How Robotic Digitization and Intelligent Document Processing are Fueling the Energy Industry

We’re back with Mark Stansberry of the National Energy Talk podcast for another insightful conversation! This time with Ripcord President & CEO, Sam Fahmy.

In this episode, Sam and Mark sat down to discuss how AI and robotics are revolutionizing document digitization and data management across industries. Their conversation revealed a striking statistic: over 80% of the world's data remains trapped in documents, inaccessible to modern analysis tools and business applications. From the National Archives' 13.5 billion paper documents to the energy sector's warehouses full of well logs, organizations are sitting on vast stores of valuable information that could transform their operations — if only they could access it efficiently.

Their discussion explores how Ripcord's innovative robotic technology is tackling this challenge, dramatically reducing document digitization time by 90% compared to traditional methods, while illuminating the broader implications for AI adoption and digital transformation across sectors. The conversation also explored real-world applications, from streamlining IRS estate settlements to helping major banks revolutionize their customer service.

Don't miss this insightful conversation – listen to the full episode below.

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Episode Transcript 

Mark Stansberry: Welcome to another episode of National Energy Talk. I'm your host, Mark Stansberry. Well, today we're faced with big challenges, but many opportunities. And when I'm thinking about data management, robotics, A.. We're starting to hear a lot about that. It's coming to the forefront more and more. I will say in 1991, I'd written a cooperative book called “The Acquisition Process and Due Diligence: Minimize Risk/Maximize Return!” and we were focused on looking at how to process data, especially in the conversion process, so one chapter was on conversion. And back then, it was paperwork, installing the data. And it wasn’t really in the digitization world by any means and we sure would have loved that. In the long run, I began giving a talk in 2018 that dealt with digital transformation from the whiteboard to the boardroom and gave talks around the country on that. I found that there were those that would agree that there were great opportunities in the boardrooms if they would listen to the whiteboard, meaning there are some great things before us, like what I'm getting ready to introduce you to, that is a company that is in the forefront. I would have board members look at these opportunities and apply them, adapt to them. I think it'd be great. So I want to make sure that that background is there because we've come a long way, but we’ve got a long way to go. And again, a leader of that is Sam Fahmy. He's the CEO and president of Ripcord, based out of California. He has unbelievable experience as far as marketing, innovation, [and] strategic management, I can go on and on. And if you will tell us [more] about you, I think the audience would love to hear about your background.

Sam Fahmy: Thank you, Mark. Great to be here. Yeah, well, thank you very much for having me. It's a great opportunity and a privilege. So look, just a little bit about me, most of my life I've been in the business or really, the passion, of building technology companies. And it all started when the Internet was — that kind of puts an age on me — but when the Internet became more of a mainstream tool in the late 90s, I started one of the first companies that took advantage of what today is called “the cloud” to deliver services that, back then, were not widely available, whether that email, file sharing, photo sharing, etc., and just never looked back. And since then I have been looking at how to take the latest technologies and make them – apply them – to the biggest problems that we face as a society. So again, whether it's the ability to share information easily, whether it's the ability to organize our work in a better way, that's been kind of the true north and what I've sought to go out and do in my career.

Mark Stansberry: That's wonderful. Well, we're glad, and it's an honor for us to have you on National Energy Talk, especially with, I call it the pioneering, “the frontier," of the digital transformation before us, and documentation is so essential. I know from the energy sector, you know, especially the gas sector, for example, there's so many different disciplines. Like in the oil and gas sector, you have, especially in the drilling side of it, you have exploration, you have upstream, you have downstream, you have midstream, you have geologists, landmen, engineering. And what we faced back in the 90s was we had to coordinate all that. So each department knew what the other departments were doing, but it was so difficult. Today, with the expertise you have on not only document intelligence, but the record keeping and so forth is so essential and so quick. You don't have to wait months, sometimes only days or weeks instead, to have the information under your fingertips, especially when it comes to mergers and acquisitions and things like that. Tell us about the process when it comes to documentation, the process that you're implementing at Ripcord.

Sam Fahmy: Yeah, thanks for that, Mark. If you pull back for a minute and think of, you know, – we all talk about data, we take that kind of for granted – but if you think of the word data, and do a quick word association, you would say, okay, well, data, you know, there's from a technology perspective, Google definitely allows people to access the world's information, and they're a multi-trillion dollar company because of that, and many other companies and organizations.

But actually, when you think about it, over 80% of the world's data is not available. It's trapped in documents where you first have to go to the document, find the document to get to that data. So if you look at the data economy and the information economy that we live in today, it just utilizes 20% of all the available data. So as a very foundational premise, we believe there's a massive opportunity to unlock that 80% of data that remains trapped in documents that are not available to Google or whatever other technology is being used to analyze that data, surface that data, or discover that data. That's kind of a foundational premise for us.

Mark Stansberry: That's wonderful. I know you have some opportunities before you because of some business alliances and partnerships. Can you tell us about those? I know there may be some within the private sector as well as the Public Sector you'd like to share with us and some of the results you're getting.

Sam Fahmy: Yeah, of course. So actually, before I jump into that, I don't know if you saw it a couple, I think two Sundays ago, actually, I was not watching it, 60 Minutes, but someone sent me a clip of it, and it's available on YouTube, of a segment of 60 Minutes where it was with the head of the National Archives in Washington, DC. And the whole story talks about all the amazing documents at the National Archives. But really, the problem that they were discussing is how do we bring these documents to the digital age? How do we digitize these documents so they're available to folks – to you and me, to citizens, to government agencies – to utilize them to better our society, to better our lives? And it's interesting, there are 13.5 billion documents that are paper documents at the National Archives, that have not yet been made available. Everything from the Constitution to all documents throughout US history that would be massively valuable for us as a society, whether in terms of governance, planning, understanding our past, etc. And sometimes there's a real need to access that information, whether it's the Freedom of Information Act or other reasons. And today it takes months – sometimes years – to find the needed information, the requested information.

So it's a massive problem just at the National Archives, but you can take that problem at that organization and just apply it to every other organization, whether it's the public sector, whether it's any private company, or us as individuals. But I'll just stick with the National Archives for a minute. So if you just try to understand the scale of that problem, 13 billion documents, if you were to try to digitize them and make them available today, it would, if you do [some] quick math, it would take a thousand people 25 years. And that's a very aggressive estimate, to take these documents and make them available to digitize and make them available. No wonder it's a tall task, and no wonder it was on 60 Minutes because it's almost an impossible task to accomplish with today's kind of standard technology. Now, that's where Ripcord comes in. 

What we have developed is, if you think, why take a thousand people 25 years to do that work? That's a lot of documents, but golly, I mean, there must be a better way. Well, the latest technology that's available today to turn paper into digital documents are scanners, right? Just as a person, we all think, “Oh yeah, there are scanners, come on, it must be easy.” But it turns out that over 90% of the work entailed in turning paper documents at scale – you know, you have 13 billion at scale – into digital documents, is not the scanning. Scanning is the easy part. Scanners are available, they're beautiful. But most of the work is actually preparing those documents to be scanned – removing them from envelopes, removing staples, removing paper clips, rubber bands, Post-It notes, all different sheet sizes – so they'll be able to be fed into a scanner. And today, that work is 100% manual.

That's why, to digitize, as an example, the National Archives, it would take 25 years and 1,000 people, because with all that work, 90% of it is manual. At Ripcord, we are the first company in the world to build robots that take on that manual work. So instead of having people with staple removers or separating different sheet sizes, etc., our robots have the intelligence to do that automatically. If, for example, we were given the opportunity to digitize the National Archives, we could do it in about 1/10 of the time. Instead of 25 years, we'd probably get it done in 2.5 years. Why? Because we're able to apply these robotics instead of having people do that mundane work.

Mark Stansberry: That's so outstanding. And to think that Ripcord's on the forefront, and you as the leader are definitely at the forefront of what will happen and implement some of these innovations you have. Do you have any new innovations on the way? You mentioned robotics, but I think you may have some opportunities before us in that regard.

Sam Fahmy: Yeah, thank you for asking about that, Mark. So we built our first robots about five or six years ago, and they were highly experimental, right? It’s the first version. For example, when Tesla built their first car, it was a roadster that was very limited to use, very few people bought it, and it usually takes two or three, usually three, generations of a product, to actually make it more viable and more mainstream. So coincidentally, today we’re shipping the first versions of our third-generation robots – which bring all the research and development, all the learnings over the past five, six years around using robots to digitize and turn paper documents into digital – we just completed our third generation robots, and we're shipping a few of them to Japan, because we have a business unit in Japan, and the rest are staying in the US. 

These robots are just amazing. You really have to see them to appreciate them. But basically, you feed them paper – and the paper could have staples, sleeves, folders, whatever it may be – you feed it into the robotic unit, and the robot at the other end spits out PDFs, digital documents. Once that happens, we don't stop there, it goes into our information cloud where we're able to understand – and based on the document type – extract and validate the pertinent data from each document. So for example, you're in the energy world, we have use cases where there are well logs, oil well logs, that have been around for decades, and they're of little use because those wells have probably been shut off for many, many years. But with new technology to extract the oil, like fracking, all of a sudden, these well logs become super valuable data, but they're trapped in paper well logs. So how do you – without having hundreds of people and many, many years – quickly get to the pertinent data within these well logs, so you can find and extract more oil? So that's one of the use cases. Once the paper documents are digitized, depending on the particular needs, we're able to provide the end data from each document that could be instantly used by whoever the user may be.

Mark Stansberry: This is so powerful information because I know in the energy sector, and again, oil and gas in particular, there are boxes upon boxes of warehouses that are stored, but not being analyzed and not digitized, but should be. And so by being able to take the innovation you have there and to be able to use the robotics, it's a huge opportunity for not just oil and gas, but the energy sector is very broad. And we were talking about transportation, utilities, and when you talk about the energy sector, it's very opportunity-driven, solution-driven. And what you're doing is providing solutions for the industry and the energy sector alone. So very, very important. And you're also looking at, Sam, I believe the evaluation as far as analytics. You touched on that, but even more so, when you take AI and apply that as well, the opportunities are even bigger. And I use the challenge and opportunities quite often today in our conversation, but it's so powerful, as I mentioned, that we can look at all this data, but then analyze it. And that speeds things up, too. When you're looking at different formations to drill, to think that it may take two or three years or longer to analyze, taking your AI along with the robotics, then you have a huge opportunity.

Sam Fahmy: Exactly. And just on that point, Mark, you bring up a very good point in terms of AI. That's all the talk today; everyone in one way or another is talking about AI. But we fundamentally believe there's a massive opportunity that’s almost historic in nature. Because if you think about going back to the printing press and how we access information that’s in documents, and if you fast forward to today, you and I, if we want to find information that's contained in a document, what do you do? You go to your laptop or your phone, you do a search, and [you] find that document. So you open a folder, you open the document, and then you start looking at the document. Let's say you're looking for certain financial information about a company, so you find their financial statements, and [all the way] on page 40, you find the information you need. I'm getting tired [of] just talking about it! But imagine how we take that for granted. That's just what we do every day, right? I mean, if you observe the rest of your day, you might do that a few times. “Oh, I need to find something,” and you'll go open your folder and do that [entire process over again]. And many times, you don’t even find the information you need. You say, “Well, it takes too much time” or you find it but it's very cumbersome. 

With AI, you can shortcut all of that. We believe the whole kind of file folder system that has been central to our digital world since the invention of the computer… And it's just a reflection of before computers, you had books, and books have chapters. Well, the folder file system is exactly a replication of that, right? You have, going back all the way to the Bible – you have the Bible, and then you have the Book of Matthew, the Book of Luke – you have chapters. And folders kind of took the physical world and translated it into digital. But actually, as human beings, do we really care about the book and chapter? We care more about information, yeah?

Mark Stansberry: No question.

Sam Fahmy: The folder file method was used as a way to, in the absence of anything else, get to that information. Today with AI, you can shortcut all that. We have a tool that we launched a few months ago called Docufai where people [can] upload any document in any language, and it automatically will give you a summary of that document. You don't have to even open the document. You don't have to know where the document is. Then you can ask questions. Let’s say, for example, you have a bunch of invoices, and you ask, “How much is owed to X customer?” And without having to find the invoice, find the document, or open it, AI will find that for you. And you can just imagine how our fundamental interaction with documents changes. If we don't have to, every time we need information, have to go search, find the folder, find the file, open the file, scroll to where the information is to get what we need. I believe that will fundamentally change the way we interact with information in a very similar way that mobile devices change the way we interact. Remember before mobile devices, you had to be at a computer, at a desk to use the power of a computer. And the iPhone fundamentally transformed that and the world. I believe there's another wave of transformation where you’re able to find whatever information that you need that is, today, trapped in documents, folders, and files just by asking questions and getting that information instantly.

Mark Stansberry: Well worded, Sam. And I will expand on that in the sense that, as I mentioned at the very beginning, when it comes to all the departments or disciplines – I should say land, geology, engineering, legal, finance, and so forth – every department needs to know what the other departments are looking for or at. And without having that information, it just slows everything down. It's not just a matter of, like we talked about, well logs and things like that, it goes to the basics of fundamental departments working together in solutions. And you're able to speed that up so dramatically that it becomes not only great for the data management side but for the management side as well. And that's really where it begins. I mentioned digital transformation and from the whiteboard to the boardroom, but what we found out when I gave these talks across the US is that those that were, I would say, the whiteboard – those that had all these great ideas and how to digitize and so forth – were getting a little bit of pullback from some of the boards to fund their research and really, more for arguing for solutions like you have at Ripcord that they could look for or at. It was pushed back quite a bit. And they would come up to me and would say, “I wish we would talk to our board.” 

Of course, you could help them look at the future, it's a transformation. So thank you Sam and Ripcord for leading that way. I do want to go back, just to get your introduction as far as your background. But also, if you could tell us where you began with Ripcord? Not you personally, I'm talking about Ripcord. How did it get started? Tell us a bit more about that, because that leads up to where we are from the conversation we've had to the record-keeping, to data management, to utilization, robotics, and AI. It's been a quiet process in such a short period of time. Please, if you will, explain where Ripcord began and where it is today.

Sam Fahmy: Yeah, thank you for that, Mark. And look at the, it's an excellent question. At the core, we fundamentally believe that, whether a Ripcord or if you look at any great technology or other company, it's not really about the technology, because technology is kind of commoditized. Everyone has fairly straightforward access to any type of technology. It's all about really understanding the user and the customer. So we're fairly obsessed with that in terms of understanding how customers use their documents and data, and then using technology to solve these problems, as opposed to the other way around, as opposed to building technology first, and then trying to figure out what users or customers could best use it. And I'll give you an example of that that helped us really grow Ripcord and develop it in very meaningful ways. I'll give you an example of one of our favorite government agencies, the IRS. And I say that with no sarcasm at all. One of the use cases at the IRS, it turns out, is this form called Form 709 that probably many of us have, over the years, filled out. It's a gifting form where, during one's lifetime, if you're providing a gift and you're filing your tax return, you fill out Form 709.

Okay, well, why is that form important? That form is important because when someone's estate is being settled, within the tax code, during one's lifetime, you could gift $12 million over your lifetime tax-free. But if it's over $12 million, it's taxable. But that does not happen until someone's estate is being settled. So when the IRS went in and the state is trying to settle someone's taxes, the IRS has to go back – imagine this – they have to go back to 40 years of Form 709s to find them, assess them, and aggregate all the data in them to be able to settle someone's estate. It took a year to do that because all these forms have been sitting in caves to protect them, literal physical caves in various states. So when someone, an individual American citizen, needs their estate to be settled, you go to the IRS and the IRS has to start the process of saying, “Okay, we have to find all the forms, 709s.” It takes them a year to do that, to first go through the microfiche and locate where those tax forms are, then provide a request to all the different caves where these forms have been stored over a period of four years, then we receive the forms… It's a year just to serve a basic process which is settling on the estate. Well, we learned from that, and what we've developed is a system to turn that one-year process into literally seconds. Because once those documents are turned digital and the pertinent data from these documents has surfaced, then you don't have to go find the document. You don't have to spend that year doing all that song and dance. Just go to the data, do a simple search, and again, within seconds or minutes, find all the information that's required. These are some of the examples that have helped us evolve Ripcord into a technology that actually – it's not just a neat technology that everyone thinks is compelling – but actually that serves very specific needs and helps citizen, companies, and organizations improve their process.

Mark Stansberry: Well, it's ultimate optimization with efficiency and [it’s] very, very effective. I can't imagine sitting there and waiting for a year to get the results, much less having to, from the government side, research it all. So what a wonderful thing. And that's just one example! I think by mentioning that, I'd like to lead in to customization. You can go in, from what I'm hearing, you can go in and whether it's government or the energy sector or any other sectors, go in and customize the information there to get the results you need through the digitization, robotics, and AI. Can you expand on how you customize and how those who are interested in learning more can do so? I will say you can go to ripcord.com as far as their website. Also, can also contact me as well and I'll give you some information. Sam, if you will expand on that.

Sam Fahmy: Of course. Obviously there’s ripcord.com. And I'm always happy to chat about solving problems. And we definitely take each, as you mentioned, each problem is a little bit different. We don't provide just a solution out of the box, because again, every type of document and the data needs of different organizations are different. So we take time to understand that. And then we provide the end solution, meaning what's also unique about Ripcord is that we don't sell any technology. We sell the ultimate solution. So an organization will tell us they have X hundreds of thousands of documents or millions, whatever it may be, and here's the data that they need from those documents. And we provide that. We provide the data. We don't sell the robots. We don't sell the software that does that. We use all of that internally to provide our customers with what they need according to their SLAs. 

And why that is so great is because today, if you look at CIOs across major enterprises or small companies, on average, I think there's a study, each company, each CIO has under them a few thousand applications that they have to manage. So the last thing they want is, hey, I need to add some more technologies that we're able to improve our document handling. So rather than doing that, what we do is we receive the documents from our customers – those documents could be paper or digital – and then we understand the data needs that they have and we provide them [with] that data according to their SLAs. So it's a very fast process. As long as we understand, “Okay, tell us where your documents are and tell us what data you need from those documents, how and what the SLA is, and the turnaround time.” For example, with insurance claims, there are often cases with 24 or 48-hour turnaround times, and we are beholden to those standards and we provide the ultimate data back to the customer. So they don't have to worry about training their people, managing new technology, installing, cloud, they don't have to worry about any of that. We provide them the data they need, when they need it, where they need it.

Mark Stansberry: You not only look at work in the United States, but throughout the world, what other areas of the world are you working in now? And you plan to expand on that?

Sam Fahmy: Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that up, Mark, because we, as a kind of Silicon Valley startup, have been venture funded and so on. There's obviously a need once you have the first version of the technology, usually it takes a couple of years to have that, to prove that the proverbial dog can hunt, right? So, in our case, the hunting had to be in Japan because the CEO of Japan's largest bank, happened to be visiting California, learned about us, and found an application for our technology. But that had to take us to Japan. So the dog had to go to Japan. 

Our first successes, and actually to date, our largest successes, are in Japan, because we went out and… I'll give you just quickly, the use case for that customer, Japan's largest bank. They had hundreds of millions of documents that contained customer data and they occasionally needed the information from these documents. And to get that information, they had a manual system; the documents were stored on shelves, and they had a really efficient manual system where someone, a runner, would have to go find the box and find the folder, and then scan it and email it as an attachment to the branch or whoever needed the data. But, still, it would take hours, sometimes days, for that when, let's say, the end customer is at a counter at the bank and they want to activate a wire transfer or a loan. So what we've done with this customer in Japan is take all those documents and make the data contained in those documents instantly available at every branch and every department at that major bank in Japan. And with that success in Japan, our business in that country has grown amazingly, just in the past three years. That's when we landed with our first robots and our first customer in Japan. Government agencies across Japan, insurance companies, banks, energy companies, a number of Japan's nuclear energy companies, and others have been using Ripcord to accelerate their path to digitization and data transformation. And that's been just an amazing experience growing that business in Japan.

Mark Stansberry: Well, it's a great example of what you do with other sectors besides just energy. We're focusing quite a bit on energy today, and I believe that there [are] so many as far as different views and issues before it comes to energy, but in the long run, there's this energy transition or whatever it might be that comes in the future. To get to the next point, as far as energy transition, how are you going to find that? We’ll definitely take digitization, we'll definitely take robotics, AI, data management, the on data management, the data collections, and the analytics that's going to be necessary. And so you've brought it to the forefront. We appreciate what Ripcord is doing. And you're just getting started, it sounds like. What's next for Ripcord?

Sam Fahmy: Yeah, great question. I mean, what's next is, look, the amount of documents that are out there containing data where there's significantly valuable information… Just to give you an idea of the scale, in the US alone, there are 4 trillion documents with data trapped in them. And that number is increasing 22% a year across agencies, enterprises, etc. So there's a massive mountain to climb in terms of taking, even if you take 10% of, these documents [and] are able to identify data within them – it's a massive, massive undertaking – and wash, rinse, and repeat across the world. 

I'll give you one more important factoid. Okay, how can you leverage the value of that data? If data is not that important and is trapped in documents, just keep it there, right? It's not that important. But with AI and with the need to train AI models and how that has become so mainstream, there's a thirst for data. So now the value of that data that before was trapped and was of little use, there's now another reason to say, “Okay, we need that data to train our AI models so we can become a smarter organization.” We believe we're at the forefront of that being kind of a fuel for AI models and AI training, etc. And without the technology like ours, it would not be realistic to use that data. It'd be too expensive and too time-consuming to rely on data that is, today, trapped in documents. But with Ripcord, we're able to feed AI models. So I think that's kind of the next frontier for us, for Ripcord to parlay what we're doing today into being a true advancement for the AI and large language model path.

Mark Stansberry: It takes a lot of collaboration, it sounds like. You definitely have to bring in the expertise, not only in the digitization side of it, the robotic side, and the AI side, but you have to look at those who understand their discipline, whether it's the energy sector, higher education, whatever it might be. So it takes a lot of that. Could you give other examples of either case studies or some solutions you provided to other companies when it comes to digital transformation?

Sam Fahmy: Yeah, absolutely. I'll give an example that applies to so many companies in the US and around the world. And if you think of the simple process of, let's say you have a consumer products company, and in our case it's Coca-Cola, but there are many others. And every day as you drive around, they deliver goods to Walmart, Target, 7-Eleven, etc. And it's not just Coca-Cola, it’s any other company that delivers goods to retailers or buyers. Then that company, the seller, will invoice the buyer. Oftentimes, actually, more often than not, the buyer is not going to pay the full invoice because there's a discrepancy between what has been invoiced and what has been shipped, let alone [what] has been ordered. 

So there's a problem out there called three-way matching. You have to match the information in an invoice with the information in a purchase order, with the information in a delivery document. And that today cannot just simply be automated because these three documents stem from three different systems and involve three different entities. You have the seller, they have their own system where they produce an invoice. You have the buyer, they have their own system that produces an invoice to the CPO. Then you have the delivery, the logistics company, that has their own system that delivers a delivery document. So long story short, there are billions of dollars that go unsettled because the cost to verify the information across these three documents is more than the actual value of the dispute. So what we're able to do in this use case, we receive all these three documents on a daily basis from our customer, Coca-Cola Bottlers, and we're able to provide the data they need instantly to be able to verify [if] they [are] getting paid the right amount from their customers. In doing so, by being able to accelerate that and not need hundreds of people to do that work, we do it mostly automated, they're able to capture tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that otherwise would have gone uncollected because they're able to verify that that's the exact amount owed. That's another example that we find very compelling and it applies to really anyone providing and selling goods to buyers.

Mark Stansberry: Great example of applications that you have from Ripcord. Sam, do you have any other thoughts, any other words of wisdom to pass along to us? I know there are those that are listening and going, “I'd like to know more about Ripcord,” but also they're going, “How can this apply to my business?, “How can it apply in cars, the energy sector?” And I'm sure they're looking and evaluating right now, going, here's what we need to do. And I know they need guidance along the way, but what are some of the final words you have [that] you can share with us in regard to Ripcord?

Sam Fahmy: Yeah, I would say simply stated, Mark, if you think back, I don't know, 15 or 20 years ago, there were many companies that were hesitant about e-commerce, if you recall. And those companies had names like Kmart, Sears, JCPenney, etc., that are today out of business, and the main reason is they lagged on eCommerce. It's not because they had a physical footprint and Amazon had a digital footprint. Absolutely not, because if you look at Target and Walmart, they're incredibly successful. But why? Because they embraced eCommerce, whereas others were walking slowly or doubting whether it [would] be a mainstream channel. The companies that… If you look throughout history, even electric vehicles, the companies that embraced that most aggressively are the companies that usually succeed. Others are left in the kind of heap stack of history. 

So, likewise, I would say with AI moving so quickly, companies that embrace digitizing, if you're a CEO of a company, whether you're a CIO or an executive at or anyone working at an energy company, a consumer products company, insurance company, if you have documents sitting around, whether these are paper or digital, the faster you're able to take these documents and put them through a process, whether you use Ripcord or something else, to turn those documents into data, the faster and more aggressively you do that, the more successful, significantly successful, you'll be over the next few years. The companies that do that will be the winners, I guarantee you, in any space. And we'll look back and think, “Okay, why did these companies, these five companies in the energy sector, succeed and others didn't?” I wholeheartedly believe it's the embrace of data first and a big part of that is turning their documents into usable data.

Mark Stansberry: Well said. And I look at it as we've got a short window of opportunities to do this. And Ripcord [can] provide the pathway, [the] pathway to success, and along the company's journey to be very successful. You've been listening to Sam Fahmy, the CEO and president of Ripcord. I want to thank the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance, and you listeners for tuning in. Please stay tuned for upcoming episodes of National Energy Talk. Thank you. Thank you, Sam.

Sam Fahmy: Thank you, Mark. It's been an honor to be with you today.