INNOVATIVE TAILWINDS We are excited to announce a solution that will build AI solutions in minutes, not months – LEARN MORE

Category: IBM

Using AI to Save $80,000 per Year with Two Hours of Work

In today’s fast-paced business environment, efficiency is key. At Innovative Solutions, we recently faced a challenge that many growing companies encounter: processing hundreds of invoices monthly from various vendors, each with its unique format and structure. Our finance team was drowning in paperwork, and traditional OCR solutions seemed cumbersome and expensive. That’s when we turned to our own creation, Tailwinds, to help us rapidly develop a solution.

The Challenge:

400 Invoices and 33 Hours per Month of Manual Work

Our finance team was processing an average of 400 invoices per month, with each invoice taking approximately 5 minutes to handle manually. This translated to a staggering 33 hours of work each month dedicated solely to invoice processing. The challenges we faced included:

  • Delayed payments
  • Increased risk of human error
  • Reduced productivity
  • Mounting operational costs

We needed a solution that could handle diverse invoice formats, extract relevant data accurately, and integrate seamlessly with our existing systems. And we needed it fast.

Why Traditional OCR Fell Short

While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology has been a go-to solution for document processing, it presented significant limitations for our use case. Traditional OCR struggles with:

  • Varying document sizes and shapes
  • Inconsistent formatting across different vendors
  • Adapting to new invoice layouts without manual intervention

These limitations made traditional OCR solutions less suitable for our dynamic invoice processing needs. We needed a more flexible, intelligent solution that could effortlessly adapt to changing document formats.

Eating Our Own Dog Food

Using Tailwinds SaaS, our team of AI experts built a robust, AI-powered invoice processing system in less than two hours. Yes, you read that right – two hours! This solution can:

  • Extract data from any type of document
  • Provide structured output ready for parsing
  • Automatically insert the structured content into our company database

How It Works: 5-Step AI Magic

The entire process, from email receipt to database insertion, takes less than 10 seconds. It’s a dramatic improvement from our previous manual process, saving our finance team countless hours and thousands of dollars in labor costs each month.

Email Intake

When a new invoice arrives via email, it’s automatically forwarded to an AWS Lambda function via AWS SES. This function either extracts the text (if possible) or creates images of the document. It then calls the TailwindsAI API, passing in the new text or image.

Intelligent Document Analysis

Tailwinds reviews the file and queries a vector database (Weaviate) containing similar document types. Weaviate returns the specific entities (data points) we need to extract for that particular document type.

AI-Powered Data Extraction

Armed with the knowledge of what to look for, Tailwinds performs targeted data extraction using advanced AI techniques.

Structured Data Formatting

The extracted data is then formatted into a clean, structured JSON format, ready for further processing.

Database Integration

The JSON is passed back to the Lambda function, which handles the final insertion into our company database.

Retrieving Dynamic Document Meta-Data with Weaviate

A key component of our solution is the use of Weaviate, a vector database that stores example historical invoices and their associated metadata. When a new document comes in, we query Weaviate to retrieve the relevant entities for that specific document type. This approach allows our system to adapt dynamically to different invoice formats without the need for constant manual updates.

This flexibility is a significant advantage over traditional OCR solutions, which often require extensive configuration for each new document type. Our Tailwinds-powered solution, enhanced by Weaviate, can handle the ever-changing landscape of invoice formats with ease.

Weaviate

Tailwinds Empowers Rapid AI Innovation

This invoice processing solution is just one example of how Tailwinds is revolutionizing the way we approach business challenges at Innovative Solutions. Tailwinds SaaS enables us to rapidly build solutions like this in minutes, not months, allowing us to implement more AI-powered solutions in a fraction of the time.  Key features that accelerated our development process include:

  • Drag-and-drop editor: Simplifies the creation of complex AI workflows.
  • Pre-made marketplace templates: Provides a starting point for common use cases, giving us a leg up in rapid development.
  • Seamless integration with AWS services: Allows for easy incorporation into our existing cloud infrastructure.
More About Innovative Tailwinds SaaS

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The Surprise Factor: Speed to Implementation

One of the most unexpected aspects of this project was the sheer speed of implementation. In fact, we were initially concerned that we must have done something wrong because the solution came together so quickly. However, our thorough testing confirmed that we had indeed created a robust, accurate system in a fraction of the time we expected.  This experience underscores the power of Tailwinds in democratizing AI development and allowing teams to iterate and innovate at unprecedented speeds.

Tailwinds vs. Off-the-Shelf Solutions

When compared to off-the-shelf invoice processing software, our Tailwinds-powered solution offers several advantages:

  1. Customizability: We can easily adapt the solution to our specific needs and workflows.
  2. Cost-effectiveness: No need for expensive software licenses or lengthy implementation processes.
  3. Rapid deployment: The solution goes from concept to production in hours, not weeks or months.
  4. Seamless integration: Built to work with our existing AWS infrastructure.

For companies facing similar challenges, the choice often comes down to buying expensive off-the-shelf software or building a custom solution from scratch – both time-consuming and costly options. Tailwinds offers a third path: rapid, customizable AI solution development that can be implemented in a fraction of the time and cost.

The Future of AI-Powered Operations

As we continue to explore the capabilities of Tailwinds, we’re excited about the potential for AI to transform other areas of our business. From customer service to product development, the possibilities are endless.

The invoice processing solution we’ve built is now available on the Tailwinds SaaS platform and is ready to be customized and implemented by other organizations facing similar challenges. And this is just one of many solutions that can be rapidly built and deployed using Tailwinds.

Our journey with AI-powered invoice processing is just the beginning. It’s a testament to the power of innovative thinking, the right tools, and the transformative potential of AI in solving real-world business challenges.

Are you facing similar operational challenges in your business? Let’s talk about how Tailwinds and the team at Innovative Solutions can help you harness the power of AI to revolutionize your processes. Contact us today to learn more about our Tailwinds platform and how we can accelerate your AI journey.

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Data Governance in the Age of AI: Ensuring Fair, Transparent, and Accountable Systems

AI drives the way most industries work today through automation, an upsurge in efficiency, and even opportunities that might not have been unlocked otherwise. AI systems are making important decisions—from loan approvals to patient diagnoses—in industries such as health care and financial services. Without strong data governance, these AI systems introduce risks in the form of bias, opacity, and non-compliance with different regulatory requirements.

Data governance ensures that AI systems work ethically, transparently, and according to regulations. In this blog, we’ll discuss how organizations can institute comprehensive governance practices across industries, using the banking industry to illustrate common challenges and possible solutions.

What is Data Governance in the Age of AI

Data governance is the practice of managing availability, usability, integrity, and security applied to data. In this classic view, data governance extends to how the data are used to train, test, and operate AI systems to ensure any decision made by AI is fair, explainable, and regulatory-compliant. In cases when organizations use AI for automated decision-making, data governance must deal with the following key aspects:

  • Data Quality: Guaranteeing that data is clean, correct, and updated as it enters into AI systems.
  • Bias Mitigation: Actively identifying and addressing any biases in training data or model outputs.
  • Explanation: Providing explanations that are clear enough to understand the basis on which the decisions of AI systems are made is especially important for industries with stringent regulations.
  • Accountability: Ownership and responsibility for AI-driven decision-making, holding an entity liable or answerable; this implies that the decisions of the AI system are auditable and traceable. For example, the use of AI for loan approvals, fraud detection, and risk assessment creates several governance principles that become very important in banking.
  • Data Security and Privacy: Ensuring that sensitive information, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), is properly protected and compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR. This protection is essential for maintaining data privacy and preventing security breaches in AI systems that process large volumes of data.

Five Key Principles of Data Governance for AI Systems

Organizations should adhere to the principles to effectively govern AI in any industry:

Data Quality + Integrity
Issue:
In AI, data quality defines decision quality. For instance, if the historical loan data in banking is incomplete or biased, then an AI model would learn from that to make decisions that could lead to discriminatory outcomes.

Solution:
Services like AWS Glue DataBrew offer automated data preparation, profiling, and cleaning to ensure quality data. These types of services can help perform anomaly detection, fill up missing values, and standardize data before feeding it into any AI model. The assurance of data consistency and integrity at this stage reduces the chances of model performance being bad downstream.

Bias Detection + Fairness
Issue:
AI systems that rely on biased historical data tend to propagate systemic inequalities. For example, the credit-scoring model developed by a bank could inherit biases from historical loan approvals that tend to favor higher-income or non-minority applicants.

Solution:
IBM’s Watson Knowledge Catalog hosts integrated bias detection and remediation tools. In addition, its real-time bias monitoring in IBM watsonx.governance allows organizations to detect skewed predictions throughout the AI life cycle. The platform continuously audits all AI deployments to ensure their fairness and regulatory compliance across the operations of the model.

Make Transparent + Explainable
Issue:
Most AI models are very complex—for example, deep learning based-algorithms—and their performance can be so cryptic that it makes it hard to figure out how and why humans make decisions. This lack of explainability can lead to non-compliant scenarios in domains like healthcare or banking, where regulatory scrutiny is high.

Solution:
AWS Amazon SageMaker Clarify is an explainability feature that allows organizations to get into the details of their models when making predictions. Clarify would provide feature importance reports, making it  clear to a business stakeholder what variable determines a decision in a model. The same is ensured by IBM watsonx.governance for ensuring the process by which AI models reach their conclusions. Both of these platforms ensure AI models stay transparent and remain compliant with industry standards.

The Human Element
Issue:
This is when, after some time, the model starts to degrade because of data drift or the changes in an external environment. For instance, the model that predicts credit risk under economic conditions from a year ago wouldn’t be relevant with new financial data flowing into the system.

Solution:
Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker offer continuous monitoring and fine-tuning of AI models. Both orchestrate with the larger Amazon AI services to provide real-time insights into how the models perform so data or model retraining can be adapted in time. IBM Watson AI Governance platform entails continuous monitoring, auditing, and logging of the model for its performance. It ensures that AI models have coverage in terms of performance monitoring and in governance observance policies on data security, privacy, and ethics.

Data Security + Privacy
Issue:
In AI, handling sensitive data such as PII introduces privacy and security risks. Organizations must ensure that this data is protected from unauthorized access and malicious activity and complies with data privacy regulations such as GDPR.

Solution:
IBM Guardium offers comprehensive Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), scanning databases, S3 buckets, and other data sources to monitor access patterns, detect vulnerabilities, and flag malicious content. Guardium ensures that sensitive data such as PII is properly handled and protected, preventing data breaches and enabling organizations to meet stringent regulatory requirements.

Customer Use Case

AI in Banking for Loan Approvals

Let’s illustrate the above by using one of the most common scenarios in banking: lending automation through AI. Lenders apply their AI models for credit evaluation to decide whether to approve or reject a customer’s loan application. More often than not, these AI systems have historical training data and, at times, also have data from present customers with income, credit history, and employment status.

Problem Discovery

A good example is the deployment of a credit scoring model by an AI-based major bank, which the bank had based on the use of automation in approving loans. In the beginning, the model did fine; the speed at which loans are processed improved, and with better accuracy. After using this model for a few months, the bank realized that some minority applicants are getting rejected disproportionally compared to other groups. The investigation showed that the data science team found the trained model to be biased against high-income, non-minority applicants.

Governance Solution with AWS and IBM

Data Auditing and Quality Control: The team applies an extensive auditing procedure to the training data using AWS Glue DataBrew. It helps detect groups that are not proportionally represented in the dataset and points with anomalies, and it even flags incomplete or anomalous data points. Such tools are used so that future model iterations see augmented and balanced datasets toward high-quality, more representative data. To further enhance data security, IBM Guardium is used to continuously scan data sources, such as S3 buckets and databases, monitoring for abnormal access patterns and protecting sensitive data like Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from exposure or malicious activity.

Bias Detection and Mitigation: IBM watsonx.governance is used to assess model bias in production at runtime. It raises an alert on the data science team for some applicant groups with a high rejection rate. This further allows the team to apply bias mitigation techniques, such as resampling and reweighting, in order to obtain a model that provides fair outcomes and doesn’t lead to disproportionate harm or benefit for any selected group.

Explainability for Compliance: The bank leverages Amazon SageMaker Clarify to produce detailed explanation reports on model decisions and passes them through to make the model available to compliance teams that audit the model for explanations of why specific applicants are accepted or rejected. Similarly, IBM watsonx.governance generates explainability reports that meet this bank’s regulatory requirements, ensuring full compliance with financial industry standards.

Continuous Monitoring and Retraining: Finally, the bank will leverage Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor to monitor, on a continuous basis, any form of performance degradation and to track changing trends of loan applications and customer profiles and give an alert the moment the model predictions start to drift away from the expected outcomes. Equipped with IBM watsonx.governance, the bank establishes automated pipelines for retraining the models to ensure they remain current with changing market conditions and customer behavior. IBM Guardium continues to monitor the data flow, ensuring that sensitive data is handled securely throughout the model’s lifecycle.

Building Resilient AI Governance Across Sectors

As AI continues to transform industries, the need for robust data governance frameworks has never been more critical. Ensuring that AI systems are fair, transparent, and accountable is not just about compliance—it’s about protecting your organization’s reputation and earning the trust of your customers. With tools like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and IBM watsonx.governance, along with IBM Guardium, your organization can harness the power of AI while safeguarding privacy and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Now is the time to invest in resilient AI governance that goes beyond risk mitigation and enables innovation with confidence. Equip your teams with the right platforms and processes to build AI systems that not only perform at a high level but also reflect your organization’s commitment to ethics, accountability, and customer trust.

Ready to implement a comprehensive AI governance strategy? Contact Us Today.


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How to Seamlessly Integrate Generative AI into Your Existing Business Processes

If there’s one surefire prediction we’d make for the future, it’s this: AI technology is here to stay — and it will only become more advanced. At this point, most small- to medium-sized business owners know why they should be implementing GenAI, but the question we get most often is how to implement it in the least disruptive way.

Five best practices to guide your organization through implementing GenAI

Below, we’ve laid out a list of five best practices to guide your organization through implementing GenAI so you can capitalize on its benefits without derailing your day-to-day operations.

 

Scaling IT Infrastructure to Meet Growing Business Needs

Establish Clear Objectives

To get the most value from integrating GenAI into your business, you need to start with the following question: What problems are you trying to solve with AI? Understanding your challenges and critical needs will make it easier to identify where GenAI can be of use and provide you with the most value. It’s the foundation that allows you to build out a road map that aligns with your business’s larger strategic goals.

Having specific objectives in place will also help you establish measurable outcomes from the outset, and allocate your resources (time, money, and people) more efficiently for minimal business disruption.

Ensuring Continuous Operations and Minimized Downtime

Choose the Right AI Tools to Fit Your Business Objectives

According to a 2024 survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, 67% of businesses surveyed plan to invest more in AI over the next three years. The supply of AI tools and capabilities continues to increase to meet the demand of more businesses adopting GenAI at an increasingly rapid pace. With more tools on the market, it’s more important than ever to do your research to choose tools that align with your needs once you’ve established your objectives.

When choosing which tools to use, you’ll also want to consider existing integrations to ensure they’ll play well with your tech stack and current platforms. If you’re overwhelmed with all the options, working with a trusted partner with deep expertise in Generative AI, like Innovative Solutions, can simplify the process. At Innovative, we offer helpful services and products like Tailwinds SaaS, a platform specifically designed to help product teams, technical teams, and business leaders streamline their approach to GenAI implementations. Tailwinds offers out-of-the-box integration with leading GenAI partners like Amazon Bedrock and industry-leading chat interfaces, including IBM’s watson.x assistant.

According to a 2024 survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, 67% of businesses surveyed plan to invest more in AI over the next three years

Maintaining High Security Standards

Prepare and Refine Your Data

Whether you’re working with a partner on a GenAI solution, or striking out into the world of AI on your own, you’ll want to gather and refine the business data you have that is relevant to the tasks you want to automate. Depending on your industry vertical and GenAI use case, this could include: historical sales data, operational data like supply chain information, product and services data like descriptions or customer feedback, or employee performance reviews and team productivity data.

Having your data prepared in advance has several advantages, including:

  • Improved AI model accuracy: The output you get from your AI tools will match the input of data. In other words, poor data quality will lead to poor results.
  • Aligning AI with your business objectives: This is another reason why it’s crucial to understand your goals from the outset, so you can pull together the data that matches your objectives, and train your AI tool with the correct data to get outputs that help you meet your goals.
  • Reduced bias and ethical AI practices: By preparing your data in advance, you’ll be able to minimize any potential bias that may exist. For businesses in industries like healthcare, for example, that may deal with sensitive patient information, eliminating bias and ensuring your AI model is producing accurate information is non-negotiable.

Managing IT Costs Efficiently

Test Your GenAI Solution on a Small Scale With a POC

As with most new processes and tools, testing your GenAI solution on a small scale first with a Proof of Concept (POC) allows you to work out any hiccups and minimize risk in advance. A POC also makes it possible to collect valuable feedback early on to understand your solution’s impact and ROI value — a must if you’re also in a position where you need to convince internal stakeholders and get the support you need for integration. Starting small is key to minimizing unnecessary disruptions and helps ensure a smooth transition once you scale.

Humach, a privately held CX solutions provider for companies seeking exceptional customer experiences, is a prime example of the benefits of starting with a POC. With our Tailwinds SaaS platform, Humach was able to rapidly POC their ideas, and quickly identify the value AI would have for their business. As a result, they’ve already seen an 18% increase in customer satisfaction and a 20% increase in call automation efficiency.

Keeping Up with Technological Advancements

Train, Scale, and Optimize

Once you have validated your POC, and you’re ready to scale, you’ll need to train any internal team members using your new GenAI solution, so they know how to collaborate with it effectively. If your team understands its functionality, you’ll be enabling them to leverage all features and capabilities right out of the gate, maximizing efficiency and productivity and mitigating any unnecessary errors or misuse. Training also supports the improvement of your solution. A trained team can provide valuable feedback on performance and identify where changes need to be made.

GenAI isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of technology. As GenAI evolves, and you continue scaling your solution’s capabilities, you’ll want to be measuring and optimizing performance along the way. Doing so ensures that your solution remains a tool that adds value to your business as it grows. Regularly monitoring your solution’s performance will also help you catch any errors before they become more significant issues that could hinder operations. A GenAI solution optimized to grow and evolve with your business will continue providing the ROI you set out to secure in the first place.

Engage a Partner to Bring Your Ideal GenAI Tool to Life

As a business owner, we know your time is valuable (and limited). As a small to medium-sized business or start-up, we also understand that your internal resources can be limited. If all of the steps above make sense, but you know you don’t have the time or resources to spend on walking through the process alone, an experienced partner can help. Engaging with a team of dedicated experts will make your GenAI vision a reality — and give you the competitive edge you need in a world where AI capabilities are evolving at a breathtaking pace.

At Innovative Solutions, we’ve evolved along with the companies we’ve helped for over three decades, gaining deep expertise in Generative AI, Machine Learning, Data and Analytics, Cloud Modernization, Cloud Migrations, and Managed Cloud Services. We’ve mastered the science of meeting people where they are with the tech-driven solutions they need.

With Tailwinds, we’re giving businesses like yours the confidence to grow in the cloud with Generative AI. Learn how we can help you take the next step on your GenAI journey.

Learn More about Innovative Tailwinds SaaS

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Innovative Solutions and IBM Collaborate to Bring IBM Software to Customers via AWS Marketplace

Innovative Solutions to open new office in Boca Raton, Florida with professionals skilled in watsonx to support expanded collaboration

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (May 6, 2024) – Innovative Solutions today announced an expansion of its collaboration with IBM to bring Generative AI (GenAI) solutions, AI-infused managed security services, and an AI-infused observability platform for cloud-based applications and businesses to customers. Available on AWS Marketplace, customers can more easily access offerings developed by Innovative Solutions that embed IBM technology such as watsonx, IBM’s AI and data platform with AI assistants, to help modernize their business.

Through this expanded collaboration, Innovative Solutions will work with IBM to deepen its expertise and skills on watsonx to help scale AI adoption among small businesses (SMBs). Innovative Solutions also plans to open a second headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida on May 1, 2024 and is projected to add up to one hundred new jobs by 2026 with emphasis on SMB digital transformation. “Our services combine best-in-class software from IBM with best-in-class cloud infrastructure from AWS, providing real-time value that can’t be found anywhere else,” says Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions. “We’re already based on the East Coast, and are excited to bring more jobs to Boca Raton, which has a rich history in technology.”

“In selecting Boca Raton as the location for this corporate headquarters, Innovative Solutions joins more than 500 other corporate headquarters in the county, strategically aligning itself with Palm Beach County’s thriving tech sector comprised of 2,000 technology companies. Positioned within the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, we anticipate Innovative Solutions with long-term growth and innovation from its new location in Boca Raton,” said Kelly Smallridge, President and CEO, Business Development Board of Palm Beach County (BDB).

The core products Innovative Solutions will focus on for SMB clients include:
Innovative TailwindsInnovative Tailwinds, designed to help organizations rapidly drive business efficiency and growth through Generative AI technologies with IBM watsonx, as well as Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic, and Cohere. Learn More
Managed Security ServicesInnovative Managed Security Services, leveraging IBM security technology deployed on AWS infrastructure such as EKS, EC2, and purchased through the AWS Marketplace. Learn More
Innovative MAPInnovative MAP, leveraging IBM Instana and AWS data transfer and migrations technologies, to monitor and effectively manage workloads as they move onto AWS. Learn More
Managed Cloud ServicesManaged Cloud Services to help customers with Infrastructure Observability using IBM Instana, supported by access to expert engineers — discounted on AWS services. Learn More

MacStadium Logo

MacStadium, a private cloud services provider and SaaS leader that delivers cloud solutions to simplify Mac for business, recently partnered with Innovative Solutions to build and test a new virtual assistant enabled by IBM watsonx Assistant and underpinned by Amazon Bedrock.

“The IBM and AWS collaboration offered a unique combination of leading AI, cloud, infrastructure and open-source technologies that enabled us to scale AI workloads quickly. With our new AI Assistant, we will be able to have an ‘expert’ available to help developers in the moment they need it. Early implementation has led to an increase in staff efficiency and enhanced implementation speed, and we’re excited to continue to scale how we embed AI across our operations,” explains Chris Chapman, Chief Technology Officer at MacStadium.

Read their full success story

“Enterprises of all sizes are searching for impactful and trustworthy AI-powered solutions to help modernize their business,” said David La Rose, general manager, IBM Ecosystem, Sell. “Through our collaboration with Innovative Solutions, we’re helping develop the deep expertise of a trusted partner to scale adoption of watsonx on the AWS Marketplace and our portfolio of AI and hybrid cloud offerings with clients on multiple environments. It’s a prime example of meeting clients where they are through the power of the IBM Ecosystem.”

As Innovative continues to focus on providing the best customer outcomes, it all comes down to keeping customer needs at the forefront and finding solutions to meet those needs. “Collaborating with IBM and AWS helps us flip the script on managed services, giving our customers the power of IBM watsonx AI and data platform and AWS AI in a highly secure, managed way that allows them to expedite their growth,” says Copie.

About Innovative Solutions

Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. Recognized as an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner. With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with generative AI, application modernization, cloud migrations, AWS cloud hosting and resale, managed cloud services, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and IT consulting.

Want to learn more? Contact us today.


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