Procurement officers in state and local government agencies have a lot of responsibilities, including: It’s a highly strategic role, so it follows that a procurement officer’s time and effort should be spent on decision-making and not on mundane or administrative tasks. Requiring them to focus on tedious tasks like invoice processing is not a good use of their time. It would be akin to expecting a CEO to reconcile receipts against travel reports or to schedule and reschedule meetings.

Not long after graduating college, in the late 2010s, I had a data analysis job that scarred me for life. It involved reading through hundreds of documents—some of them handwritten—and meticulously, painstakingly entering data into spreadsheets. Who among us hasn’t been scarred by a similar experience? I remember thinking, as I spent mindless hours copy-pasting rows of text from one screen to another, that there had to be a better way. Mercifully, there is.

Discussions about AI could be heard throughout the 7th annual Appian Government event, held November 29, 2023 at Capital One Hall in Tysons, Virginia. At breakfast, a customer sitting next to me mentioned how he’s looking forward to hearing how AI can help mine his historical data. “And securely,” another added. In a lunchtime conversation, yet another customer told me about the productive meeting they had with Appian on incorporating AI into their processes.

In 2023, generative AI took the spotlight, emerging as the most talked-about technology of the year. This content creating powerhouse can do everything from text, image, and video generation to answering questions through natural language queries. And its potential uses are vast. While many industries are still in the experimental phase, the insurance sector is poised to benefit significantly from the integration of artificial intelligence into its ecosystem.

Too many legacy systems. It’s something we hear from government agencies all the time. And you’ve heard this complaint too, no doubt. But the risk-averse nature of government organizations combined with a fear of disruption makes them reluctant to take on a wholesale modernization effort. What if they don’t have to, though? What if there’s a better way?

Whether it's invoice processing or compliance management, it's likely that your organization grapples with numerous processes centered around documents. And for many, a relentless increase in document volume without an efficient way to process them has continued to challenge productivity. The manual handling of documents not only consumes time and effort but also introduces errors, which creates more costs.

In the age of rapid innovation, organizations are increasingly adopting low-code business process automation (BPA) to meet demand for speedy custom application delivery and seamless digital workflows. Perhaps that’s why global demand for low-code automation platforms (LCAPs) is expected to grow 25% to a $10 billion market value in 2023. So what does the ascendance of BPA tell us about the evolution of innovation?

Automated underwriting technology is helping insurers reimagine what’s possible for replacing manual underwriting processes. Gone is the workbench of the 80s and 90s—incomplete data, sluggish page loads, time-consuming workflows and all. And in its place? A modern, connected solution that unifies your data, automates your underwriting process, and improves decision-making for a better customer experience and a stronger bottom line.