ABBYY’s New Executive Appointments Illustrate Focus on Hybrid AI to Drive Enterprise Intelligence
Robert Hucik promoted to Chief Technology Officer and Joe Rayfield hired as SVP of Sales for the Americas and EMEA
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AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — ABBYY today announced it promoted Robert Hucik to Chief Technology Officer and Joe Rayfield as SVP of Sales for the Americas and EMEA. Both executives have significant experience helping organizations leverage purpose-built AI with generative AI to improve enterprise intelligence.
Hucik previously served as SVP of Engineering at ABBYY where he transformed the global R&D team so it can now add new capabilities to ABBYY’s Document AI portfolio ahead of the market. His vision also makes ABBYY intelligent document processing (IDP) technology easier for customers and partners to access, no matter the platform, application, or large language model (LLM) they use. This approach keeps the company at the forefront of enabling agentic automation.
“I’m proud to lead an R&D organization that can now put new capabilities into the Document AI portfolio ahead of the market and do it on a cadence customers can plan around,” commented Hucik. “Hybrid AI is why it holds up. Our purpose-built document AI does the precision work, generative AI absorbs the variation, and customers get accuracy they can audit at a cost per page they can predict.”
Rayfield returns to ABBYY after spending several years in chief executive and revenue leaderships positions at enterprise software leaders Cendyn and OpenText, as well at AI startups Personar and Askelie. Now heading sales for the Americas and EMEA, Rayfield focuses on executing ABBYY’s go-to-market strategy and providing organizations the right technology for their use cases in one AI pipeline that they don’t have to build themselves.
“No matter the industry, use case, or LLM involved, every organization is discovering the same truth: generative AI can only reach its full potential when it’s working from a complete, accurate set of data — and for most enterprises, the majority of that data is still locked away in documents,” commented Rayfield. “ABBYY’s hybrid approach, pairing three decades of intelligent document processing expertise with the power of LLMs, turns that messy, unstructured information into the complete, trustworthy data foundation AI needs, and I’m excited to be back helping customers unlock that full potential.”
Ulf Persson, CEO at ABBYY stated, “Robert has done a tremendous job leading our R&D team, and I’m confident that as CTO he will continue to execute on our vision.”
Persson continued, “I am very pleased to have Joe back at ABBYY, where he was previously well respected within the sales organization and had a phenomenal track record for generating growth opportunities. We are at a pivotal moment within the enterprise AI market when our execution on purpose-built AI for documents will be critical to organizations reaching their business goals.”
About ABBYY
ABBYY helps organizations optimize processes, accelerate decisions, and drive better outcomes with purpose-built Document AI. More than 10,000 enterprises, including many Fortune 500 companies, rely on ABBYY’s 35 years of innovation to turn business data into actionable insights that improve the way we work and live. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, and offices in 13 countries, ABBYY leads the way for smarter agentic automation. For more information, visit www.abbyy.com/company and follow us on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
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Editorial Contact
Gina Ray
Gina.Ray@abbyy.com
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