The thirty-third episode of the podcast that you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts from and additionally in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). This month it's time to discuss the annual Deep Analysis Innovation Awards, so Matt is joined by both Alan and Dan to discuss this year's winners; Infrrd and LatticeFlow AI (but as ever, show notes are included just below the embedded video).

In this month’s episode:

Preamble: Why do we have Innovation Awards?

First up, Alan talks about why Deep Analysis has annual Innovations Awards and why they are different to many other awards that are out there. Firstly, you can't apply for them, and if you win one there's no fee to pay, fancy dinner to attend (and buy a table at) or winners speech to rehearse. Also there's no set number of winners each year either; the team discusses which briefings wowed them and meets the awards criteria; Does it solve a problem? Does it apply ingenuity? Does it add value? Does it show flexibility?

Winner: Infrrd

Dan introduces the first award winner, Infrrd. Having initially annoyed him with their marketing choices, he was won over with the number of patents that have been awarded for their research in document AI and their development team deserves recognition for that work. Additionally, Dan was impressed with a demo involving Autocad drawings and data extraction, retrieval and document understanding (and awarded them a mini award of their own in the Intelligent Document Processing Market Analysis 2025-2028 report for best demo). Finally Dan was also impressed with Infrrd's work on mortgage loan files; a notoriously difficult use case. Alan adds that IDP in general is featuring in virtually every briefing that Deep Analysis receives right now, as it is a vital part of how unstructured data is made available for AI and agentic technology to use and it could be said it's what is driving many of the predominant AI use cases and is fundamental to LLMs themselves.

Winner: LatticeFlow AI

Matt then talks about second 2025 award winner, LatticeFlow AI. One of the features of 2025's discourse has been that AI projects are not making it out of pilots and into production. One of the reasons that is happening is that often the hurdle that is compliance, risk etc are not baked into the development from the beginning. LatticeFlow AI is focused on ensuring that an organizations AI applications meet both internal (think GRC; governance, risk and compliance) and external (regulations, like ISO, EU AI Act etc), with a focus both on internal data quality as well as how well individual models are likely to work in conjunction with it. Alan adds that that it's another areas that underlines the increasing gap between demos and production realities; as soon as the word governance people tend to switch off, but it's a vital part of ensuring that organizations are insulated against inevitable legal challenges coming down the road for organizations that don't realise its importance.

Postamble: What are we looking for in 2026?

To wrap things up, the team nominate what they hope they'll be seeing in 2026 that will end up with them pitching briefings in for the nominations pot in 12 month's time.

Dan: Hoping to see better support for tabular information in IDP products; there's lots of start-ups working on the

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