Ep 55: Ai4 Podcast - Turning 35 Years of Paper Archives into AI Training Data | Dilo Wijesuriya, ARC

Recorded live from the Ai4 conference floor in Las Vegas, Sam sits down with Dilo Wijesuriya, President & COO of ARC Document Solutions, to talk about the unglamorous but essential layer of enterprise AI: getting decades of paper archives into a format models can actually learn from.
What's Covered:
The Technology — ARC holds patents for OCR on wide-format documents (architectural drawings, engineering blueprints) that standard scanning tools can't accurately process, backed by a 200-person engineering team in India.
Security & Compliance — SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliant, running on AWS — built for regulated industries like healthcare and financial services.
Will Paper Disappear? Dilo's view: not for a long time. Most organizations' most critical institutional knowledge still exists only on paper, meaning today's LLMs simply can't learn from it yet.
The Book Destruction Debate — A direct response to recent controversy over companies destroying physical books after digitizing them, and why ARC's non-destructive robotic scanning preserves originals for high-value collections at universities, libraries, and museums.
Looking Ahead — Why Dilo believes the next competitive advantage for most enterprises isn't a better model — it's finally accessing the data already sitting in their own archives.
Key Quote: "The challenge isn't finding more data. It's making existing information accessible."
Connect with Dilo and ARC:
Dilo Wijesuriya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dilo-wijesuriya/
ARC Document Solution: https://www.e-arc.com/
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