Content and data change management specialist, DeltaXignia, has teamed with Aston University in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP), co-funded by the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, to explore how AI and machine learning will integrate with the company’s change-management software, in order to enhance the way organisations manage and merge changes and amendments across their enterprise-wide documentation and datasets.
The partnership will investigate how machine learning and generative AI can be applied safely and effectively to DeltaXignia’s DeltaCompare and DeltaMerge software solutions, with the project focusing on developing AI models that can detect document changes automatically and predict likely future changes. It will also ensure that new tools developed are explainable and accountable, avoiding what is known as ‘black box’ AI, where it becomes difficult, or impossible, to see how an AI is making its decisions – a common feature of existing, ‘off-the-shelf’ tools.
And with a growing need for businesses to ensure all their data and content are accurate and of high quality at all times, particularly from compliance perspectives and when considering adopting their own AI models, this KTP is good news. It will enable DeltaXignia, together with Aston’s AI experts, to explore how machine learning and AI-enhancements to the company’s software might further optimise the identification of changes, improve predictive analytics, and support additional capabilities, beyond the software’s current competencies.
DeltaXignia’s gold standard DeltaCompare and DeltaMerge software and add-on support and training services for comparing and merging complex files are already widely used in highly-regulated global industries, where precision is paramount. DeltaXignia customers use its powerful comparison-and-merge software to identify differences between two or more versions of the same digital document or dataset, checking line by line, or even character by character, for anomalies. The company’s software recognises precisely what has changed, what has stayed the same, what has moved location, and where conflicting edits need to be resolved at every level; it then merges those documents to ensure just one up-to-date version is in play. DeltaXignia customers include well-known companies in aviation, financial services, life sciences, legal, and semiconductor sectors, where it currently helps detect, manage and merge changes in documents and data across languages and formats from XML, JSON, and HTML, to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDFs.
In the highly-regulated, safety-critical aviation industry, for example, new aircraft come with hundreds, if not thousands, of technical manuals. Compare-and-merge software highlights every addition, removal and alteration made during the complex drafting process, ensuring manufacturers can consolidate all revisions into a single, accurate set of manuals to accompany each aircraft. However, AI could transform this, because as well as showing what has changed between versions, it has the potential to spot patterns, which may help businesses predict future updates, suggest the best way to handle conflicting revisions, and provide improved explanations that make changes easier to understand.
Eithne Devine-Hynes, CEO of DeltaXignia, said, “AI presents a huge opportunity for us to enhance our products and grow our business. Our customers rely on us for absolute precision. This partnership with Aston University gives us the expertise, structure and confidence to explore AI adoption in the most responsible and impactful way.”
And alongside technical advances, the KTP will also help further the company’s business model, including plans to increase its compare-and-merge consultancy and training services, including AI-based solutions as this area of the business expands, as well as to launch new AI-enabled software products under licensing.
Dr Farzaneh, of Aston University’s School of Computer Science and Digital Technologies, said, “This collaboration is about blending the proven strengths of DeltaXignia’s software with the possibilities of AI. By combining research with real-world application, we aim to create innovations that are practical, explainable and trusted by the industries that need them most.”
The work will be carried out remotely and on-site at DeltaXignia’s offices at the Malvern Hills Science Park, at Aston University in Birmingham, and will begin in early 2026.
