Technology Timeliness
Focus on AI/ML
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have been around for over 60 years[1] – long before “AI/ML” became buzzwords. These technologies have fascinated us in books and movies for more than one generation, in fact (Terminator or AI anyone?). What’s new is the widespread productization of tools and the imagination of business managers that have dreamt up use cases. All great leaps in technology begin with someone thinking “we need an intelligent way out of this crisis” or “wouldn’t it be great if….”
Vaco is different. Our innovation lab, spearheaded by Sudhir Sahu, out of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Office, asked the question: “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a way to help our client quickly and accurately build AI/ML critical need projects? For example, wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that masks or redacts Personal Identifiable Information (PII), a tool that was both smart and fast enough to deal with all of our client’s emails, scanned documents, various tables, documents, data lakes, and other data sources?
In fact, a tool like that would have to continuously learn, because PII continues to evolve. However, if we developed a tool like that, it would solve an essential data control problem and it would be flexible enough to learn the nuances of each business. What happens if a client didn’t have much of an issue with PII, but needed to process thousands and thousands of documents, all of which needed to be indexed and searchable….that sure would be useful. Wouldn’t that be…..great?”
I want to highlight exactly our response to all those questions. It’s called the Vaco PII Data Redaction product, empowered by Vaco Cognitive Computing Framework (VCCF)™. For a detailed explanation, here is a snapshot of the architecture:
[1] AI wasn't formally founded until 1956, at a conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined. But achieving an artificially intelligent being wasn't so simple.
For the Small to Mid-Size Businesses (SMB), here are a couple of key points. While new bits and pieces of AI/ML products are being introduced to the market all the time, Vaco’s offering is one of the few – perhaps only – fully integrated platform of hardware and software. Vaco and NEC-X Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, have formed a partnership that has developed this integrated solution using NEC’s highly advanced data processing hardware that is used in super-computers around the world. The result is enterprises are now able to scan through millions of files, identify critical information and redact such information to protect individual’s private information from unauthorized uses in a matter of minutes.
This fully integrated, semi-custom product has the capability to parse, identify, confirm, and redact information based on the GDPR and other privacy policies through its AI/ML rules engine model. Given the fines that have been levied at companies for ignoring PII data (in the billions), an affordable tool for the SMB (Small-to-Midsize Business) market makes cost/benefit sense as well as being a critical component for audit compliance and risk management strategies.
The Vaco PII Data Redaction product is intelligent enough to differentiate a real social security or driver’s license number from fake/non-sensical ones, and flexible enough to be adapted for, say, medical or legal records processing. It’s built to intake information from emails, IMs, ECM (SharePoint/Confluence/etc.), Document Management solutions, unstructured data, Non-Production environments, removable media, file shares, and of course relational databases. All structured, semi-structured, and non-structured data can be ingested and processed according to configuration.
It has already been selected for “Excellence in Tech Awards Finalist” under the Best Smart Banking Technology Solution category for Banking Technology Awards and has immense utility not only for a financial services company, but retail, legal, and healthcare as well.
For more information, contact your local Vaco representative to coordinate a straightforward, 1-hour real-time demonstration of this powerful solution.
Steve Shoemake
Steve Shoemake brings more than 25 years of Technology and Management Consulting experience to Vaco, which he joined in 2014 as a Managing Partner to help lead the company’s expansion into the Ohio Valley region. Prior to joining Vaco, he led RGP’s Information Management Practice for the region, helping grow that practice from the ground up where he expanded it into Dayton, and delivered timely solutions around Healthcare changes, Business Intelligence, and emerging
ERP/CRM solutions. Earlier in his career, Steve provided leadership for nearly a decade at Accenture as a member of their highly selective Process Excellence Practice before founding his own successful consulting firm.
Steve has written several articles on the topic of Performance Management and frequently speaks about change – particularly at the intersection of business and technology. He is also a published fiction novelist, launching his first two books In Pursuit of Wisdom in 2014 and In Need of Protection in 2016 as part of the Dark World Saga Trilogy.
Steve holds a BS from the University of Michigan in Electrical Engineering and is passionate about helping you change when change is needed.