February 24, 2021

Why Choose Applica?

So, you’ve read or heard that Applica is the best solution for the intelligent automation of documents, but you wonder why we’re not more of a household name? That is a valid question. A client needs to be sure they’re backing the right horse when leaping into the future. If you need a reason to select Applica for a use case that’s otherwise unsolvable – or to recommend Applica to your board, your CTO, or your team – here are a few of the ways we are different, better, and more versatile than legacy solutions on the market.

Size Matters

First of all, size matters. In the case of targeted technologies, a smaller, newer company is generally more hungry, more innovative, and more agile. Because we dedicate ourselves to one specific AI application – the automation of text-intensive processes – we never have any qualms about becoming very, very good at that (we consistently outperform tech industry behemoths in objective benchmarks). Our bottom line isn’t a battleground for multiple divisions, so many of which can claim a better forecast on returns than document automation, a notoriously hard nut to crack. So no, we’re not a tech super-brand, but this is a point in our favor. Because if you need a solution that is optimized for the automation of complex and variable document types, a highly precise specialist is simply going to do more and deliver things that slower-moving companies dismiss as impossible.

Narrow Focus

Second, we’re not trying to sell you anything else. Unlike bigger players with R&D teams working on every AI front, we don’t have multiple revenue streams we’re trying to bundle to get you to use our bots or workflow management tools because you need our document processing solution. Our tech will run on and with anything you already have, and you can count on us to stick to our lane so that you can stick to yours.

Huge Advantage

Third, processing documents ranks among the toughest of challenges for AI. Why? Because unstructured and semi-structured documents bear the mark of human variability and imperfectness. From decoding irregularities to parsing text fields to making sense of rampant human error, any AI tasked with extracting and comprehending information from text needs to outperform most other AI in existence. For a long time, this niche was completely stagnant because both developers and potential users were steadily disillusioned with the technology. Today, despite Applica making such fast progress, the industry as a whole is still offering customers soon-to-be obsolete deterministic methods that only bring results on 20% of document types. Thus, most of the industry continues to use machine learning rather than deep learning to process documents, and this is why they are not our competitors at all in the most fundamental sense. They are selling a completely different approach and only a partial automation service, which fails to address the needs of a modern company with documents that need fast, flawless attention. And like all other technology that fails to evolve, these deterministic methods won’t hold water a few years down the line.

Complete Solution

Fourth, while other companies are staying in their pre-determined technology lane, Applica’s R&D team is just as engaged in the design thinking relevant to what the business community needs for long-term efficacy. That is why we are continually improving our truly innovative solution, viable for the 80% of business documents that currently can’t be automated by legacy tools. After all, the overwhelming majority of business documents fall somewhere in between the “unstructured” and “semi-structured” formats. Sure, lots of companies can automate the processing of invoices and other binary-type forms, but we want our clients to be able to successfully automate higher value work – financial statements, contracts, and all those other documents with inconsistent formatting and unpredictable content, which are routinely still being outsourced to high-priced attorneys, paralegals, and various opportunistic consultancies. In short, Applica is the only solution that can process all layouts and formats, due to our unique deep learning approach and our ability to comprehend information from both a graphical and textual standpoint.

No Code, No Templates

Fifth, because Applica is no code and template-free with contextually aware neural language models on the back end, it’s intuitive to use and easy to maintain on the front end. This means that our AI really does automate things as promised. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry often relies heavily on templates and hand-crafted rules. This, however, is essentially human work masquerading as AI. Providers of such machine learning-based partial solutions call their tools “AI-based automation” but they actually rely on highly skilled data scientists and engineers to write rules/templates/code to run and maintain their solutions. Not only is this inefficient and costly in the long run, but it lacks the stunning versatility of what Applica offers. What do they do? They find what you tell them to find. What do we do? We find everything, including the stuff you never knew was there, ready to be harnessed.

Interested in learning more about the ways Applica can do what no one else can? Connect with an Applica expert for a demo.

Continue reading

Articles
TILT Can Go Where Others Can’t
What makes Applica the only solution in its class that can do what we do? Specialization. And research.
Articles
A Deeper Look at TILT – Applica’s Revolutionary Deep Learning Tech
We’ve figured out a way to give our clients more speed, more precision, more control, and more options, while again setting an entirely new standard in the document automation game.
Articles
Improving Work-Life Balance With Extra Paid Leave
Applica’s team members are everything to us, which is why we trust them to take the time that they need.