The IDC Perspective on the Business Value of Natural Language Processing

Industry analyst IDC recently released a perspective paper on the impact that natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) are having on business. The report discusses some of the most important advances that have been made in NLP, largely due to the rise of LLMs and the significant increase in model accuracy that they offer. 

Industries highlighted as being most impacted by this technology include banking and financial services, insurance, healthcare, the public sector, and manufacturing. Organizations in these and other industries are leveraging NLP to accelerate profitability and to increase competitiveness though greater operational efficiency. 

There are four main points to take to take away from the report:

1. Large language models are now capable of powering NLP to organize and understand unstructured data with accuracy comparable to that of a human and to generate new, human-like content in response to queries.
2. Organizations are adopting NLP and LLMs due to significant growth and business opportunities provided, with deep learning being singled out for its impact in creating innovation and competitive advantage.
3. Out-of-the-box models are trained using generally available data and provide good accuracy for high level categorization. However, they are not fine tuned with industry or domain specific content and can struggle with industry specific jargon, proprietary terminology, and terms that have varied meaning across usage. Custom models offer far greater accuracy than out-of-the-box models and are trained to understand industry specific content. 
4. While large language models can fundamentally transform businesses, they also present management challenges due to their size and the time involved in training them to sufficient accuracy.

The paper explores the specific use of NLP in a number of different industries and domains, including healthcare and life sciences, retail, media, supply chain management, fintech, insurance, and banking and financial services.  

A number of case studies are highlighted, including one for OTP Bank, the leading banking group in Central and Eastern Europe. Included in the report are some of the ways IDC sees NLP as having transformed the banking and financial services industry.

The paper concludes with guidance on implementing NLP. The potential impact is made clear as it can drive greater operational efficiency, agility, scalability and better resource management when best practices are followed, some of which are listed. 

A quote at the end of the paper by Ritu Jyoti, group VP, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation research at IDC, summarizes both the importance of NLP and LLMs and the criticality of utilizing the right solution.  “NLP is rapidly becoming as integral to an enterprise as communication itself. Although NLP has made big strides over the last few years, context, relevance, and time to market for NLP solutions continue to be challenging”.

To learn more about IDC’s perspective on how large language models are NLP, download the full report here.