VAKT Incorporates AI into its Tech Stack for Further Streamlining
VAKT sees AI within its platform as a potentially powerful tool that can help to further streamline business processes and workflows, particularly in handling barge nomination documents, inspection documents, certificates of quantity and quality, and bills of lading in vLogistics. Additionally, AI may enhance data handling and user assistance, according to VAKT’s Jatin Bhadra. Currently, VAKT is focused on improving document handling by replacing traditional OCR technologies with AI.
“VAKT is all about the ecosystem and having participants on the VAKT platform. This is fully integrated and so the data just seamlessly flows through it. Data is accurate and processed in a timely manner,” Jatin said. In an ideal world, since all market participants are using the VAKT platform, they all gain the benefits of data accuracy and can transmit the data end-to-end without having to manually key in the data when documents are exchanged over emails. However, when some market participants are not on the VAKT platform, and they send those documents to VAKT participants, then that data does need to be read and entered into the VAKT system. Currently, these documents would be uploaded using OCR reader technology supplied by a third party, he told me. However, VAKT is about to release AI technology to extract the key relevant data from that document that the user is interested in and automatically feed it into the system.
Traditional solutions based around OCR work through knowing the arrangement of data in the document. In essence, it’s a library of document templates with x and y coordinates to find the data on each type of document, Jatin explained. The problem is that this requires a lot of maintenance for the plethora of documents sent by partners. Each partner could use a different document format. “By using AI and by fine-tuning the augmented intelligence, we are able to now extract data from that document without having to create templates, thus giving users better accuracy and without intervention as well as faster acceptance of new variations of those documents,” he said. This, he told me, is the first use of AI by VAKT to date.
Other AI initiatives are in progress at VAKT. These include potentially using AI to deal with unstructured data in vSure. vSure helps manage the trade confirmation process and it integrates with the users ETRM solution but when traders innovate and create new ways of trading, new trade terms are created and can create issues. In these cases, notes are used to communicate between the parties. So VAKT is looking at how AI can capture and compare unstructured notes between multiple parties to ensure that both sets of notes are contractually the same thing, for example, Jatin said.
Jatin also notes that the first release of AI is just a start introducing the technology to the platform and ensuring that customers are comfortable with it. “Security and privacy are critical for our customers, and that’s why we use blockchain,” he said. “We cannot compromise on that, and we cannot immediately go bigbang with any new technology because we need to ensure security and privacy and bring customers along with us.” As stated in a previous article on VAKT and the NIS2 directive, VAKT is built around security as a founding principle.
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