In the competitive world of consumer goods, sustainability matters more than ever. In recent Google survey, 82% of consumers said sustainability is more top of mind now than it was before COVID-19¹ and 78% said that big businesses have a role to play in helping to fight climate change.² As well as delivering on customers’ heightened expectations, sustainable business practices can help organizations reduce waste and lower operational costs and even help attract top talent.

Not only is sustainability good for business performance and the bottom line, it’s great for the planet, too. And it’s something we care deeply about at Google. Since our earliest days, we have focused on developing services that significantly improve the lives of billions of people while operating our business in an environmentally sustainable way. In 2007, we were the first major company to become carbon neutral, and in 2017 we were the first to achieve 100% renewable energy. Today, we proudly operate the cleanest cloud in the industry. We’ve also been powering humanitarian, scientific, and environmental initiatives studying geospatial information and making it available for analysis via Google Earth Engine. 

Powering the future of responsible sourcing 

How does all this relate to CPG supply chains? The world relies on raw materials like palm oil, soy, and cocoa to produce the items we consume every day—such as coffee, chocolate, frozen foods, shampoo, toothpaste, cosmetics, and even household cleaning products. Yet as demand for these materials continues to grow, forests are under threat. Change is needed.

As sustainability moves further into the spotlight, in-demand crops face increased supplier scrutiny. Environmentally conscious companies want to know what percentage of their raw materials is sourced from deforestation-free suppliers—and how they can improve that number. Until recently, many CPG brands have found it hard to get real-time, reliable visibility into operations at a local supplier level, globally. 

Google Cloud, in partnership with NGIS, is helping brands gain a deeper understanding of raw material sourcing practices across supplier networks, so they can improve supplier performance and compliance in the fight against deforestation. The TraceMark solution, developed by NGIS, uses Google Earth Engine and BigQuery to analyze and visualize how suppliers behave over time. 

Google Earth Engine is the world’s largest archive of open Earth data. It combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities to help people detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth’s surface.With Earth Engine, organizations can analyze the potential social, and environmental impacts of the decision they make. 

Together, TraceMark, Google Earth Engine and BigQuery help companies visualize, monitor, and measure the impact of suppliers’ farming practices. The process starts with Earth Engine, which aggregates and harmonizes planetary data into images that it has been collecting for decades. Then, boundary maps for different suppliers are created and NGIS applies climate data science and machine learning to turn pixels into insights. Finally, BigQuery and Vertex AI -Google Cloud’s unified artificial intelligence platform are used to produce supplier scoring, which is integrated into downstream ERP and procurement systems to support more informed decision-making.

These efforts support the responsible sourcing of raw materials by making supply chains more agile, transparent and traceable.

“NGIS is thrilled to work with Google Cloud and its partners to enable business accountability for sustainable practices at all levels of their supply chain,” said Nathan Eaton, Executive Director, NGIS. “Google Earth Engine provides unique geospatial capability that [gives] leaders visibility and control over their environmental footprint and that of their suppliers in a way that was not previously possible.” 

Unilever commits to working towards a deforestation-free supply chain 

Unilever is a great example of a company committed to using technology in the quest to become more sustainable. Since 2020, Unilever has partnered with Google Cloud to use data for eco-friendly decision-making, particularly when it comes to sustainable commodity sourcing. 

By combining the power of cloud computing with satellite imagery and AI, we’re helping Unilever build a more holistic view of the forests, water cycles, and biodiversity that intersect its supply chain. By gaining a complete picture of these ecosystems, Unilever can detect deforestation while simultaneously prioritizing critical areas of forest and habitats in need of protection.

The cleanest cloud for your sustainable transformation

We are excited to bring Google Earth Engine and NGIS to our CPG customers to help them meet their sustainability goals. Looking ahead, we’re committed to furthering our own ambitious sustainability goals and empowering CPG brands with the technology to do more for our environment and our shared future. 

Contact your cloud seller to learn more about Tracemark sustainable sourcing solutions and how Google Cloud can help you advance your sustainability initiatives.

Explore TraceMark on the Google Cloud Marketplace

To know more about how we are helping CPGs transform digitally read this ebook

<sup>1. Google/C Space, BR, FR, DE, IN, MX, U.K., U.S., qualitative survey activity, n = 528, Nov. 24–Nov. 26, 2020.
2. Google/Ipsos, Google Sustainability, BR, FR, DE, IN, JP, U.K., U.S., n=16,959 online population 18–70, July 2021.</sup>

Some of the most important data at your company isn’t living in databases, but in documents, and most business processes begin, involve or end with a document. 

Yet most companies are still manually entering data and reliant on guesswork to make sense of it all as the volume and variety of data explodes. Organizations are also leaving heaps of value on the table in the form of new and better customer experiences that can be unlocked with artificial intelligence (AI) applied to documents. 

The latest releases of Document (Doc) AI platform, Lending DocAI and Procurement DocAI, built on decades of AI innovation at Google, bring powerful and useful solutions to these challenges. Under the hood are Google’s industry-leading technologies:

• Computer vision (including OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) that creates pre-trained models for high-value, high-volume documents. 
• Google Knowledge Graph to validate and enhance the fields in your documents.
• Training and creation of your own custom document models. 
• Human interaction with AI to ensure accuracy where needed.

Google Cloud DocAI platform, Lending DocAI and Procurement DocAI are now generally available. Thousands of customers have tried these products in the preview phase—and DocAI has already processed tens of billions of pages of documents across lending, insurance, government and other industries.

“The vast majority of enterprise content still resides in unstructured sources like documents. Google Cloud’s Document AI brings a fresh new perspective to the problem informed by the company’s decades of experience making sense of the largest unstructured corpus in the world—the world wide web.” —Ritu Jyoti, VP of AI Research, IDC

Cut document processing costs by up to 60%

Lending DocAI helps banks, mortgage brokers and other lending institutions fast track the loan application process from weeks to days, dramatically reducing the cost of issuing a loan. And Procurement DocAI enables companies to automate procurement data capture at scale, lowering processing costs by up to 60%.

These solutions are built on DocAI platform, a unified console for document processing that lets you quickly access all parsers and tools. From the platform, you can automate and validate documents to streamline workflows, reduce guesswork, and keep data accurate and compliant. 

Get more value from AI with DocAI’s industry-specific solutions

According to Accenture’s AI: Built to Scale report: “Companies that scale successfully see 3x the return on their AI investments compared to those who have not fully rolled out AI capabilities.” 

Core to our strategy at Google Cloud is the creation of industry-specific solutions that help companies get maximum value out of their investments in AI. We announced Lending DocAI, our first solution designed specifically for the financial services industry, at the Mortgage Bankers Association convention last year. It processes borrowers’ income and asset documents using a set of specialized machine learning (ML) models, and automates routine document reviews so that mortgage providers can focus on more important work. 

Lending DocAI is now generally available and includes more specialized parsers for critical loan documents including paystubs, bank statements, and more. Our goal is to provide the right tools to help borrowers and lenders have a better experience and close home loans faster. For more, watch this video.

Procurement DocAI is also now generally available. This solution helps companies accelerate document processing for invoices, receipts, and other valuable documents in the procurement cycle. 

Automating data capture is helping our customers increase accuracy and also lower their procure-to-pay processing costs. We are continually expanding the types of documents Procurement DocAI can process—the latest is a utility parser for electric, water and other bills. In addition, Procurement DocAI leverages Google Knowledge Graph to validate and enrich parsed information to make the data even more useful. Check out this overview video for more details. 

One company that lives and breathes AI-enabled document management is AODocs. It uses Procurement DocAI to simplify invoice processing for enterprise customers and launched a new Gmail add-on, Invoice to Sheet, for SMB customers who just want to track their invoices in Google Sheets.

“Google Cloud’s Procurement DocAI service allows our document management platform to better automate the processing of invoices; AODocs customers who have tested our new account payables workflow estimate that the productivity of their A/P team has more than doubled, thanks to the reduction of manual data input brought by the Procurement DocAI.”—Stéphan Donzé, Founder and CEO, AODocs

The new specialized parsers for Lending and Procurement DocAI can be used alongside our existing AutoML Text & Document Classification and AutoML Document Extraction services. These technologies provide a state-of-the-art toolset for creating new document models and have been widely deployed by customers in financial services and other industries. 

Partner to accelerate your AI deployment and results

Having the right partner to ease the complexity of rolling out your AI-strategy in mortgage document processing is critical to transforming your customers’ experience. We’re excited to announce a partnership with Mr. Cooper, a leader in mortgage servicing, to provide customers with more automation and workflow tools throughout their entire mortgage life cycle. As part of this agreement, both companies will collaborate on digitizing Mr. Cooper’s core mortgage platform, creating a more personal customer experience utilizing AI, and driving a broader culture of innovation to imagine and develop services and solutions that will transform the mortgage experience for American homeowners.

“Over the last few years, we have made substantial investments in our servicing technology and core mortgage platform that have revolutionized the customer experience, while providing dramatic efficiencies in operating cost. Our partnership with Google Cloud AI will build on those advances and help make these technologies available for the mortgage industry.” —Jay Bray, Chairman and CEO, Mr. Cooper Group

This builds upon the robust partner ecosystem we’re creating to help customers revolutionize the home loan experience, which includes last year’s partnership announcement with Roostify.

Integrate human review into ML predictions 

Next up is the general availability of Human-in-the-Loop AI, a new DocAI feature that will help companies achieve higher document processing accuracy with the assurance of human review. Adding human review can increase accuracy and help businesses interpret predictions using purpose-built tools to enable those reviews. 

Processing documents quickly and cost-effectively is important. But it’s often necessary to have a high level of assurance on data accuracy for compliance. CIOs and IT decision-makers need highly accurate ML predictions to fulfill compliance requirements, improve employee experience (e.g. less rework), and raise customer satisfaction (e.g. fewer data errors). Including human participation in ML processes allows AI and humans to work together for the best possible results.

Human-in-the-Loop AI provides the workflow to manage human review tasks and produces a percentage confidence score of how “sure” it is that the AI ingested the document correctly. Document AI extracts data from documents with ML, and when paired with Human-in-the-Loop AI, human reviewers are able to verify the data captured. This system is customizable, providing the flexibility to set different thresholds and assign individual groups of reviewers to various stages of the workflow. With Human-in-the-Loop AI, developers can choose trusted reviewers to assign to the task; these reviewers can be from within their own or partner organizations.

More Document AI resources

To learn more, check out the Document AI webpage and watch a demo of how to process sample forms in AI Platform notebooks to inspect data extraction and confidence scores. For more on how customers and partners like Workday, AODocs, and Mr. Cooper are using Document AI, listen to our fireside chat. And stay tuned for the exciting evolution of these technologies in future releases of DocAI.