I came to artificial intelligence the long way round. Over the past decade I have recorded, dismantled and rebuilt business processes in manufacturing companies, in administration and in large public-sector organisations — more than fifty projects, most of them involving documents moving between people who were each certain the delay was somewhere else.
What that work teaches is a particular kind of scepticism. The bottleneck is almost never where the organisation believes it is. It sits in handovers, in the same information being entered twice, in an approval waiting on one person who is in a meeting. Tools do not resolve any of that on their own. They resolve it reliably once somebody has looked closely enough to say what is actually happening.
Why procurement
Buying, checking and paying is where the document problem is at its most concentrated. An invoice is a claim about reality that has to be tested against a contract, a delivery and a measurement — three other documents, held by three other people, in three different states of tidiness. Every structural weakness in an organisation's information flow shows up here first and most expensively.
It is also a field where the recent progress in machine reading of documents genuinely changes what is possible, as opposed to changing the marketing. That combination — a real problem and a real new capability — is rarer than the conference programme suggests.
How I work
I talk to the people doing the job, at their desk, before I read a single process diagram. I put numbers on things rather than adjectives. I write reports that make sense to someone who has never met me. And I say no to work that will not pay for itself, which is occasionally awkward and has been the main reason clients come back.
Practical details
The practice operates as Martin Echt GmbH, based in Escheburg near Hamburg, Germany. Working languages are German and English. A German-language publication aimed at mid-market companies more broadly sits at ki-experte.hamburg, and the company's general site is echt-gmbh.de.
These field notes are written when there is something worth writing, which is not on a schedule. There is no newsletter, no sign-up form and nothing that follows you around the internet afterwards.