NEW YORK and BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Columbia Business School data scientist Professor Daniel Guetta, Director of the Business Analytics Initiative at Columbia Business School and Columbia Engineering, has published a case study about Evisort, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enhanced document management and data analytics solution for contracts developed by Harvard Law and MIT researchers. Guetta begins teaching the Evisort case study today in a new Business Analytics MBA class, the latest in Columbia’s growing data- and analytics-focused offerings for MBAs. The case study, entitled: “Evisort: An A.I.-Powered Start-up Uses Text Mining to Become Google for Contracts,” will be joined by a technical case study counterpart in the near future.
Guetta describes Evisort as a compelling, versatile solution for AI-driven contract data mining, with strong core utility for lawyers. He notes that, in addition to their significant usefulness for attorneys, contract analytics also have vast mainstream potential to assist a wide range of corporate professionals in finance and operations. Guetta also acknowledged that artificial intelligence techniques such as those used by Evisort could also be used to harvest data from many types of business documents in addition to contracts.
“Contracts are the scaffolding of the modern company,” says Guetta. “Every department and process within an organization is ruled by contracts including legal, employment, supply chain, pricing, inventory, and more. Extracting data from contracts is not only of paramount importance to lawyers in an organization, but it also has a much more enterprise-wide, holistic reach with infinite applications.”
Guetta continues, “Extending far beyond legal tech and contracts, contract-focused business intelligence solutions can form the basis of hundred-million-dollar savings for corporations because contracts contain so much essential corporate data. Text mining drastically reduces the need for manual data searching, reporting and human reading of contracts except in the most complex cases. Evisort is particularly impressive because it demonstrates both the power and limits of AI. Even when human review is necessary, Evisort provides a suite of non-AI-enhanced tools to go the last mile if needed and reduce review time significantly.”
Evisort CEO Jerry Ting and COO Jake Sussman were Harvard Law School students when they co-founded the company in 2016 with CTO Amine Anoun, then a graduate MIT student. All three men have since graduated and are now full-time executives at Evisort. Evisort is backed by leading venture capitalists including Amity Ventures and Village Global which has investors like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates.
Ting explains, “You can break down a company into its entire value chain by looking at its contracts...a business intelligence platform centered around contracts can become a business intelligence platform for the whole company, from operations, to supply chain, to advertising. Evisort has unlimited potential for corporations and law firms to mine any type of data.”
Guetta’s Business Analytics class at Columbia Business School introduces MBAs to advanced topics in artificial intelligence. This class is the latest in a series of data- and analytics-focused classes at the business school, including classes on databases, Python, R, and applied data science. The Columbia Evisort case study is now available on the Columbia Caseworks website here.
About Evisort
Evisort (www.evisort.com) is a startup founded in 2016 by Harvard Law and MIT researchers to develop artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to help companies mine contracts for data. Evisort’s AI understands meaning and context in legal language, virtually eliminating the need to read contracts.
Artificial intelligence specifically designed for contracts is a nascent and booming industry that Evisort has pioneered and developed with great success. Evisort allows corporate in-house attorneys, supply chain, and other professionals to leverage AI to seek patterns in contract data automatically using content analysis algorithms.
Evisort has offices in Boston and Silicon Valley.
