Tom Abbott is the founder and chief revenue officer at TQA. He’s the driving force behind the business with a laser focus on solving client problems through automation, artificial intelligence and data. But why has he chosen this career path? The answer is a personal experience, which he outlines below.

I graduated from university in the summer of 2013. If you cast your mind back, there were quite a few notable events from that year. Nelson Mandela died, Edward Snowden leaked classified CIA documents, and the world was fixated by the Oscar Pistorius case.

Among the dramas of those 12 months, something even more important happened from a personal perspective. I got my first job. And I was full of excitement and expectation.

The role was with an insurance underwriter in the Lloyds of London building. I’d gotten a suit, chosen a set of ties, polished my new brown brogues, bought a season ticket to get me to Liverpool Street and was dreaming about a long career ahead of me in the city.

I arrived on the first day ready for high-powered meetings and crucial decision-making. As I strode towards the corner office ready for action, I was guided in a different direction. To the scanner.

I spent the next seven months there.

Brokers would deliver paper documents in droves, stacking up into a never-ending pile beside me. My job was to scan and save them for someone else more senior to extract the data for processing.

If I was lucky, after 10 years, I might have made it to the next desk, where I could have run the second step in a highly manual process. So much for my career in the city.

It was ridiculous. I’d spent three years at university and gained student debts, only to do the office equivalent of being on an incredibly dull production line. Yet this is how industries like insurance were running, wasting talent from the swathes of graduates who joined their ranks each year. So, what changed?

Curiosity didn’t kill the cat

Even in 2013, I was surrounded by advanced technology. Yet business processes hadn’t caught up. Paper documents still ruled the roost with manual data entry and management.

There and then, I vowed to do something about it. Not just for my own career, but for everyone with a dream of doing something more rewarding, more meaningful and more useful to business and wider society.

My professional curiosity kicked in and I began to explore how technology might help. Fast forward 11 years and I’m now doing everything I can to ensure as few people as possible come out of education and enter the world of work to something as dead-end as I did. Let’s remember, the average student debt in the UK is about £45,000. It’s unfair to expect anyone to pay off that burden with drudgery.

This is why I believe in the transformational power of TQA. This is why I get up in the morning.

Now we’re helping the US healthcare system to manage the process of insurance payments. We’re supporting the life sciences sector to improve cold chains and medical tracking. We’re enhancing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction for airlines with AI-driven automation.

And we’re banishing manual, repetitive and unrewarding jobs to the dustbin of history. Not just with business process automation, but with data services that can unlock the potential of information. We push the boundaries of what’s possible, so data is organized and structured effectively, making it easy to find and use, allowing people to gain actionable insights that will drive smarter decision-making.

We’re also using AI and machine learning that allows people to discover valuable information, predict trends, automate complex tasks, and optimize business functions.

Say goodbye to the mundane

Thanks to the work we do at TQA, the excitement and expectation of anyone going into their first job won’t be crushed like mine was on that day in 2013. Perhaps we can add another notable event to the list for 2013: a passion for a different way of working was ignited in me.

If you want to hear more or tell me about your worst job, perhaps we can brainstorm some ideas to banish it forever. It’s my passion.

– Tom Abbott, CRO