Xerox—the company that revolutionized document management—has embarked on a new path enabling businesses to automate business processes and workflows by harnessing the power of those documents to streamline organizational efficiency.
This strategic pivot builds upon Xerox’s rich history of innovation, which those who know it only for its iconic photocopiers might not appreciate. Since it launched the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1969, Xerox has conducted research and development that was instrumental in birthing technologies that have become the bedrock of today’s digital world, including the graphical user interface (GUI) and Ethernet. Despite the common association with printed pages—and transitioning PARC to the non-profit SRI International—the company has been delivering digital product innovation uninterrupted since the early 1970s.
For Xerox, like many innovations that turned into commercial opportunities, the journey toward providing automation services to external clients began as a solution to an internal problem.
Stephen Miller was hired in 2018 to lead digital transformation within Xerox. He has since served as CIO for the company’s SMB unit and currently serves as the entire company’s Chief Digital Officer. But one of the first problems he was presented with led directly to implementing an automated solution to save a single, important account.
“My first couple days at Xerox, the Chief Revenue Officer walked in and said, hey, Steve, we have to automate the billing for a very large, complex client or they’re not going to renew. Xerox was used to selling hardware and our legacy systems were great for typing in hardware orders and sending one bill over,” Miller explains in an interview with Automation Today. “But now we had clients that had thousands of locations that were buying software and software-powered services from us. They wanted separate bills, invoices, products and so forth and we had no way to do it.”
Miller said the first automation created internally at Xerox solved a multimillion-dollar revenue problem and immediately opened the company’s eyes to the power of digital transformation and automation. So, the organization bought into automation internally and outside clients began to notice the results—Xerox was more efficient and was solving problems for itself that its clients were also experiencing.
The conversations they began having with clients about automation turned into a commercial practice about three years ago. Initially, it consisted of clients looking at Xerox’s bot catalog, formed from the use cases the company had in live production, and buying bots. But it has evolved during that time into a comprehensive offering integrated into its digital services business.
“Automation is a vital part of digital transformation, but what we are really providing our clients is a seamless continuum of digital capture, processing, and comprehensive workflow automation, applicable across any process or industry,” he states.
Uniquely Positioned
Combining deep corporate DNA in print and document management with an early embrace of automation and augmenting that capability with AI as it has been infused into robotic process automation (RPA), Xerox felt it was uniquely positioned to deliver on the promise of digital transformation.
Miller argues that understanding how process and technology come together to enable value is the company’s secret sauce, but it starts with the core competency that everyone knows Xerox delivers.
“We have the capability to capture, digitize, store, and facilitate the retrieval of all our clients’ documents, whether online or offline, as an integral component of our established managed print services,” he explains. “Moreover, we’ve broadened our scope to include a multichannel capture strategy that utilizes our proprietary imaging centers, third-party offsite facilities, and on-site scanning at client locations to meet every customer requirement. We can then apply intelligence so they can understand classify, extract and process each document.”
That process, leveraging AI and Intelligent Document Processing capabilities, serves as the basis for extracting valuable data from the documents and enables RPA bots to automate any downstream workflows that rely on the data. But that all starts with intelligent document management, something people traditionally have recognized in Xerox as a strength.
“We have created a document lifecycle management platform,” Miller says. “Our clients use bots to instantly perform all the actions in a process, but it all starts with accessible digitized data.”
Virtuous Circle
Digital transformation is far from complete in most organizations and Xerox, as one of the biggest manufacturers of multifunction devices, has been instrumental in the transition from paper documents to digital. Miller notes that much of the activity on those devices is scanning. In just the past two years Xerox has digitized nearly three billion documents.
“For clients that permit it, we mine attributes from those documents and that’s enabled us to create and train LLMs to do very complex IDP, very complex classification and extraction that really gives us an advantage,” he says.
So, a virtuous circle has been created. Xerox’s legacy as a premier print company has enabled it to digitize documents at scale, which trains AI that makes it better at digitizing documents, moving Xerox beyond print and enabling their clients to take full advantage of intelligent end-to-end automation.
“We operate with our clients on a continuum,” he explains. “We digitize the information or work with files that are already digital, and then the Xerox Intelligent document processing will classify and extract that information. Gen AI prompts enable IDP to then get almost 100 percent accuracy on highly unstructured data so they can truly understand that data, optimize what’s classified and extracted, and we also use the bots to automate processes downstream. That’s where you’re really into a fully digitized automated workflow.”
Xerox’s clients represent a wide range of verticals, but one that is extremely important to the company is manufacturing. Miller related an example of how a Texas company is leveraging the platform to optimize their shipping process.
“In that case, IDP is looking at lots of unstructured data coming out of their order entry systems and working with our multifunction devices to create bills of lading associated with particular trucks,” he notes. “For a long time that process was people and paper because you’re in a factory, it’s a very industrial environment. But now that information is digitized, classified, extracted and turned into a bill of lading that automatically goes to a ‘ruggedized’ printer at the loading site and is given directly to the driver. It’s a much more digitized process resulting in fewer errors than they used to get when it was a manual workflow.”
Adding Value
While PARC was not engaged in the development of RPA or Gen AI (indeed, it’s no longer part of the organization), its innovative spirit has fueled Xerox’s move beyond print to incorporate much more. Managed print services has been a Xerox staple for decades. But understanding how technology is revolutionizing your core business is necessary for survival. Miller notes that Xerox’s leadership understands that data is everything. And, that its access to data through longstanding relationships and its ability to leverage that access and the rapidly changing technology has given it the opportunity to evolve as a company.
“It’s one thing to understand the technology,” he says. “It’s another thing to understand how work gets done in an enterprise or an SMB and understand exactly where that technology can enable the most value. At Xerox, we understand how work is done and that gives us the credibility to say to our clients, ‘here’s exactly how this Gen AI bot or this automation workflow or this end-to-end managed service can integrate into this enterprise workflow and add the most value’.”
