The creators of a new artificial intelligence system hope their tool will make lengthy document review processes easier for humans. Expeflow launched in Waterloo, Ont. on Tuesday. It can flag missing, inconsistent and unsupported information found in dauntingly long documents. “It’s a document review system. And what it will do, is it will check the document for any number of facts you want to check,” Terry Stepien, Expeflow’s CEO said. “You could do spelling and grammar. OK. But where it gets more interesting is you could do consistency. So, is the document consistent top to bottom with what it says. And then it gets even more exciting if you say is the document true to all the facts you originally had when you started writing it? So, does it have the right information? And then the one that I find really interesting is does it have any extra information that wasn’t in what you were intending?” According to Stepien, in document heavy work like healthcare and law, these quick reviews can ensure everything is accurate and major information hasn’t been changed or missed. “We’re currently using it with medical documents where people are reviewing their information that have related to medical incidents or accidents or those types of situations. But the actual technology could be used across the industries, such as legal or any business situation where you have a document and you’d like to know how accurate it is,” Stepien said. Expeflow uses a hybrid of AI models and their own technology to point out inconsistencies or errors, but a human must always approve any changed. Changes are also logged for future reviews. “If you get something such as a medical file, there could be thousands of pages to review and only some of those pages apply to what you need. And then you want to make sure they’re accurate. So, you could use it as you’re processing your medical information,” Stepien said. Security concerns Technology analyst Ritesh Kotak said it’s definitely going to help users, but warns they need to make sure they’re always checking its work. “It definitely is a safeguard when you have what we call human in the loop. The issue becomes around complacency,” Kotak said. “As a professional, that’s governed by a professional organization, there are professional responsibilities. And that’s not ever going to be negated. However, it does become a challenge. And we have seen time and time again where individuals have relied heavily on these systems only to later find out that it was problematic.” Kotak also questioned the safety of the data and said it’s important for users to question who has access to that information. “Is my data encrypted? Where is it being stored? Are you maybe removing certain types of information or anonymizing the information before using these tools, such as an individual’s name [or] address? Again, personal identifiable information that is absolutely critical. We have seen companies give multiple assurances that the information is secure. It’s not hackable, that it’s encrypted, until later they find out that was misleading and/or there was some sort of situation that caused the information to be compromised or breached.” According to Expeflow, information is stored in a secure commercial data centre and a 256 bit encryption is applied to all the data. “If someone ever hacked the data centre, the data in the Expeflow solution would still be protected,” a media spokesperson for Expeflow said in an email. Kotak said software that works on-premise or essentially offline, can avoid using the internet and any third-party platforms. “It’s really important that you ask questions around who has access to my data,” Kotak said. Expeflow said working offline can have benefits, but becomes challenging to maintain. The internet may be needed for additional data that is too large to manage manually and limiting access to the internet can also make failover, an automatic process that moves operations to redundant systems when the primary unit fails, cost prohibitive. Expeflow is now available for use, something Stepien hopes will lessen the burden on fact checkers everywhere.
