Scott Opitz, Chief Marketing Officer of ABBYY – Interview Series

Scott Opitz, is the Chief Marketing Officer at ABBYY.  He founded the process intelligence firm TimelinePI before it’s eventual merging with ABBYY.

What initially attracted you to artificial intelligence?

My interest in AI was borne from the same thing that attracted me to technology in general, I have always been fascinated by any computing tools that increase the speed at which humans can solve problems. For much of my career, I was focused on the development of technologies that made traditional analytics tools more accessible to non-technical users. Although this provided great improvements in their understanding of their data, there were classes of problems that were beyond the capabilities of these techniques. A great example is detecting how the subtle interactions between different steps of a business process can influence the outcome of that process. It turns out that creatively applying machine learning can actually allow you to predict these outcomes far better that any human. These new insights allow users to take actions to change negative outcomes or at least prepare in advance to mitigate their impact.

You were previously the co-founder and CEO of TimelinePI, Inc., a company that was later acquired by ABBYY. Could you discuss how TimelinePI empowered users to understand, optimize and monitor any business process?

TimelinePI was originally founded to provide a better solution for the discovery, analysis and monitoring of business processes. We did this through a combination of process event mining and schema reconstruction. This was particularly helpful in the process assessment and planning for digital transformation projects. In 2019, we merged with ABBYY to further extend these capabilities by allowing us to achieve even greater insight by exploiting the critical business process data locked away in the numerous documents found in business processes. We now offer the combined solution as core capabilities within ABBYY’s Digital Intelligence Platform.

The importance of these deeper insights became especially evident during the pandemic. Overnight, employees from order processing to accounts payable to customer service lost the ability to walk over to the next cubicle to discuss a file or ask for help. In some cases they couldn’t even access core systems and applications. Out of necessity many employees became frustrated and circumvented processes in an attempt to find any way to get the job done. In fact, in a global survey conducted by ABBYY, 1-in-4 workers were so fed up with processes that they were willing to quit their jobs.

The insights enabled by the new ABBYY Digital Intelligence Platform solve this problem by allowing companies to see the exact process steps as they are completed and pinpoint bottlenecks or other potential issues. It also helps companies learn what employees actually do when they perform a particular task and identify opportunities to improve the process through better training or by sharing insights. Uncovering new, more efficient process variations then can be promoted as best practices.

After the acquisition of TimelinePI, Inc. you became the President of ABBYY Process Intelligence where you oversaw the integration of TimelinePI’s process intelligence products (now ABBYY Timeline) into ABBYY’s worldwide sales and distribution channels. What were some of the challenges behind this integration?

The integration of the technologies was the easiest part. The greater challenge was helping our more than 5,000 customers, many among the Fortune 500, understand how to adjust their usual practices to benefit from true process understanding. In many cases these companies are just beginning to realize that they cannot afford to waste time on manual, error prone analysis or the risk of guessing on how best to optimize their organizations. Our successes thus far are thanks to the tremendous efforts of our customers success team and highly qualified partner network.

What are some…