How does AI extract data from complex documents?

AI document extraction: an intelligent approach to data extraction from complex documents 

Business documents are a gold mine of data, which, when extracted on time, can add immense value to the business. Sadly, complex documents suck the life out of productivity. And extracting data from bulk documents manually is an impossible endeavor. For example, opening a simple account in a bank is a time-intensive process. The amount of paperwork involved with KYC processes adds to customers’ frustration because processing their personal identification documents, verifying them, and extracting data from each involves hours of hard work, adding to obvious delays.

The search for tech-based solutions to address the complexities of business documents has been going on for quite some time. Thankfully, intelligent new-age solutions like AI in document extraction came as a breather, not only for the employees but also for the customers.

AI document extraction not only shoulders the responsibility of mapping, mining, processing, and extracting documents for insights from the human workforce but also addresses other complexities arising from documents present in various formats and a mindless trail of errors left behind by humans when handling documents manually.

What is Intelligent Document Extraction, and How does it Help in Data Extraction?

Intelligent document processing and extraction is a tech-based software solution tasked with digitizing documents for further processing quickly and cost-effectively. Advanced technologies like AI, ML, OCR, NLP, and Computer Vision are leveraged by such platforms to identify document types, recognize and understand the text and extract correct insights from bulk documents in nanoseconds. Since technology is not designed to commit errors or omit subtle information, data extracted from complex documents using tech-based platforms are accurate and authentic.

AI document extraction platforms offer an end-to-end document processing service, regardless of template or layout complexity and domain specificity. It functions in the following ways: –

Classifying documents: Business documents come in various formats and layouts, leading to unnecessary complexities in manually extracting insights. With the help of document extraction AI, such documents are uploaded in a uniform format and classified based on document types. Such document types include: –

• Images
• Emails
• Text
• SMS
• Annual Reports
• Receipts
• Invoices
• Bank statements
• Stamps
• ACORD forms
• Claims
• Handwritten forms
• Utility bills and many more

Extracting data from each document: Data is then collected intelligently and ingested from various source documents.

Understanding data: Various tech capabilities, like Computer Vision and OCR, are leveraged to understand the information in their true sense. For example, Computer Vision performs image cleanup, skew correction, and resolution changes for poor quality images. Visual Object Detection identifies the difference between visual objects like signatures and scribbles and highlights unsigned signature spaces. Handwriting Language Processing is used effectively to analyze handwriting and handwritten documents quickly and accurately.

Cleaning information of all errors: Needless to say, many businesses still follow the paper-based approach to maintain business-related information entered manually. This approach is vulnerable to errors. Document extraction AI identifies such minor errors and makes documents error-free.

Digitizing data: The extracted data is digitized in an easily consumable format by an ML tool for further processing and analysis.

More advancement made in the said field has empowered such tech-based platforms to conduct more complex document processing and extraction processes. A few of them are understanding human language, intent, and emotion behind each shared data.

Benefits of AI Document Extraction

According to statistics, nearly 80-90% of business data are unstructured and locked in various documents and images. These documents contain game-changing insights, which, when extracted intelligently, could drive business growth ten times faster than the global economy.

But complex document layouts, varying templates, and different domain specificities made extracting data a humongous task until now. ML and AI in document extraction came as a boon for businesses looking for an optimized and intelligent answer to the problem of data unavailability.

Intelligent document extraction has endless possibilities; most importantly, they bring benefits to businesses. A few such benefits are elucidated below: –

Ingest and extract data faster: Unstructured data is extracted from various source documents and collated intelligently faster than humans.

Increases data quality and usability: As per research, nearly 80% of enterprise data is locked in emails, PDFs, images, videos, and various scanned documents. With the help of AI-based tools, intelligent document extraction pulls out granular data and transforms them into high-quality and structured information ready for further analysis.

Improves compliance and security: An intelligent document processing and extraction solution easily handles compliance-related documents accurately and offers a robust security infrastructure to safeguard sensitive information from external vulnerabilities. Since such a tech-based solution eliminates the need for humans in the loop, the risk of exposing sensitive information to outside parties is highly reduced. Additionally, it streamlines and enhances regulatory reporting accuracy.

Drives effective business outcomes: Granular data extracted are further processed and analyzed for valuable insights, made readily available for effective decision-making fostering improved business outcomes.

Reduces errors: When a tech-based solution is utilized for data entry and extraction, the major challenge of identifying and addressing mindless human errors ceases to exist.

Speed up the process: Manual entering and extracting data is time and labor-intensive, affecting the business’s overall productivity greatly. AI document extraction tools can speed up the process by completing the same tasks in microseconds.

These solutions are scalable: The major advantage of deploying AI document extraction bots lies in the fact that such solutions are scalable and easily applied to multiple applications for automating several important business processes.

Conclusion

AI is integral to business success in the new normal post-pandemic era; there are no two ways. Hence, it is only right for businesses to resort to AI and other tech-based solutions to extract insights from complex documents. AI document extraction can help generate revenue opportunities, save costs, reduce compliance risks, improve operational efficiencies and productivity, and yield faster ROI.