Ricoh Taiwan promotes the "20/80 flip revolution": AI takes over administrative tasks and allows human resources to focus on high-value work

According to surveys, up to 60% of modern office workers’ time is spent on mundane tasks such as communication and coordination, document search, and administrative processes. “Fragmentation of office time” has become a common pain point for enterprises. (Downloaded from PEXELS)

[Reporter Qiu Qiaozhen/Taipei Report] Office workers have a full daily schedule, and the time they really spend on "valuable work" may be less than imagined. According to a survey of more than 10,000 knowledge workers around the world by Asana, a cloud project management platform, up to 60% of modern office workers' time is spent on mundane tasks such as communication and coordination, document search, and administrative processes. "Fragmentation of office time" has become a common pain point for enterprises. As generative AI rapidly enters enterprises, AI applications also begin to move from "generating content" to further in-depth daily administrative processes such as document identification, contract search, and data comparison.

Ricoh, a smart office service provider in Taiwan, observed that although many companies have launched digital transformation, there is still a gap in the actual work process of "a lot of data, little knowledge; fast technology, but slow processes." In a traditional office environment, employees often spend up to 80% of their time and energy on repetitive administrative tasks. In addition, cross-system collaboration and unstructured data are difficult to integrate, leaving less than 20% of the time that can actually be used to create business value.

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When companies face problems such as recruitment difficulties and rising training costs, "how to get people's time back" has become a new battlefield for companies to introduce AI. Ricoh Taiwan therefore promotes the "20/80 flip revolution", hoping to use AI to take over repetitive document and administrative tasks, allowing manpower to refocus on high value-added tasks such as judgment, communication and innovation.

Ricoh Taiwan currently launches two AI products with DocuWare as the core. Among them, DocuWare AIDP integrates large language model (LLM) technology, which only requires 1 to 2 samples for initial testing and training to carry out document recognition and can handle complex formats such as handwritten Chinese and mixed graphics and text. Ricoh Taiwan stated that its measured recognition accuracy rate for Taiwanese business documents is over 90%, including contracts, shipping bills of lading and other complex documents, hoping to reduce the cost of enterprises relying on manual interpretation one by one in the past.

Another one, DocuWare Aura, targets contract management and financial documents, positioning it as an AI assistant within the enterprise. Employees can quickly find specific contract terms and related documents by asking questions in natural language, and AI can also automatically compare the differences in terms between different versions or contracts with different suppliers. In terms of information security, all queries are run within the enterprise's controlled environment to reduce the risk of leakage of business secrets that may arise from the use of general-purpose AI.

As Taiwanese companies accelerate the implementation of AI and upgrade office scenes, smart document processing and process automation have also become important applications for companies to introduce AI. Xu Bodun, Managing Director of Ricoh Taiwan, said that the real value of AI lies in amplifying human judgment and creativity rather than replacing human power; enterprises can start with small-scale, verifiable application scenarios and adopt the method of "running fast in small steps, making it effective and then expanding" to gradually expand the scope of AI introduction, allowing AI to take over repetitive work, while human resources focus on judgment and innovation, and develop towards an office model of human-machine collaboration.

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