TOKYO, November 18, 2019 – FRONTEO, Inc. (“FRONTEO”) (NASDAQ: FTEO) (TSE: 2518), a leading provider of artificial intelligence (“AI”) based big data analysis services, announced today the launch of saki-mori, a service that uses FRONTEO’s independently developed AI KIBIT to monitor and detect warning signs of compliance breaches. This system plays a valuable role in early detection and proactive handling of improper conduct and warning signs relating to compliance breaches and rules violations at companies, such as harassment, false expense claims, kickbacks, appropriation of confidential information, and cartels/collusion, using data for a given period of time provided to FRONTEO.

At present, many companies perform email audits, but they are faced with common problems: too much time and effort required, and the lack of thoroughness. Since the number of emails that can be reviewed at one time is limited, companies have to extract and check a sample or search through emails based on keyword searches. As a result, they will not necessarily find the information they are seeking.

Using sample emails provided by the customer as teaching data, the new AI email auditing service provided by FRONTEO is able to examine immense quantities of data in a thorough manner and sort the data into pertinent and non-pertinent texts. Pertinent texts are assigned a score corresponding to the level of urgency, which enables those responsible to check these documents without wasting time or energy. Furthermore, in the event that a compliance breach is detected, the case may be rapidly escalated to fraud investigation by FRONTEO. FRONTEO is able to provide this service due to its extensive experience supporting international litigation and fraud investigations – including 9,400 cases to date. Another advantage of the system is that it does not have to be run continuously: the audit period (e.g., a month, a quarter) may be selected based on the customer’s needs. The audited individuals are not fixed either and may be changed as required, making it possible to audit multiple departments one after the other during the course of the year.  

AI Email Auditing Flow

Advantages of AI Email Auditing

• Detection of warning signs relating to compliance breaches, rules violations, etc., at companies: Based on email auditing using AI, the system identifies and collects emails with warning signs that indicate a potential future compliance breach, etc.
• Reporting to persons in charge: Investigation details are reported to the relevant departments and executives. The contents of emails deemed to require attention may be thoroughly examined internally.
• Proposal of improvements: By providing guidance and enabling companies to address issues in an appropriate manner before they lead to corporate fraud, the system makes it possible to tackle problems at the root and maintain healthy business practices.
• Flexibility to audit anything from a few people over a short time to many people over an extended time: The system can handle audits varying in scope from around 3 to 1,000 or more people, and it is also possible to select the time period (month, quarter, etc.). The number of audit subjects may be changed as needed.

Limitations of labor-intensive visual audits
Since emails are strongly indicative of personal relationships within the company and the corporate culture, email auditing is essential in order to detect warning signs of compliance breaches and rules violations. However, there are limitations to the effectiveness of a restricted number of people visually scanning a vast number of emails. Moreover, since it is extremely difficult to evaluate expressions that indicate whether a text reflects a problem, finding people who possess the skills to evaluate emails is an issue as well. Along with the issues of time constraints and scarcity of personnel with the relevant skills, the psychological burden on those who performing auditing work, who are liable to feel they are spying on other people’s business, is another point that cannot be ignored.

Resolving problems through the application of AI
With FRONTEO’s saki-mori AI email auditing service, the KIBIT AI evaluates vast quantities of data based on a small amount of teaching data and judges which documents need to be checked by humans and which do not, then forwards those documents deemed to require verification to the relevant people. It is therefore able to alleviate the time constraints, skills issues, and psychological burden described above.

By offering this service, FRONTEO aims to help companies identify compliance breaches and rules violations at the warning sign stage and allow them to handle these issues in a timely manner based on interval investigation, before they incur significant harm to their credibility, reputation, or revenues.

• Learn more about FRONTEO’s AI-based e-mail audit service “saki-mori” (Japanese): https://legal.fronteo.com/aimailaudit/
• Performance of the AI review tool “KIBIT Automator” (Japanese): https://www.fronteo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/20190509.pdf

About KIBIT
KIBIT is an AI engine developed by FRONTEO. KIBIT is a combined word of “kibi,” a Japanese word meaning “subtlety,” and “bit,” the smallest unit of digital information. The name is intended to describe an AI capable of understanding the subtle elements of human behaviors and personalities. Existing Predictive Coding technology requires great amount of data to structure training data whereas KIBIT can do so with a few data. This allows KIBIT to learn the training data in a short time.

About FRONTEO, Inc.
FRONTEO, Inc. (“FRONTEO”) (NASDAQ: FTEO) (TSE: 2158) supports the analysis of big data based on behavior informatics by utilizing its technology, “KIBIT”. FRONTEO’s KIBIT technology is driven by FRONTEO artificial intelligence based on knowledge acquired through its litigation support services. KIBIT incorporates experts’ tacit knowledge, including their experiences and intuitions, and utilizes that knowledge for big data analysis. FRONTEO continues to expand its business operations by applying KIBIT to new fields such as healthcare and marketing. FRONTEO was founded in 2003 as a provider of e-discovery and international litigation support services. These services include the preservation, investigation and analysis of evidence materials contained in electronic data, and computer forensic investigation. FRONTEO provides e-discovery and litigation support by making full use of its data analysis platform, “Lit i View”, and its Predictive Coding technology adapted to Asian languages. The company name was changed from UBIC, Inc. to FRONTEO, Inc. as of July 1, 2016.

For more information about FRONTEO, contact global_pr@fronteo.com or visit
https://www.fronteo.com/global/.