Q&A With AI Innovator and Evisort Founder and CEO Jerry Ting

Necessity was the mother of invention for Evisort. Entrepreneur Jerry Ting launched the leading AI-native document intelligence platform for a simple reason: The pain and time of deriving insights across thousands—if not millions—of pages of documents with dense and repetitive financial, accounting, and legal language. 

Instead of more hours of human labor, he wondered how he could use technology to free people up and enable them to do more value-add work, while also driving value for businesses by surfacing critical insights. He tapped a few friends and colleagues at Harvard and MIT to solve this problem, and that’s how Evisort was born.

Today Workday closed on its acquisition of Evisort. To help us get to know the company and its mission, we spoke with Ting, Evisort’s founder and CEO, about driving transformation, why he continues to teach at Harvard while running a company, and the benefits of document intelligence and AI.

Julie Jares: What was your vision for Evisort, and did you know AI was going to be the solution to your problem from the start?

Jerry Ting: We founded Evisort in 2016 with researchers from MIT and also Harvard Law School.

At that time, AI wasn’t really well understood yet in its applications. It was more of a researcher’s world, and theoretical in nature. We were one of the first companies to try to take these academic concepts (called “machine learning” and “operations research” and “natural language processing”) and apply them to business documents in a commercial setting.

The vision was to automate—while keeping humans in the loop—the mundane tasks of knowledge workers and surface all the insights trapped in unstructured data. We want to get people out of the business of doing repetitive tasks that make them unhappy and help them contribute to business impact.

Jares: How are you driving transformation and impact for your customers, in terms of handling contracts and legal documents?

Ting: We do that in three key areas. The first is helping companies reduce time to revenue. That could be working on contracts to get sales deals negotiated, or automating invoices to help with accounting to get the books closed. Reducing time to revenue is a big driver for us.

The second is figuring out how to use AI and no-code software to automate the buying centers. Think procurement onboarding, vendor compliance, supply chain management, strategic sourcing—all of those use cases. We help companies purchase and buy the materials, time, and hours they need to run their business.

The final is in mitigating risk, like ensuring compliance and visibility across regions, policies, and risk frameworks.

Jares: Do you have an example of a customer that, because of Evisort, transformed its business?

Ting: Yes. I was working with the CIO and the chief procurement officer of a large insurance company. They were using a legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, and this was the No. 1 question they were looking to solve: The CFO has to give a forecast every year on how much costs would increase on its multi-billion dollar supply chain, based on vendors raising the prices. It happens to every company in the world, and their legacy solution provided no insights into the invoices that were tied to the spend, the purchase orders, or the contracts.

With Evisort, they could get insight into 100% of their supply chain and find more efficiencies in vendor payments. That gave our customer incredible stability and forecasting ability.

Jares: Are there other tangible examples of business value for customers?

Ting: If we take the supply chain context, a large multinational enterprise can usually only analyze the top supplier contracts. That's just a function of time and budget. So scaling provides tremendous value.

We can analyze hundreds of thousands of contracts a day and provide a clear dashboard that tells you when they expire, how much they’re worth, what sourcing category they’re in, and if there are any redundant products that you may be paying for that are overlapping. And that analysis can also highlight the key risks from a business perspective, such as a vendor raising the price on you.

When you do that kind of AI analysis at scale, based on our customer data, a Fortune 500 company can save tens of millions of dollars using AI across hundreds of thousands of documents.

Jares: What about using Evisort’s technology for risk mitigation?

Ting: We can help with that. For example, we work with a lot of the large healthcare providers in the country, and there's a lot of compliance risk involved. Is a physician licensed to practice this type of medicine in this state under these billing guidelines? You can imagine you’d need to read a lot of legal compliance documentation to get an answer there. 

Evisort can analyze multiple documents and come up with a conclusion about whether this physician is licensed to do this type of work in this jurisdiction, and whether or not they’re complying with billing and insurance policies.

Jares: How would you describe your leadership style?

Ting: I set clear goals and hold my team accountable to them, but I'm also right there supporting them.

Being a servant leader is something that's really important to me, and something I see Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach do a lot. He’ll join customer calls with his team, and he doesn’t just say “sales team, go sell.” He’ll come and support them. 

It’s super important that the servant leadership model is exemplified by all people leaders. That’s how you make the culture real, versus a set of principles you put on a website or a T-shirt.

Jares: I know you’re still teaching. Is education something you're passionate about?

Ting: I'm entering my fourth year as a faculty member at Harvard. It's one of the gifts that I've been given to be able to share my story and the passion I have for technology, and how it makes a positive impact. 

The topic I cover is how to use AI to pursue entrepreneurship or innovations in knowledge work. And it's the reason why I decided to create the course and teach. We're going through such a big transformation right now, and all of us have to be students.

Jares: What piqued your interest in terms of Workday being an acquisition partner, and what excites you about the partnership?

Ting: Two things. One, Workday has been a long-term customer and partner, so we have a great relationship with the company. We love the culture Workday is famous for.

The second thing is the platform. Workday is an incredible platform company, and it gives a company like Evisort resourcing, scale, and stability. When you combine our passion with everything Workday brings to the table—during this era of AI, one of the largest technical transformations of our lifetime—I think a lot of good things will happen.

AI represents such a great opportunity for continued innovation right now. If you think about some of the legacy players in financials and ERP, it's hard for them to truly adopt AI because there's so much that they need to do to change. Because we’re a faster innovator in the financials space, that gets me excited.