Tackle Ai
True AI

Tackle Ai was conceptualized three years ago. It all started when Joe Stecher and his partner Sergio Suarez Jr. were trying to find solutions to automate workflows. In the course of finding one, they soon discovered that many companies in the market are claiming to do wonders with Artificial Intelligence (AI). But, when they dug deep and peeped behind the hood, it was really not AI.

So, the duo launched Tackle Ai to capture, comprehend and identify not only different types of documents but business-critical information contained within those documents— all automatically. Tackle Ai works with structured, unstructured, highly variable documents and images, without any need for human interaction. This enables businesses to quickly gain a richer, more meaningful understanding of their information while significantly reducing labor and document management expenses.

What used to take humans or other software hours or days, Tackle Ai completes in mere seconds, at a fraction of the cost.

It’s been an exciting ride for Joe and Sergio with Tackle Ai just completing its Seed funding round last month. In an exclusive interview with CIO Applications, Joe shared his insights on Tackle Ai’s solution and how it benefits clients. He spoke in-depth about the current state of the AI space and how Tackle Ai is educating businesses on real artificial intelligence and demystifying the myths involved.

In light of the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak, your solutions make perfect sense for businesses. Can you elaborate on that aspect?

Joe: With COVID-19, companies are getting battered with employees not being able to work in the office, and as a result, taking a hit on the efficiencies of various processes.

We automate all types of workflow components to increase efficiency. It doesn’t make sense for companies to have their resources doing mundane, tedious, and repetitive tasks. Tackle Ai empowers stakeholders to reallocate their resources so they can be leveraged for more business-critical work.

On the topic of AI being used too carelessly, where do the current solutions and technologies fall back when it comes to automating workflows?

Joe: One of the big things that we come across a lot is fake AI.

There are a lot of companies claiming they have an AI, but when you have an army of people behind the scenes that is doing everything manually, that’s not AI!

When you’re doing “AI” in Excel with a bunch of “if-then” statements, that’s not AI!

So, one of the things that we wanted to do with Tackle Ai is to demystify the entire AI space and show the world that there is real AI out there. The critical part of the term Artificial Intelligence is the intelligence piece. There are a lot of AI companies that unfortunately don’t have the intelligence part. Not having the intelligence piece can be detrimental to businesses sold on their “AI” solution.

AI means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So as we get into client discussions, we quickly identify where the voids are or where the manual workflows are. Tackle Ai is able to step in and automate those workflows using a real artificial intelligence platform—which continues to learn as the workflow evolves. We find a lot of inefficiencies not only in the workflow automation but also in the data accuracy and data intelligence, helping the client improve the data sets over time.

Another good thing is, stakeholders of companies are waking up to the fact that the data they are running analytics against is only about 20 percent of the whole equation. They’re beginning to understand that 80 percent of the world’s information is found within unstructured formats. And that is something that will be a key for us: continuing to educate organizations about what unstructured data is and how this other 80% of information is crucial to their business.

The world is full of solution providers who can help businesses find dynamic data on a structured form. But as soon as you change the form and move fields around in that form, their process stops working and they aren’t able to identify information as quickly and easily anymore. That’s because these other solution providers are not true AI. So as a result, companies continue to struggle with ways to get access to the information that is trapped in those informal, unstructured documents.

How do they get access to that information?

How do companies make their database more robust with information, so that when they actually run analytics against it, they gain true insights to make informed critical business decisions?

They’re trying to figure that out, and they can’t most of the time. So instead, they just throw humans at it, ask them to read the document, and then enter the data into spreadsheets or their database.

This is where Tackle Ai comes in. We take care of automating the workflow and we give the client access to 100 percent of their data to run analytics against.

How are you demystifying AI? How do you help clients understand what AI is supposed to be doing in their IT environment?

Joe: We’re not the cool AI company.

We’re not the sexy AI Company, shooting rockets to Mars, or, building androids that will take over the world, like Skynet! Our AI is more grounded to everyday businesses and catering to their need of automating workflows, making them more efficient, and extracting that “difficult to get” information.

When we sit down with a customer or client, we want to first understand what the company wants to get accomplished—what their pain points are.

What are they trying to automate?

What are they trying to make more efficient?

What information are they trying to get access to?

So that way, we can train our AI to perform just like a human would and bring that automation to life to make their environments and their workflows more efficient.

To what extent can Tackle Ai be used for automation?

Joe: It depends on how much the client wants us to automate.

It can be as simple as having the client drag and drop their documents into our AI platform to be processed. We can then spit out results via a JSON file or CSV, or, if the client wants us to, we can populate a the information extracted into another database directly and automatically.

For example, we completely automated a client’s entire invoicing process. Tackle Ai monitors their email and figures out which emails contain invoices. The system then opens the email, downloads the attachment, and goes to work separating the documents within the attachment and then extracting information specifically off the invoice. Finally, our AI populates their third party AP software automatically.

So literally from end to end, the entire process is never even touched by a human. Unless the AI detects some kind of an exception or anomaly, in which case, it will go ahead and route the rare occurrence to a human workflow for further confirmation. In this case, an email alert is sent to the client notifying them of the interaction required. The AI is always learning. It’s always getting smarter.

What all can Tackle Ai automate?

Joe: We’ve trained our AI for three specific verticals at the moment--legal, healthcare and finance. It is 95 percent ready to go out of the box, with the remaining 5 percent, left to customize each respective client’s needs.

One of our key differentiating factors is that there is no new software a client’s end-users will need to learn by leveraging Tackle Ai.

Unlike others in the space that are SaaS-based, off the shelf solutions, our AI is really configurable based on the client. So instead of changing an organization’s entire workflow to fit the way our system works, we go in and listen to how their processes work. Once we understand the entire workflow, we sit in the middle and automate what the client needs which frees up their resources.

After the deployment phase, we keep in contact with our clients. We set up a communication structure between Tackle Ai and the point of contact on the client side. There are frequent touchpoints that are put in place from onboarding the client to launching the workflow and automation in the AI, making sure that it fits and exceeds their expectations.

How has the market reacted over the last three years after they have used your solution?

Joe: The market has reacted very well. We’re seeing a lot of uptick in inquiries as businesses are realizing what can be accomplished with data extraction, data automation, data analysis using an AI like Tackle Ai.. Many businesses think there are limitations even though there really not any when working with Tackle Ai. There are endless use cases and applications for several industries. Workflows that currently take humans hours or even days to complete can now be simplified down to less than a second with our AI.

One client spent two years and $3 million working with an “AI” company. And after two years, they pulled the plug because it wasn’t automating anything that they wanted to automate.

When this client came in to talk with us, there was a lot of skepticism. They tested our platform to see if there was manual intervention but found no foul play. Once they finally got over all of the past scars, they were blown away by what we could accomplish for them. The client quickly started selling our platform and results internally to other departments, and to other process owners saying “you have got to do this. It saved me so much time, energy and money.”

So to your question of how people react, its true astonishment.

Where do you see Tackle Ai in 12 to 18 months?

Joe: We plan to leverage our AI and really make OCR extinct. That’s a big task because OCR is massive.

In all, we are in the epicenter of a digital intelligence revolution where AI is actually the centerpiece. Businesses better start thinking about leveraging AI, because they’re going to be left behind like the dinosaurs otherwise.

So contact us, and we can help your stakeholders walk through what an AI solution really needs to be.

We believe Tackle Ai has been the best-kept secret out there.

And now it’s time to start letting people know about what we can truly do!