A New Dawn for Unstructured Data with Deep Learning

Anant Bhardwaj, Instabase
October 12, 2022

Instabase, the world’s first horizontal platform for unstructured data, is democratizing access to deep learning to empower any organization to solve unstructured data problems with unprecedented accuracy.

From understanding complex financial data for the world’s largest banks to transforming manual processes for insurers and federal agencies alike, automating unstructured data represents the largest opportunity for digital transformation in the enterprise. To solve this, our design principle for Instabase has been consistent: we strive to continuously evolve the toolkits and solution building blocks available on our platform with the latest innovations from the market – not just from us. Over the past few months, we have innovated at pace with the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning space, and today, we are announcing our first set of deep learning capabilities to empower organizations to solve document understanding use cases with unmatched accuracy.

Unstructured data, in the form of a file or a document (i.e., Word documents, PDFs, emails, scanned images, etc.) make up the backbone of an organization’s processes and are pivotal constraints today in delivering end-to-end digital transformations. The documents are fueled with invaluable data and insights that, once unlocked, revolutionize customer experiences and create new opportunities. But to date, businesses across industries have primarily leaned on humans to understand the data within documents. The variations in document structure and the algorithmic complexity required to understand the information trapped in these documents are why end-to-end business process automation remains a challenge, with more than 70% of automation projects failing to meet their objectives.

Now is the time to break this paradigm. While the deep learning field has been rapidly evolving, we have incorporated these advances into our platform in record time. Instabase is entering a new chapter with deep learning and we look forward to seeing how our customers will transform their organizations by automating their most critical processes with deep learning.

Why deep learning is the future of unstructured data

The first generation of document understanding solutions was template-based or rules-based, making it only useful for 20% of an organization’s data found in the structured documents. Templates and rules simply cannot handle high variability or unstructured data.

The underlying concepts of deep learning have been around for the last decade, but only recently did the technology mature and allow us to solve difficult, unstructured data problems by leveraging large-scale models pre-trained on millions of documents. These models can be fine tuned on domain-specific documents from checks and non-disclosure agreements to medical records by using only a few hundreds of samples and produce unprecedented accuracy. As a result, we are now ready to transform document-based processes across a multitude of industries such as healthcare, finance, and the federal government with the power of deep learning.

We are introducing the first set of deep learning capabilities on the Instabase platform

Our customers will now be able to access the state-of-art deep learning models and the supporting infrastructure to train, run, and host these models directly on the Instabase platform to achieve unprecedented accuracy. Since these deep learning models have already been trained on very large sets of data, they will require fewer samples to fine-tune for a specific customer use case, significantly accelerating time to value. Furthermore, business users can now build an end-to-end solution with deep learning on the Instabase platform, thanks to new no-code/low-code functionalities in Machine Learning Studio and Flow.

Functionality

  • Machine Learning Studio provides a no-code user interface for users to easily create deep learning-based classification and extraction models for any given document use case. Users can simply annotate by highlighting the data points to extract from their documents, pick their model of choice, and train with a push-button. Instabase auto-generates the fine-tuned model for their documents which is available to anyone in their organization at any time.
  • New Flow experience makes it possible to rapidly create business applications powered by deep learning in a visual development environment. Flow democratizes deep learning solution development by helping operations and development teams build on their combined talents. Users can choose from a suite of pre-packaged solution blocks and use drag-and-drop to assemble their end-to-end workflow while configuring each step with just a few clicks. Deep learning models, custom business logic, and human review can all be combined in the same workflow to solve the most complex problems.
  • Model Catalog and the supporting infrastructure allow users to discover, manage, and run deep learning models at scale. Instabase provides access to the latest deep learning models built by Instabase and leading providers in the market as those techniques are proven in real-world environments. Users can discover and explore these models with Model Catalog or bring their own to use in their end-to-end solutions. The models built on the Instabase platform are also available to anyone across an organization.

Our unique approach

Traditional approaches to unstructured data have led to the proliferation of rigid, vertically integrated solutions that make it challenging to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape. In contrast to vertical applications that must be used as-is with baked-in models or re-engineered for incremental updates, our horizontal platform offers a plug-and-play approach to innovation.

With Instabase, organizations and users can:

  • Quickly access the newest deep learning innovation on the market to protect their competitive advantage.
  • Easily swap in/out the latest models without rewriting their applications to future-proof their solutions and consistently achieve the best results for their business.
  • Seamlessly combine deep learning models with deterministic techniques to refine, transform, and validate the model output to achieve the highest accuracy possible.

What’s next

Our deep learning capabilities are now available in preview for select customers and will be available to the general public in early 2022. We’re excited to provide our unique approach to deep learning to our customers, lowering the barrier to solving their domain-specific problems. And with demand for document understanding on the rise, we’re experiencing high growth and looking for top talent to join our mission. If you’re interested in joining our team, check out our open roles.

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Anant Bhardwaj, Instabase
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