Late-august, members of our product and engineering teams headed to Google's London office, just a stones-throw away from Kings Cross station.

A Warm Welcome

Upon arriving at the office, we were greeted by an impressive space that felt more like a campus than a workplace. Our hosts at Google welcomed us and led us through an insightful overview of Google Cloud's product offerings. Among these offerings, Google's DocAI caught our attention the most.

After an insightful showcase of the Google cloud platform and their AI offerings, we were split into teams and briefed by Diji (our CTO) on our objectives for the Hackathon, being: "What can Shieldpay use from Googles AI offerings, to improve our operational processes?"

The stakes were high, with coveted Google Pixel Buds awaiting the victorious team.

After much initial ideation between the teams, it was time to don our chef hats and make ravioli (from-scratch) in Google's very own kitchen. with a professional chef teaching us. I will not divulge into specifics of my culinary masterpiece, but my trusty sous-chef (James Stubbs), seemed to have a secret talent for making pasta.

Showtime! (Hackathon presentations)

Bellies-full and after some chill-time on the top floor terrace, it was time to get back to work and start our presentations.

There were some fascinating presentations, particularly around using DocAI to pull structured data from unstructured documents. There were also ideas to automate our processes such as uploading/downloading and passing documentation through our internal workflows.

And the Winner Is…

The winning team: (Luke, Zeynep, Ade, Chiwing and Mona) hit the home-run with their 'Shieldoc' proposition. The USP being a one-stop-shop for all secure document processing, utilising both DocAI and Shieldpays business logic to help navigate our document handling through a straight through processing flow. The main objective being to improve our customer journeys and to prevent human-error during documentation verification.

The winning team walked away with their Google Pixel Buds, smiles all around from them!

Although, that wasn't the only accolade of the day.....

Recognising Excellence

Our very own Arran Jaques was awarded the 'Standout Engineer' of the day, for tackling the inevitable curse of "everything working perfectly fine" up until errors appear during the presentation. Arran's impressive on-the-fly debugging during the demo also earned him a pair of Pixel buds!.

A Glimpse into the Future

As the day came to a close, we reflected on how much we can utilise generative AI to help and improve our day-to-day operations. So much that we have been occupied with building a proof-of-concept to make the use of AI within our day-to-day a reality.Overall, Google's DocAI had opened our eyes to the immense potential of AI in streamlining document processing, customer journeys and reduction of human-error.

Farewell!

With a heartfelt goodbye to our gracious hosts at Google, we left their sprawling office inspired. We learned a great deal and it's nice to ignite your creative spark when put under pressure to deliver a solution in minutes-few.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience with thanks to our hosts at google, we're now armed with fresh ideas and Google Pixel Buds aplenty.