The background screening industry is facing pressure from all directions. Cost of operations is rising - from vendors and from labor - while clients want a better experience for a lower price. As screening organizations evaluate strategies to set themselves up for success, AI and automation has been top of mind. But how and where does AI fit into these goals?

Across the hundreds of millions of dollars of value created from automation for our customers, we’ve found one thing to hold true: AI automation is wonderfully effective at rapidly completing repetitive, transactional workflows. Here’s why: the key word is transactional. Transactional workflows don’t require emotional buy-in (like negotiating or de-escalation) to complete the exchange, which are skills currently better left to humans. And while not without their own complexities, transactional workflows can be safely delegated to a machine. The background screening order process is full of transactional workflows, like classifying and normalizing inbound vendor/client data, reading and extracting complex documents, or routine interactions (like data collection or status checks). In fact, almost all of the order fulfillment process is transactional in nature, making screening organizations prime candidates for the benefits of AI automation.

AI automation is like having a perfectly trained workforce that's on the job all hours of the day, seven days a week. It executes workflows in parallel and processes information as soon as it’s available, optimally reducing turn-around-times. In addition, AI automation systems are infinitely scalable, meaning as you add clients you’re able to service them without growing your human workforce. Aside from the operations cost savings recognized after implementation of AI automation, your margins can improve over time.

AI automation - what does it mean?

AI automation. The automation piece is straightforward: we take a human workflow and replicate the process with technology. AI is the game changing element: we’re able dynamically react to events in real time, allowing us to finally automate what would be considered the complex workflows, such as those with infinite permutations, unstructured data, or natural language. At Theary, we chunk our AI automation offerings into three key capabilities- interactions, document processing, and intelligent data.

We've seen various combinations of these core capabilities applied in the background screening space, strung together to automate a process end to end. In one example, we autonomously request a copy of a drivers license from an applicant over email, then instantly extract information from the photo they send back.

Technology is no longer just an enabler of human operations. It’s advancing to be the driver of operations. Background screeners must craft their growth and ops strategies around a strong technology play to remain competitive and meet the industry’s rising demands. There’s been a lot of talk around “leveraging AI” for this purpose - and we’ve identified some clear ways to help you do it.

The bar is rising for screening organizations to be successful:

Clients are demanding faster turnarounds, more transparency, and lower prices. They’re also expecting the highest degree of accuracy, plus stellar customer service. How do you maintain (or even increase?) your product and service quality while lowering your costs? Especially when your labor expenses are going up, and your vendors are raising their prices year after year?

Hypothetically, let’s assume solving these problems is at the top of your list, and you’ve decided to use an AI strategy to do so. Let’s take a look at some sample use cases for how an intelligent automation system would be utilized by your organization:

Intelligent Source Lists

Use Case: Each employer, school, courthouse, and vendor has specific contacts, contact methods, and instructions for how to submit requests. Having accurate, up-to-date information is critical to eliminate any avoidable processing delays. In addition, surfacing this information for actionable use (whether it be by technology or a human) is crucial for efficiency.

Solution: Theary digests your previous historical points of contact and any existing source lists into a vector database. We augment the contact information with internet insights, finding connections like parent corporations, business hours, and more. The new, intelligent source list updates itself in real time, always providing the best, most successful contact, method, and instructions to the user.

Potential Impact: Eliminate research time, failed points of contacts, or incomplete information requests, which reduces your turn-around-time (TAT) and fosters better relationships with your contacts.

Automated Verifications (Education, Employment, References)

Use Case: For entities that don’t utilize a third party like The Work Number / Equifax Workforce Solutions (TALX), or in the case of incomplete third party reports, verifiers reach out to individuals or organizations to verify an applicant’s information. This involves sending a questionnaire, then receiving, extracting, and logging the results into a system of record. There’s often back and forth within this process, such as collecting more information from the applicant or providing additional information about the applicant.

Solution: Theary is able to autonomously make outbound requests, as well as process returned inbound requests or results. We use natural language processing to understand the contents of all inbound requests, then classify each request to generate a corresponding response. This can occur in real time, (such as a phone conversation with a voice agent) or be turn based, like over email or fax. We’re able to process documents that are submitted (including handwritten ones), and cleanly insert the information into your system of record.

Potential Impact: Process and respond to inbound information 24/7 for gold tier customer service and faster processing times, while reducing labor costs by completing searches autonomously.

*A few more interesting use cases to consider: DTOH status checks and results collection, normalized criminal report records, intelligent routing and triaging, intelligent source lists, and third party report processing and QC.

Where to start?

Getting started with AI automation is actually very simple. We’ve found that taking an iterative approach - solving problems in small chunks- helps familiarize staff with the technology while simultaneously building trust in the system’s performance. If you’re designing a technology strategy for your background screening organization, we’d love to chat. info@theary.com