Intelligent document processing (IDP) is a new way enterprises utilize AI to ingest, better understand and process written documents. It can be useful in processing insurance claims, reviewing legal documents, summarizing complex materials, and much more.
But how valuable is IDP and these intelligent AI tools, exactly? And are they truly reliable?
The Importance of Intelligent Document Processing
Document processing, as a process, is used by practically every business for a variety of applications. Essentially, reading and going through documents to either extract or better understand information within them. It might include taking physical documents and digitizing them, and it might include things like verifying data, classifying documents into various categories, extracting and sorting data, or converting documents into a different format.
Most businesses use document processing to glean important information from key documents, such as insurance policies, legal documents, technical manuals, and much more. It’s useful for streamlining and automating workflows and business processes, improving data accuracy, boosting overall efficiency, maintaining compliance, and generally maintaining operations.
Historically, document processing was all done by human beings, who read and took notes on core materials. As we began to develop more sophisticated technological tools, it became easier to digitize and scan documents for specific pieces of information.
The Intelligence Dynamic
Intelligent document processing (IDP) platforms are the next generation of these technological tools. Intelligent document processing tools utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to take over certain tasks that were once thought impossible for machines to do. For example, intelligent document processing platforms can functionally ingest, read, analyze, and summarize even very complex documents in a matter of seconds.
When used appropriately, intelligent document processing tools can greatly accelerate document processing in your organization, practically eliminating mistakes, accelerating workflows, and ultimately providing your business with more reliable, auditable data.
How to Choose the Right Intelligent Document Processing Platforms
The question is, how do you choose the right intelligent document processing tool when there are so many options on the market?
These are some of the most important things to consider:
- Key features: Obviously, one of the most important factors you’ll need to consider are the key features available in this intelligent document processing tool. If the tool is calling itself an intelligent document processing platform, you can typically expect it to have all the features necessary to digitize, scan, parse, ingest, and analyze documents. But what types of documents, exactly, are supported by these platforms? How does it approach analysis and exactly how powerful are its analytic capabilities? What other features are available to users, and how does this tool integrate with other tools your organization uses as part of these processes?
- AI capabilities: AI can be extremely powerful, but it’s also a somewhat misunderstood business tool. There’s a wide variety of technologies that could conceivably be lumped into the same category of “AI,” but some are much more powerful and sophisticated than others. Does this document processing platform simply process documents a little faster than the others, or is it capable of conducting more sophisticated analyses and decision-making? Does it act in an agentic capacity? Can you trust it not to be reliable?
- Usability: You should also think about the usability of this tool. Although AI-powered platforms often work autonomously, they will require some direction and mediation. To this end, is the platform easy to learn and understand? Can the average business user at your organization begin taking full advantage of it after only minimal exposure?
- Processing speed: How fast is this document processing platform, and is there any way to make it faster? At scale, you need to make sure that you can accept, analyze, and store documents at speeds that will not bog your organization down.
- Adaptability: There are many ways to train AI and get it to do what you want it to do. You can also provide it with meaningful feedback to shape its abilities and the way it processes data. Just how much adaptability is offered by this platform?
- Scalability: s document volumes grow, will the platform scale effortlessly? Can it handle increasing workloads without performance degradation? Look for solutions that offer modular upgrades, cloud scalability, or composable architectures to future-proof your investment.
- Costs: Finally, you’ll need to think about costs. How much is the subscription to this product? How much will it cost you to integrate it? How much time will you spend training people on how to use it?
Any business that requires any degree of forms or applications processing can benefit from incorporating an intelligent document processing into their enterprise. However, not all intelligent document processing tools are equally valuable or appropriate for your organization. If you want to reap the full benefits of intelligent document processing while keeping costs relatively low, it’s important to do your due diligence and choose a platforms that’s a good fit for your unique business needs.
