When agents take processes beyond the sum of their parts - the EvoluteIQ story

With the arrival of agentic AI, the field of Process Automation is facing a big upgrade step.  While traditional RPA (Robotic Process Automation)has proven very effective when processes are stable, repetitive, rule-based and require high precision with structured data, Agentic RPA comes into its own when tasks are dynamic, unstructured and need cognitive judgement.

One of the new entrants into the space is EvoluteIQ, which has developed an AI-native, end-to-end agentic automation platform designed to support the management of an entire business process throughout the workflow, not just its more stable constituent parts. 

Using agentic AI, the company has created the EIQ platform, that is pitched as being able to learn each process, such as Know Your Customer (KYC) or Accounts Receivable (AR), from end-to-end. Sameet Gupte, CEO and Co-founder of EvoluteIQ introduced me to the AI-native company.

The company was born in 2019 and is headquartered in Sweden, because Nordea was an early state co-investor and Gupte also thinks that Stockholm is a vibrant innovation hub that takes a socially responsible approach to capital management. Over the past seven years EvoluteIQ has grown to have 120 employees, with over 85 customers. Ninety per cent of the business comes through partners such as WNS (a Capgemini business) and HCL, according to Gupte:

Even where I sell directly, I will bring a partner in to implement.

He adds:

We are a pure technology company and so adoption is driven by customers and partners and the most dominant sectors for us are healthcare and life sciences, along with insurance, banking and financial services. For example, the Automobile Association in the UK has transformed its insurance claims operations using agentic AI and the EIQ platform. Kaiser Permanente is also using EIQ to improve patient care and administrative workflows.

EvoluteIQ has also worked with a large utility In the UK that had been found to have overcharged customers over a number of years and so wanted to reach out to customers and repay them. Gupte explains:

The regulator gave them six months to manage the reimbursement which they needed to do to mitigate reputational risk. They had three options: they could double the number of human agents in the call center which would be expensive and slow; they could work with a major system integrator and an automation vendor, which would also be expensive and would take nine months; or they could work with a BPO partner and EvoluteIQ, which is what they chose to do. In three months, we created a system to work with legacy SAP systems that could process £400 million worth of claims. EvoluteIQ has now grown the account and is being used in other process areas.

AI-native differentiation

So how does  EvoluteIQ differentiate itself from the plethora of Process Automation vendors in the market?  Gupte argues:

Our differentiation is that we focus on the problem rather than parts of the problem. A process is more than data extraction, workflow or case management. A business person is not interested in having the best RPA tool, but they do care that their KYC process takes too long and is too expensive and involves lots of different technologies. For example, in the past to automate a process you would need a data extraction tool, a database technology, a workflow technology, you would generate reports with another tool, and then you would need a system integrator to integrate all these technologies. 

With EIQ that is not necessary, but we are not a rip and replace option, EIQ can integrate with these other tools (3,000 connectors are provided with the product) if the client already has them by dragging and dropping code into our studio. But we do make sure the client reaches ROI quicker than they otherwise would. We have been AI native since day one and we price per instances because we are driven by adoption as organisations put more processes on our platform. The number of users and bots is unlimited because our focus is on the process.

EvoluteIQ began by serving Fortune 500 companies, and has recently launched an EIQ lite version for smaller businesses that also offers unlimited bots and users but has more limited functionality.

The company has a net customer retention rate of 170% and recently received $53M in minority growth funding led by Baird Capital. It is looking to grow both organically and inorganically. As its biggest market is the US, it has now opened an R&D facility in Menlo Park to complement its capability in Bangalore.

As to where he sees the market going over the next year or so, Gupte's view is:

The management consultants, system integrators and BPO players are merging their business models and now with AI they will also absorb the technology vendor space. With Open AI and gen AI, service providers will become enterprise companions to quickly build software and so become a provider for the entire suite. These business approaches will morph into one provider, whether that be Palantir or OpenAI – they will not just be selling a model, they will be deploying a genuine outcome. AI will not be just a practice addition for service providers.

My take

New entrants with Agentic AI automation platforms are not likely to displace mature RPA players (who themselves are adding agents to their toolkits). However, they do bring versatility into the space because they can automate existing workflows as well as introduce new use cases. 

AI agents are also able to process multiple input types and generate output in multiple formats which RPA software struggles to do. The trick at the moment is to combine the two types of technology, to manage both structured and unstructured data in, say, insurance claims processing, and to enable analysis of the process in, say, KYC where agents can make decisions based on customer information. And the magicians performing these tricks with platforms such as EIQ are the service providers.