As India, specifically Bengaluru, emerges as a global GCC hub, companies are increasingly looking to invest more in R&D instead of focusing on cost centres alone. The primary driver behind this shift is the rich talent pool available in the city.
This is what prompted ABBYY, a global leader in intelligent process automation, to move a significant portion of its R&D operations to India last year. On December 16, 2024, ABBYY welcomed 30 new employees. By the end of March this year, it is on track to expand its team size to 60 members. The company further plans to add an additional 60 employees to complete its expansion in India.
CEO Ulf Persson and director of product operations and site head (India) Yathiraj Shetty K spoke to AIM about this decision.
Persson revealed that the company had secured a new office in the Central Business District of Bengaluru, which can accommodate over 65 employees, to gain a “strong presence in the heart of the city”. According to him, the company is looking to hire top talent from India.
Persson believes India is set to become the largest hub for staffing the whole product organisation of ABBYY.
When asked whether ABBYY considered hiring AI agents instead of expanding the workforce, Persson laughed off the idea. “We have people developing products, including language models. AI helps compile code and build products, but it’s a tool, not a replacement.”
“We use a lot of internal AI, but only to help us do better things, not to replace human intelligence,” Shetty added. Rather than acquiring an existing company, ABBYY chose to build its R&D centre in India as the company wants its own people trained on the use cases and markets.
For ABBYY, AI plays a dual role – improving existing technologies and creating new market opportunities. “AI allows us to get better results and better accuracy for our customers while also expanding the market with use cases that were impossible even three years ago,” Persson said.
The OCR Roots
ABBYY specialises in intelligent process automation, a technology that helps businesses extract and utilise data often embedded within various documents. “We help our customers make sense of and use data that most often, but not necessarily, is embedded in some sort of business document,” Persson explained.
One of ABBYY’s core use cases is streamlining document-heavy processes such as loan applications, where customers must submit multiple documents like ID proofs, income statements, and address proofs. Traditionally, this process required manual intervention. “Now, with ABBYY;s technology, banks can automate not only the collection process but also, at the end of the day, the decision-making process,” Persson noted.
Initially rooted in optical character recognition (OCR), the company evolved into data capture and intelligent document processing (IDP). The rise of robotic process automation (RPA) transformed the market and expanded the scope of automation to end-to-end solutions.
Beyond financial services, ABBYY’s solutions play a vital role in sectors like healthcare and government services. Persson shared an example of an Asia-Pacific customer processing national disability insurance payments. “For them, automated handling of claims documents is paramount for timely reimbursement of care costs,” he explained. “And for them, it’s obviously very important that the payments get processed very quickly, and they also get paid out in time.”
Apart from this, ABBYY also focuses on translation services, which makes it ideal for AI for Bharat use cases, as the company claims to have around 200 languages in which it can operate. “We have traditionally been very strong at language applications, and India is definitely a focus for that,” said Persson.
India’s Leapfrogging Digital Transformation
When it comes to India as a market, ABBYY sticks to its OCR roots. With the country’s push towards foundational AI models, the core challenge remains – lack of digitised content. OCR is emerging as a key enabler, allowing more data to be fed into LLMs. “In order for any model to be applicable to a document, it has to be digitised in the first place,” said Persson, emphasising the role ABBYY can play in India’s digital transformation.
Legacy data capture firms such as Tungsten (formerly Kofax), IBM Datacap, and OpenText, and even tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, leading in AI model development, are all in the same space as ABBYY. Automation vendors such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism also operate there.
While India presents growth opportunities, challenges remain. However, ABBYY’s deep expertise in document processing and automation sets it apart.
Beyond digitisation, India represents a significant business opportunity for ABBYY. “The expansion into India is not only driven by an R&D centre and product development,” Persson stated. “India is an ever-growing consumer and B2B market for us.”
Unlike developed markets that evolved incrementally, India has the opportunity to leapfrog directly into advanced digital solutions. Persson compared this to the Baltic states, which modernised rapidly after gaining independence. “India can take a large leap forward in digitising and automating processes faster than other countries because it doesn’t have legacy constraints,” he observed.
Use cases like invoice management, a global necessity, will also be critical in India. “We expect core document processing use cases in India to align with those in Europe, the US, and Japan,” Persson stated.
