Frequently Asked Questions
How is Instaknow’s Human Intelligence Automation® different than Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Robotic Process Automation and Form Recognition tools use machine learning to remember pre-shown data layout examples of screens and documents. They have a major flaw that they are “blind’. If the actual future data is in a different layout than the examples, they break.
Instaknow does NOT use machine learning. It applies patented human-vision-like artificial intelligence in real-time to determine where the data of interest lies in ANY layout with human-like accuracy. A single instruction can handle hundreds of different layouts automatically, saving you the headache and cost of tracking, showing and maintaining hundreds of layout variations.
Why is Instaknow’s Human Intelligence Automation® a better choice for Scalable Intelligent Automation than Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Adapting in real-time, Instaknow overcomes the main scalability limitation RPA has, i.e. inability of processing unfamiliar data layouts. Additionally, Instaknow runs multiple complex processes in parallel in the memory of each machine, WITHOUT opening visible user interfaces like browsers or Excels. With dramatically higher accuracy and throughput, Instaknow delivers high-volume, straight-through, unattended automation to realize the effort, time and cost savings promised by Scalable Intelligent Automation.
How does Instaknow’s Insta-Intelligence® Data Extraction compare against competition?
Instaknow does NOT use machine learning. It applies patented human-vision-like artificial intelligence in real-time to determine where the data of interest lies in ANY layout with human-like accuracy. A single instruction can handle hundreds of different layouts automatically, saving you the headache and cost of tracking, showing and maintaining hundreds of layout variations.
How does Instaknow reduce manual involvement in business workflows?
Imagine that you can hire and train a whole army of new employees willing to work nonstop, 24×7, to carry out day-to-day business operations; and then, put them inside a single computer. Like trained staff, Instaknow can discover, correlate, conclude, update, and publish real-time data across enterprise systems, websites, portals, mainframes, e-mails, Excel sheets, Word documents, PDFs, databases, and more, without requiring technical changes to those systems. The customer’s preferred rules, conditions, updates, and alerts are automatically applied.
What makes a manual business process a good candidate for automation?
- High-volume manual effort
- Complex but repeatable business rules in the process
- Involvement of fragmented sources of information (enterprise systems, documents, website pages, e-mails)
- Processing delays that negatively affect business results
How does Instaknow’s Human Intelligence Automation® work?
Instaknow’s patented Human Intelligence Automation® software uses human-vision-like artificial intelligence to automatically recognize, contextualize, and adapt to changed data locations in documents and screens, without needing arcane technical instructions from “spying” protocols. By identifying and understanding context clues similar to a human (such as the placement of headers, labels, surrounding information, colors, fonts, styles, gaps between words, and gaps between lines), software deployments are speedy and drastically simplified. And, since Instaknow’s HIA software re-discovers the data each time at electronic speeds, the required information can move to unknown locations and is still found correctly every time, dramatically increasing the flexibility, reliability, and scalability of complex automations.
How is an Instaknow solution deployed?
An Instaknow deployment project is like any other well-defined IT project, except drastically compressed in effort, time, and cost. You would follow the usual project management, requirements gathering, design, development, testing, and deployment steps; just in a very agile manner.
What does the customer need to provide?
- User-level access to involved systems or data sources (documents, e-mails, portals, systems) to be processed by the solution
- Business rules and decisions to be used to process data automatically
- If deployment is in-house, a standard Microsoft OS machine (Windows 10, Windows Server 2012/2016) to run the automated processing, which can be virtual and can be in the Cloud. Instaknow processing can also be deployed as SaaS, provided the automation can have user-like access to all involved systems.
How many clients are using Instaknow technology?
Thousands of Instaknow solutions are running in production with hundreds of major customers. That number is rising rapidly due to the exploding data volumes, especially the exponential increase in unstructured data.
What are the key benefits?
- High ROI: 50% – 75% reduction in manual data work and related costs, delays, errors, and fatigue
- Competitive advantage: Faster business processing equates to higher responsiveness to customers
- Better decision-making: Real-time, multi-system integrated visibility, alerts, decisions, and actions
- New revenue streams: New market offerings made possible by automatically linking web-based information with internal systems
What are the supplementary benefits?
- Guaranteed adherence to SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)
- Higher compliance with government and industry-specific regulations
- Higher process and data quality leading to higher levels of customer service
- Reduced HR expenses (less interviewing, onboarding, training, desk-space costs)
- 24×7 automated processing coverage
- Higher employee satisfaction leading to more work on higher-value tasks and less work on mundane, repetitive tasks
- Lesser penalties caused by not meeting SLAs (Service-Level Agreements)
What makes Instaknow better than competing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions?
- All RPA solutions lack Instaknow’s patented human-vision-like artificial intelligence, which is necessary for dealing with unpredictably varying data. While other RPA systems work like a blind robot expecting exact data locations or technical identifiers, Instaknow works like a trained human, deciding where the desired data is in each source based on the context of labels near the relevant data, auto-adjusting to the unpredictable locations in real-time before extracting and using the data. RPA robots are brittle and need constant ongoing tweaks, with operations staff spending valuable time to correct bot inaccuracies. Instaknow’s human-like visual data detection is flexible and automatically adjusts to data variability, making it far more stable and reliable.
- Most of Instaknow’s competitor products evolved from desktop automation solutions, and hence have severe limitations in their parallel-processing capabilities. Instaknow is built from the beginning for parallel, high-volume processing from a single machine. Instaknow instantly scales to very high processing volumes (millions of business transactions per month from just one or two machines is routine), which is impossible with RPA offerings.
- Instaknow’s processing can operate multiple browsers, mainframes, and documents simultaneously for a single business transaction, without getting confused about which web page is showing in which browser. Whereas the RPA tools can operate only one active browser at a time, Instaknow works like a user opening multiple browser tabs. The business logic can operate any of the web pages in any sequence based on the desired business logic. Therefore, Instaknow can automate far more complex real-time processing than competing RPA tools.
- Unlike blind RPA bots, Instaknow’s Artificial Intelligence has “electronic vision”, which allows it to detect colors and fonts. For example, Instaknow can follow the rule “Ignore grey rows in the PDF table” or “Compare prices on supplier websites of only parts shown in red-font in yellow-background Excel cells”.
- Instaknow can solve Captchas (images), including reCaptchas (“I’m not a robot”)
- All of this translates into the lowest TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) for the customers because Instaknow:
- Is versatile with broad applications, leading to the widest benefits compared to RPA tools
- Is enterprise grade and able to process millions of business transactions per month, contributing to deep labor cost avoidance
- Automatically adjusts to unpredictable data location changes, reducing the need for staff intervention
What value does Instaknow offer you?
- Higher profits and competitiveness by cutting the cost, time, and effort of repetitive manual work.
- Peace of mind of knowing the SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) are being followed diligently.
- Rapid scalability
- Simple, easily managed deployments, needing only one or two machines even for high-volume automation
What are Instaknow's Key Differentiators?
- Human-vision-like AI that can dynamically and accurately decide where the required data is on any screen, web page, document, Excel, or other source, despite unpredictable data locations
- Vastly simpler and faster configurations because no technical instructions need to be provided. NO “SPYING” NEEDED.
- High throughputs from a single machine using built-in parallel processing architecture, requiring magnitudes fewer machines than RPA for high-volume transactions. A single machine typically completes tens of thousands of straight-through business transactions in a day.
- Typical payback in months, not years
- Built-in Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) approach
- Easy implementation of ongoing process changes
- Flexible deployment on in-house or cloud-based physical or virtual machines