Page 46 - FCW, January/February 2021
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CaseStudy
How California’s DMV
adapted to COVID closures
The Department of Motor Vehicles deployed intelligent document processing so it could continue serving customers remotely
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
When COVID-19 forced the clo- sure of the California Depart- ment of Motor Vehicles’ 176 field offices, officials turned to artificial intelligence to process customers’ documents.
“We established a virtual field office for our customers where they could request certain services that we could provide remotely,” said Ajay Gupta, DMV’s chief digital transformation officer. For situations that require customers to submit physical docu- ments, such as vehicle title transfers, DMV set up a digital mailroom using intelligent document processing tools from ABBYY.
Customers can upload most docu- ments or DMV officials can scan them. Either way, the documents go through an AI-based process for extracting the
data, classifying the documents and posting them to the department’s vir- tual case management system. But the automation doesn’t stop there. DMV uses bots to move the documents forward.
“These bots are basically doing the work to talk to our legacy sys- tems and process some transactions and complete the whole thing like a technician would have in a real field office,” Gupta said. “The technicians know that a document has arrived in the [digital] mail, and it’s complete, and this is the document, and here’s the data and next steps.”
Expanding the use of automation
Intelligent document processing is also accelerating Real ID applications by letting customers submit images
of their identification documents via cellphone before going to a DMV field office to receive the ID, which adheres to federal security guidelines.
“Customers would get a notification after they submit all the documents saying, ‘Yes, your package is com- plete. You can go to the field office,’” Gupta said.
The AI-based tool validates the doc- uments and extracts the needed infor- mation. In addition, the department created a human-in-the-loop process so that employees can complete any task that the AI cannot do.
DMV never receives physical doc- uments, which simplifies the pro- cess for employees and saves paper because they don’t have to make pho- tocopies to send to the department’s scan unit, he added.
It takes the AI tool about 30 sec- onds to 45 seconds to review each document. Furthermore, “we’ve gone from 28 minutes per Real ID trans- action to about 10 minutes,” he said. “AI-driven prescreening is one of the reasons why we are able to do that. It also reduced customer visits because there are reduced returning customers due to incomplete documentation.”
However, he added that “the No. 1 benefit to us was elasticity,” espe- cially given the requirement that all of California’s 34 million driver’s licens- es transition to Real IDs by October 2021.
In addition, DMV started using AI to improve its interactive voice
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