Soutron Global, an internationally recognised provider of information management solutions for corporate libraries and digital archives, recently held a client advisory meeting on AI initiatives that focused on how to make AI beneficial to the industry. Attendees included representatives from clients in the pharmaceutical, engineering, legal, energy, manufacturing, medical, electronic industries, in addition to membership organisations.
At the meeting, potential areas of AI interest were discussed, including new methods of streamlining workflows and creating new efficiencies, while seeking balance and benefit alignment with the diverse Soutron client base of special libraries and archives.
“We brought together Soutron clients from a wide range of industries to get different viewpoints, help direct and look at what’s needed as we advance the Soutron application to take advantage of AI and ensure it is being used to solve and improve real life challenges,” states Graham Partridge, VP of R&D at Soutron Global. “It was great to hear from our clients about how they are using AI, what the AI challenges are in their industries, and what potentially Soutron could solve along with what direction they would like to see Soutron take. The trust they have with our secure information management system and new development initiatives was gratifying to hear.”
Soutron has a history of working with intelligent technology. Back in 2017, Soutron worked with a government agency to integrate the Summariser application into Soutron, which uses machine learning techniques to extract metadata and summarise documents, creating searchable information records. That agency determined that it would take over 30 years to catalogue all the digitised material they had available and needed to reduce that workload.
Summariser quickly extracted and imported information such as title, abstract, keywords and date, and added a note that the record was automatically generated. Previously, a search returned many records and all returned documents had to be opened and reviewed. Now, with the abstracts created by Summariser, users can refine searching to return the most appropriate documents more accurately and can easily scan the results to quickly determine the most appropriate resource.
“Everything we do with AI will be done with purpose and reason,” states Tony Saadat President and CEO of Soutron Global. “Our clients have always been the guardians of qualified, authoritative information and data, and we know that secure, qualified sources of information are needed with AI to make sure that the information that comes out is correct and of excellent quality.”
