Rise in digital transformation, artificial intelligence and robotic process automation initiatives fuel growth

ABBYY^®, a global provider of intelligent capture solutions to improve business outcomes, today announced its 2017 results. The company achieved a total revenue growth of 25%, the highest rate in five years.

Throughout 2017, ABBYY completed a number of large-scale projects for its corporate clients in the United States, Europe, Australia, and other countries around the world. Licensing technologies to partners like Fujitsu, Epson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, RICOH, and Xerox also remained a significant revenue source for the company.

ABBYY’s growth goes hand in hand with the expanding digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) markets. International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts worldwide spending on digital transformation technologies to reach $1.3 trillion in 2018 and maintain a strong pace of growth over the next five years. Gartner sees AI as the most disruptive class of technologies that will give an unprecedented competitive edge to businesses over the next 10 years. According to Forrester, the AI market will increase tenfold to reach $29 billion by 2020, while the RPA market will double to $2.4 billion. McKinsey predicts that by 2036 close to 50 percent of business processes will be automated.

“Businesses understand that to survive in today’s markets, where customers have the expectation of now, they need to change. ABBYY’s AI-based intelligent capture platforms and solutions help them go through digital transformation and robotic process automation as effortlessly as possible. This is why we see a growing interest in our product portfolio,” comments Ulf Persson, ABBYY CEO. “Enterprise clients use our technologies to accelerate onboarding and decision-making processes, manage risks and extract meaningful insights from large amounts of unstructured data.”

In 2017, ABBYY went through a series of organisational changes. Ulf Persson became the CEO in January 2017, after serving as a member and the Chairman of ABBYY’s Board since 2002. As CEO, he created a new global management structure, which by the end of 2017 integrated all 16 offices in 13 countries. Several new functions were created, and a Chief Innovation Officer was recruited. The new model serves the needs of the company’s business across the globe, helps to maintain a unified brand and reinforces its focus on providing innovations in content intelligence for the digital transformation market.