AI-generated content material created from scratch.
There’s an extra benefit. AODocs integrates seamlessly with any LLM, giving our clients freedom to decide on their most popular supplier. This versatile structure additionally ensures we will shortly incorporate future fashions as they turn out to be obtainable, positioning our clients to profit from the inevitable AI improvements rising within the months and years forward.
One of many greatest AI challenges in doc processing is hallucinations or inaccurate responses. How does AODocs make sure that AI-generated insights are reliable and dependable?
The important thing to making sure trustworthiness and reliability is grounding. We make sure that AI is used to rephrase or rework data from trusted sources.
In doc processing, AI is requested to summarize or translate current paperwork, minimizing the possibility of hallucination. In AI chatbots or brokers, the system is supplied with extracts of managed paperwork and is instructed to generate solutions solely from these extracts—the LLM should all the time quote the sources from which it generated its reply—with out utilizing basic world information or exterior data. This prevents AI from inventing or offering data not explicitly current within the validated paperwork.
With AI remodeling enterprise software program, the place do you see AODocs within the subsequent 5 years? What position will AI brokers play in the way forward for doc administration?
Our core enterprise as a doc administration platform won’t change. Our mission stays to make sure the trustworthiness, forex, correct enterprise course of adherence, and traceability of managed data.
AI is each a brand new want for managed data (to feed reliable knowledge to AI chatbots) and an accelerator of enterprise processes involving paperwork. AI can velocity up duties like summarizing, translating, and categorizing paperwork, making human customers extra productive.
Within the subsequent 5 years, we goal to supply the instruments for firms to simply apply AI the place it is smart to reinforce their enterprise processes. AI brokers will play an important position by amplifying and accelerating our core missions: offering reliable data, guaranteeing using the proper doc variations, serving to keep away from human errors, and facilitating entry to enterprise processes. We need to assist firms use AI successfully and strategically to spice up productiveness.
Thanks for the good interview, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to AODocs.
