SBI Neo Financial Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tokyo-headquartered SBI Holdings, announced it has entered into an agreement with Singapore’s AntWorks to establish SBI Antworks Asia. This joint venture is designed to support the sale and introduction to East Asia and Southeast Asia of AntWorks’ operational automation platform, which integrates cognitive machine reading and RPA (robotic process automation) capability with artificial intelligence (AI). The SBI Group will hold a 60% interest in SBI Antworks Asia.
In August 2018, SBI invested $15 million in AntWorks through the SBI AI & Blockchain Fund managed by SBI Investment. In stark contrast to more traditional OCR (optical character recognition) tools, the Generation 2.0 intelligent automation platform developed and provided by AntWorks leverages Cognitive Machine Reading as the basis of its data ingestion engine.
This translates to data being ingested in any form (including structured, semi-structured, unstructured, inferred and images) which improves the quality and accuracy of data being used at the start of the automation process, according to a company statement.
This is just one of the platform components which AntWorks believes enables them to deliver significantly improved results than traditional RPA and OCR tools, which are now increasingly becoming referred to in industry as Gen 1.0 technology.
AntWorks’ Gen 2.0 solutions integrate AI technologies, including machine vision, machine learning, deep learning and natural language modeling (NLM), natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG). The principles of the platform are all underpinned by fractal science, spearheaded as a breakthrough alternative to neural science for the deployment of process automation by AntWorks.
SBI Neo Financial Services Representative Director, Yoshitaka Kitao, commented, “AntWork’s platform uses AI for CMR and RPA on their platform which enables the machine to recognize unstructured data. This Intelligent AI is the next generation RPA technology. It will realize the true automation in the office just like it happened in factories in Japan in 1950s and 1960s.”